Blue Highways: Harbor Beach, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

We stop in at the Crow's Nest in Harbor Beach for a beer with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), and watch people dance.  While LHM is a little dismissive of the band and the dancers, it leads me to exhort my male Littourati friends to learn to dance and dance more.  To see where Harbor Beach sits, waltz on over to the map.

Book Quote

"At the Crow's Nest we drank 'America's Only Fire-Brewed Beer,' a brew remarkably interchangeable with any other American beer....

"Two young women drinking Scotch and Coke sat and waited to dance.  The one with deep, dark eye sockets relentlessly worked a stick of chewing gum.  The other, wearing snakeskin knee boots and golden slacks that fit as if gilded to her, was slender and had the eyes of a lynx.  Boys in yellowed shirts took her to the dance floor one after another.  They were stumps.  Dancing out of her pelvis, she swirled around them like smoke, moving across the floor, inching back, sliding away.  The siren went off, and the strobes flashed her into a wispy possibility.  The boys were dying for her, but they got drunk and sat down.  She danced on alone against the amplified drums and moved through the shadows of other dancers.  Six college boys from Ann Arbor came in to drink Heinekens, and one had a few turns with the lynx, but only his shoulders and hands danced.  No one else even tried."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 16

Downtown Harbor Beach, Michigan. Photo hosted at CityData. Click on picture to go to host page.

Harbor Beach, Michigan

Of all the lessons that I've learned in life, there is one that I try to pass on to my younger male friends.  Needless to say, they never listen to me.  So I will throw it out to the Littourati and others in the netiverse...

Men, if you are interested in meeting a lot of women, learn to dance.

As far as I can tell, there seems to be two general laws of human behavior.  The first and almost inviolate law is that American men love The Three Stooges, and American women think they are stupid.  I can count on one hand the number of women that I've met over the years that are Three Stooges fans.  I'm not sure why this law seems so prevalent, but my suspicion is that the Stooges take men down to their monkey brains, whereas women are much more advanced and rarely access that area of the brain.  They are more likely to like the refined and intelligent slapstick of Laurel and Hardy or The Marx Brothers.  Men like them too, but are easily able to just enjoy the pleasure of stupid noises, fingers poking eyes and hammers hitting heads.  Lest you think I'm too much off the mark, then here's some proof for you.  Women are more analytical in approaching jokes, whereas men are not.

The second almost inviolate law, it seems, is that American men don't like to dance, and women do.

This is not a universal law, at least not as universal as The Stooges.  There are men who love to dance, and women who don't.  However, men who love to dance are usually seen as different in some way.  Either they have made dance into a career because of an innate talent, or if they truly, truly love to dance they risk being labeled as "less than a man" or possibly "gay."  Of course, my gay friends embrace the label, but they are adults who've embraced their images, as are the straight men who dance who don't care what people think. 

However, in one's formative years in junior high school or high school, learning anything more than the rudiments of movement to music is perceived as "not cool."  Most men don't know how to dance properly, and dancing is a surefire way to make you look bad.  I remember, before going to my first school dance, my mother asking me if I knew how to dance.  I did a few steps that I thought were interesting, and she laughed at me.  It was not a kindly laugh.  It was a laugh that said I was going to look stupid on the dance floor.  I didn't have many dance moves, and like most men, I couldn't really move certain parts of my body, particularly my hips.  I was tall and gangly and kind of looked like a spastic stork on the dance floor.  In fact, most of the guys who danced in junior high or high school dances I attended moved as little as possible, in order to not look bad.

Girls, on the other hand, just knew, innately, how to move their bodies.  They seemed to be able to disconnect their midsections from the rest of their bodies and make those midsections do things that amazed and astounded me, as well as kindling in me the fires of teenage desire.  Anyone who has seen an attractive and good belly dancer will know what I'm writing about.  Even to this day, I am often struck about how good most women look while dancing AND what joy they take in it, even as the guys they are with look stiff and uncomfortable.

Eventually I learned formal dancing.  In my thirties my wife and I started taking dance lessons.  Waltz, foxtrot, two-step, polka and swing.  I found that in the confines of the rules of formal dancing, I was good.  I could keep time and rhythm, I could guide my wife around the dance floor and it was me, with the combination of moves that I led, that made her look good and because she looked good, I looked good too.  After that, I began to get compliments from women who were slightly envious of my wife about our dancing.  These women wanted to be on the dance floor, but their husbands/boyfriends didn't dance.

In the past couple of years, I learned that you don't even have to formally know how to dance to impress women.  Your willingness to dance will simply suffice.  Some former high school classmates told my wife that at the dances, I always danced with them.  They felt they didn't get much attention from other guys, but I always asked them to dance.  I had forgotten all this, but they remembered it twenty-five years later.

Are you getting the picture, guys?

All you have to do is dance or be willing, and you will be in a much better position to make women notice you.  All that whining about how you can't meet anybody will be past history.  You'll meet lots of women.  You will be in demand because you dance.  Knowing how to actually dance will help you even further.  You may even meet your true love on the dance floor.

Some years ago, after my wife and I learned some formal dancing, we went out to dinner at what used to be a speakeasy and dance club in San Antonio.  The tables were arranged around an oval dance floor, and at one side was a large dais where a big band was set up.  People could get up and dance before, during and after dinner.

One thing we noticed that puzzled us was that there were many couples of mismatched age there - older women in their 60s to 80s dancing with younger men in their 20s.  It seemed too far-fetched to surmise that so many grandsons were taking their grandmothers out dancing.  The men were good, too.  Later, we learned that there was a thriving business where young men who could dance offered their services to older women who wanted a night of dancing.  Either they were now alone, or their husbands didn't want to go dancing.  So they hired young men to accompany them for the evening.

Guys, I don't expect you to learn to dance so you can take older women out dancing for money.  But, I write that story because again, it demonstrates that no matter what age, women love dancing.  You are depriving yourselves if you continue to live in dance ignorance.  If there's one thing I could change about my youth, it would be simply this: I would have learned to dance.  I probably would have had a lot more fun.

Of course, if you are a jerk, no amount of dancing knowledge will help you, besides perhaps fooling some women until they really get to know you.  But, if you have a decent personality and self-awareness and esteem, dancing could be formidable addition to the range of qualities that will make you attractive.

Think about it, men!  I'm just sayin'...

Musical Interlude

Just in case, guys, you need any more proof, James Brown is here to exhort you to Get Up Offa That Thing.  A great dancer, I don't think James had any trouble getting the ladies.  (Here's a secret for you, Littourati.  I love funk music, and whether out or in the privacy of my own home, funk will get me up offa my thing and I WILL dance to it.  Parliament, Funkadelic, James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, you name it.  It's just our little secret, though.)

If you want to know more about Harbor Beach

City of Harbor Beach
Harbor Beach Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Harbor Beach

Next up: Bad Axe and Ivanhoe, Michigan

Blue Highways: Caseville and Port Austin, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Are you rooted to your place, or are you rootless?  I have felt rootless, but now I have a desire to be rooted for awhile.  Americans, surprisingly, are a pretty rooted people overall.  So while William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) continues his rootless way, we'll pause for a moment and I'll reflect on rootlessness and the desire to settle.  To root yourself in where we are, plant yourself at the map.

Book Quote

"Away from the bay and lake, Thumbland was agricultural land: sugar beets, navy beans, silage; but on the bay from Caseville to Port Austin, the Thumb was an uninterrupted cluttering of vacation homes, tourist cabins, motels, and little businesses selling plastic lawn-ornament flamingoes and used tires cut into planters.  The houses and cabins and businesses pressed in tightly, and in the few places where beach delivered itself to the road were 'no trespassing' signs.

"Whoever called Americans a 'rootless' people never saw the west shore of the Thumb, where houses used eight weeks a year block off the lake every day of the year.  If Americans are truly rootless, why weren't a few lodges and hotels built to leave the shore undeveloped as the 'rooted' Europeans might do it?  As it is, the rootless family drives up from Ypsilanti to spend its allotted time cutting grass, painting the boathouse, and unplugging the septic tank."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Point Aux Barques Lighthouse in Port Austin, Michigan. Photo at Citypictures.org. Click on photo to go to host site.Caseville and Port Austin, Michigan

If you've been following me a little, you know that the "rootlessness" concept that LHM references in his quote has been on my mind lately.

For most of my adult life, I think that I've been that stereotype of the rootless American.  I haven't necessarily been a constant nomad, never able to pitch my tent in one place for long before I have to move on.  Rather, I've settled down in one place for a period of years and then moved on.  After growing up in Fort Bragg, California, I lived in Milwaukee for nine years, San Antonio for five years, New Orleans for four years, and Albuquerque for seven years with about ten months in that Albuquerque stay in Lubbock.  Recently, my wife and I have been debating whether to stay in Albuquerque or whether our fortunes should lead us elsewhere.

And at this time, my instinct is telling me to stay, or at least find someplace where I can root myself.

I agree with LHM.  Americans, despite our stereotype driven by our early doctrine of Manifest Destiny and stoked by the images of rootless cowboys and wanderers in the Old West, are a pretty rooted people.  A USA Today report on American's geographic mobility in 2008, citing data from the Pew Research Center, showed that a majority of Americans stay close to home because of family ties.  56% of Americans have never lived outside their home state, and 37% of Americans stay in their home town.  And if I read the recent US Census data correctly, less than 12% of Americans moved away from their traditional home between 2000 and 2010.  Of those who moved, two-thirds stayed within the same county and 83% stayed in the same state.  Only three percent of those who moved chanced living abroad.

In other words, we are a pretty rooted people.

I believe part of the reason is the size of the United States.  In Europe, for example, one can travel in a matter of hours through very distinct countries with different cultures and customs.  Even the European Union experiment has not led to differences in national feelings - in many ways it has enhanced nationalism among ordinary people who take pride in their Germanness or Frenchness or Englishness.  Yet on a higher level, more Europeans, at least to me, appear to be willing to look at relocating to other countries - after all, you're only a train ride or a quick flight from home.  In the U.S., the distances are larger and more daunting, especially in the western half of the country.

Another reason might be economic.  The lure of jobs is powerful, though in the U.S. it doesn't necessarily trump family ties.  It seems to me that in times of economic hardship, Americans tend to rely on family and pull closer together, rather than moving apart.  I'm not sure about this completely, but that is my instinct.  I saw this when I lived in New Orleans.  People who lived there were very close to family and tended to stay there, or if they moved they didn't move for long.  Other factors also played into this, including the uniqueness of the city and its culture.  But family was a huge reason most New Orleanians didn't leave.  The devastation and disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina was incalculable, because so many people were forced to leave their families, friends and the city that they identified as home.

I think a third reason is Americans' attachment to private property.  Again, I'll use Europe as a comparison.  Europeans also have private property, but it seems that they aren't as attached to it as a concept as we are in the U.S.  With so many countries in Europe classified as social democracies, there is a much more expansive concept of community and shared public space.  In other words, there are less Europeans who own property, more who rent and are part of cooperative movements, and therefore less attachment to something that is rooted in one place.

Americans, on the other hand, are rooted precisely because we buy property and own it.  The American dream is to own a house and a little patch of land upon which it sits.  Thus, the ownership roots people into one place.  From there, if we are wealthy enough, we branch out and buy vacation homes or cottages, such as the types that LHM references along the western part of the Thumb of Michigan.  Unfortunately, that rootedness leads exactly to what he describes - houses sitting vacant most of the year except for those few weeks that people come to use it.  Also regrettable is the closing off of potential public space - access to beaches and the like. 

Our attachment to private property has its benefits, but it also has a lot of costs.  The only reason that we have not had to reckon with those costs very much as a society is that there is a lot of property available.  We can go and be our own little islands in the midst of the American cultural sea.  We can become rooted in a very familial way.  In Europe, where private property is at a premium, people have developed a different sense of community and there is a greater openness to mobility.  In poorer countries, where private property is a luxury available only to the very wealthy, we get back to rootedness - people stay with family because there is no other place to go.

For me, after years of wandering, the call to become more rooted has been stronger.  It's not that I want to cut myself off from exploration and understanding.  My years of wandering, however, have meant that my traditional home in California, while always "home," is not really my home anymore.  I haven't had a place that I could really feel is my home and place where I will stay for a while.  I feel like I need that as I move into the second half of life.  I just want a place of my own for a while.

Musical Interlude

I found this song by a group called Thrice.  It's called In Exile and the lyrics capture exactly the sense of rootlessness and wanting a place to find peace that I've been feeling.

If you want to know more about Caseville and Port Austin

Caseville Chamber of Commerce
City of Caseville
Huron Daily Tribune (Bad Axe newspaper covering Caseville and Port Austin)
Port Austin Chamber of Commerce
Village of Port Austin
Wikipedia: Caseville
Wikipedia: Port Austin

Next up: Harbor Beach, Michigan

Blue Highways: Quanicassee, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

I feel like carping on a few things in this post.  Okay, I'm really going to be carping on carp, while also reflecting on my lack of enthusiasm for fishing.  All of this, in context of Blue Highways, takes place near Quanicassee, Michigan.  Drop some bait on the map and see if you can hook Quanicassee's location.

Book Quote

"Near Quanicassee, canals draining the wet land to make farming possible flanked the highway.  In the ditches, mile after mile, violent flashes of polished bronze roiled the murky water.  I stopped to see what it was.  The hot, muddy banks frothed with the courtship of eighteen-inch carp.  Males, flicking Fu Man Chu mustaches, metallic scales glittering like fragments of mirrors, orange tails thrashing, did writhing belly rolls over females as they demonstrated the right of their milt to prevail."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Framework and Chimney. Photo of an abandoned house in Quanicassee, Michigan taken by The Gallopping Geezer and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host site.Quanicassee, Michigan

I was never much of a fisherman.  I remember taking a fishing pole and some fish eggs down to the river at some property we owned in Northern California and sitting and trying to get the fish to bite.  The fish were river trout, and they were small fish.  I remember that when I hooked them, pulling them out of the water was always interesting because they went from a greenish color in the water to gray and silver in the air.  They always seemed to be bigger in the air than in the water too.  I would watch them gasp for breath as I removed the hook and then I'd throw them back because rarely did we get a large trout in the river.

Lately I'm reminded how little interest I really had in fishing, which might seem strange since I have two uncles who were commercial fisherman, another uncle who was a sport fisherman, and a brother-in-law who likes to fish both ocean and fresh water.  I just never got into it, which is funny since I'm a relatively introverted person and fishing is a somewhat solitary pasttime.  It's an activity that encourages an inner-life in some people, and a zen-like calming solitude in others.  But it's never been my thing.

Which again is funny, because I love eating fish.  I think that there's nothing better than fresh fish, especially if the bones are removed and you can really enjoy the meat without picking needle-like bones out of your mouth.  I'm relatively picky about my fish, and my mother even more so.  For her, fish had to be so fresh it had to be almost wiggling on your plate.  Any fish that had a hint of fish taste for her was bad fish.  While I can get by with fish that has been flash frozen, for her that's an extreme no-no.

Nor did I ever get interested in other things about fish.  I never had an aquarium, and never learned much about the types of fish, fresh and saltwater, that live in the world.  I enjoyed looking at fish in aquariums, but never truly considered taking it up as a hobby.

Yet fish are a huge part of our existence.  Our evolution may mean that we are ultimately descended from fish-like creatures that crawled tentatively out onto the sand and ultimately adapted.  Fish have been a staple food source for eons of human diets.  Some of our most compelling stories have been about fish.  Jonah may have been swallowed by a "great fish" or whale depending on how one interprets the text.  Aphrodite and Eros, in escaping the terrible god Typhon, either turned into two fish and swam away or were saved by two fish whose images were immortalized in the constellation Pisces.  Jesus fed a multitude by multiplying loaves and fishes, and exhorted his apostles to be "fishers of men."  In an Indian story, Manu was instructed on how to save himself from the great flood by a fish.  Beautiful mermaids, half woman and half fish, are said to lure men to their watery doom. 

I knew that goldfish and koi, types of carp, are considered to be important symbols in Japanese and Chinese culture.  In Japanese legend the carp was the only fish strong enough to swim to the top of the waterfall where it then became a dragon.  Therefore, in Japanese culture, the carp symbolizes strength, bravery and going against the current as well as the benefits of attaining one's goal.  In Chinese and Japanese culture goldfish and koi, both members of the carp family, are used, either in the form of paintings or with their physical inclusion in environmental surroundings, as elements leading to what the Chinese consider good Feng Shui.  Koi represented in a home symbolizes the desire for more happiness, better success, prosperity, good fortune and energy.

Unfortunately, Asian carp in the United States are now a pest.  Originally imported by Southern farmers to clean their ponds, these invasive species have been multiplying and adversely affecting the environment.  They can be dangerous too.  One species of Asian carp, the silver carp, is easily frightened by boats and leaps high out of the water as they pass by.  It has been known to cause injuries to boaters.  Here's a montage of some people trying to bowhunt Asian Carp as they jump out of the water.  It can be pretty frightening, as you can see, because these flying projectiles can really hurt a person.

It's ironic that in the U.S., carp, a fish that is seen in Asia as lending balance and harmony to life, is such an agent of imbalance in our environment.  It is literally screwing up our national Feng Shui.  Furthermore, it is maintaining its symbolism for strength and meeting goals in the worst possible way.  How did this happen?

It happened like everything else that is besetting the embattled fish populations of our world.  We, humans, are the ones that put everything out of balance.  In the oceans, we are overfishing as sushi has become a must-have food in the United States and elsewhere.  That overfishing has led to entire salmon seasons along the West Coast of the United States to be severely restricted if not canceled some years.  Five of the eight species of tuna are feared to be in danger of extinction.  We have, sometimes with good intentions, introduced non-native species like Asian carp into rivers and streams in an attempt to accomplish some good, but the lack of natural enemies has let those populations explode and crowd out the native species. 

Somehow, humans need to discover that our actions affect the balance, the Feng Shui, of the world for better or for worse.  Is there a way that we can meet our goals and be strong, like the carp that scaled the waterfall and turned into a dragon, but also create balance and harmony, like the koi?

Musical Interlude

The musical interludes in this post are all about my sister Pauline.  She was a big fan of this first song, Fisherman's Blues by The Waterboys.

She is also a very close friend of Chi Cheng, the bassist of The Deftones who seriously injured with traumatic brain injury in a car accident.  Though I've never met Chi, my inclusion of this song, Street Carp, co-written by Chi, is dedicated to him and hopes that he will recover.

If you want to know more about Quanicassee

Wikipedia: Wisner Township

Next up: Caseville and Port Austin, Michigan

Blue Highways: Bay City, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Bay City zips by and is in the rear view mirror, but houses have been on my mind recently.  I'm going to reflect on why I don't own a house, why I possibly should, and what has been stopping me.  You're free to ramble through the rooms and hallways of my thoughts if you would like.  You can get an idea of where the real estate that Bay City sits upon is located by looking at the map.

Book Quote

"...past the Victorian houses in Bay City."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

A Victorian house in Bay City, Michigan. Photo by Yfat Yossifor and hosted at MLive.com. Click on photo to go to host site.Bay City, Michigan

I don't own a house.  I've never owned a house.  And at 48, sometimes I think I should grow out of being a man-child and actually buy one.

After all, it is a good time to buy a house.  The real-estate market is really bad right now.  Houses are going up for sale all around my neighborhood as people try to unload overvalued houses that are rapidly losing value.  It seems like homes put on sale are on the market for a long time, even as their signs advertise another price drop of a few thousand dollars.

All my life I have rented.  My first rental as an adult was in Milwaukee after I left volunteer service.  I rented a Taiwanese woman's apartment along Holton Street near the East Side.  She still considered it her apartment, and would often come in with no warning.  Everything in the apartment belonged to her - I was a simply place holder.  One day I came home to find another person had moved in.  May, the landlord, didn't tell me he was coming.  She just moved him in.  At other times she would leave her dog, a little Shih Tzu named Winston, for me to take care of with little warning.

I moved from there to a community house on the near the west side on 21st Street.  I lived with five other people with as varied backgrounds as you could imagine.  The house was an old coop house that had housed conscientious objectors who made napalm in the basement to burn their draft cards in the late 60s.  It had kept that counter-culture flavor, though by the time I lived there it housed a nun who had fallen on hard times, an older gentleman who was a link to the house's earlier counterculture glory, an artist, a student, a volunteer with the Brethren Volunteer Service, and a woman librarian in her 50s who was trying to find her next calling.  (Aside: I recently heard from the librarian, who lives in Albuquerque where I now reside and who runs an elder care business and loves it.  She was just as surprised to find me in Albuquerque as I was to hear from her.)

After that experience, I moved in with a friend and lived a few years in an upstairs apartment Milwaukee's Sherman Park neighborhood.  It was a neighborhood on the cusp of the inner-city and was somewhat rough.  Gunshots were common, as were the glares of some of the people walking the street when I walked my dog.  Once a guy said as I walked past with Hannibal, whose fur was completely white, "...man, even your dog is white."  While walking in Washington Park one day, a few blocks over from my house, a little kid told me to hand over my dog.  I refused and as I walked away, he yelled out that he was going to shoot me.  I kept walking, and he disappeared.

After my wife and I married, we lived in an upstairs apartment in the Mahncke Park neighborhood of San Antonio.  When we moved to New Orleans, we paid rent to a couple who went to live in Guatemala and lived in Mid-City in a double shotgun, then after a year we moved to Fauborg St. John and lived in a downstairs apartment in what we considered the best neighborhood we've ever lived in.  Currently, we live in a faux adobe in a neighborhood we like, in the Southeast Heights of Albuquerque and close to a nice business district.

Why didn't we ever buy?  Our itinerant lifestyle kept us from buying.  We never knew if we were going to be in one place long enough to make it worth our while.  Perhaps if we'd been more savvy, we would have bought and then rented after we left.  But we didn't and therefore missed out on some great prices.  Now we are left hoping that perhaps the market will come back to us so that we can get a house in a good neighborhood that we like.

Now, I'm 48 and realize that I don't know the first thing about buying a house.  I don't know what to look for.  I grew up in a ranch-style house in California, which was laid out on one floor with a long hallway separating the master bedroom from the living room and kitchen.  In Albuquerque, houses range from Victorian-style houses to ranch houses, from faux adobes to actual adobes.  We know that we don't want to live in a suburban tract pre-fab style house, but would rather live within the city in a house that has some character.

And to tell you the truth, I have become somewhat lazy.  Owning a house means either being willing to pay for repairs oneself, or becoming handy enough to be a do-it-yourselfer.  One of the casualties of my dysfunctional childhood was that my father did not take time to teach me what he knew about carpentry and handyman-ness.  I would like to have those skills, and could probably learn, but having lived in rented places for pretty much all of my adult life, I like that I can call the landlord and get the plumbing fixed, or get a faulty electric outlet replaced.

Yet, there's some things that having a house would allow me to do.  It would allow my wife and I to define our own space in the way we want.  It would allow me to do projects.  I've always wanted a nice garden with all kinds of plants of both the edible and aesthetic variety.  The prospect of designing my own back yard to make it a place of refuge appeals to me very much.  I also feel that because I would be invested in my own house, I would spend more time there which might help me reach a goal of slowing my life down.

The exciting and scary thing about owning my own house, however, is the sense of rootedness I would gain.  My wife and I have been used to just packing up and leaving when the job gets tough or another opportunity presents itself.  However, for the first time in my life, I feel like I need a sense of being rooted to place, and a community to go with it.  It was Easter a couple of days ago, and as I watched homeowners in a local park have a neighborhood Easter egg hunt with their kids and then have a neighborhood soccer game, I realized I want something like that in my life.  However, I would sacrifice that sense of being able to move when and where I want.

Maybe it's time to buy a house.  I don't care if it's Victorian, adobe or whatever.  As long as I feel at home, happy and rooted, I think that at this point in my life, I will be satisfied.

Musical Interlude

Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  This is how I'd like to feel about having a house:

The Talking Heads with Once in a Lifetime.  This how I think I might feel after buying a house and being suddenly rooted to one place..."My God, how did I get here?!!!":

If you want to know more about Bay City

Bay Area Chamber of Commerce
Bay City Fireworks Festival
Bay City Times (newspaper)
Bay County Historical Society
City of Bay City
Wikipedia: Bay City

Next up: Quanicassee, Michigan

Blue Highways: Midland, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Traveling past the huge Dow Chemical plant in Midland, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) notes it and moves on toward the Thumb of Michigan.  I'll reflect a little on chemicals that have become, like it or not, a part of our society and a part of us.  Trace a chemical path to the map to see where Midland is located.

Book Quote

"On a map, lower Michigan looks like a mitten with the squatty peninsula between Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron forming the Thumb.  A region distinctive enough to have a name was the only lure I needed, but also it didn't hurt to have towns with fine, unpronounceable names like Quanicassee, Sebewaing, Wahjamega, or other names like Pigeon, Bad Axe, Pinnebog, Rescue, Snover, and - what may be the worst town name in the nation - Freidberger.  People of the the Thumb have come from many places, but Germans and Poles predominate.

"I headed due east across the flat country, past the great industrial pile of Dow Chemical at Midland..."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. Photo by Bill Puglianno/Getty Images and seen at the Britannica website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Midland, Michigan

In the quote above, LHM references the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Michigan.  In fact, the chemical giant was actually founded there in the late 1800s.  Throughout the 20th century, Dow Chemical and others like it led a revolution that ultimately helped bring about great advances in humanity's way of life.  There was even a time when it was "sexy" to be in the chemical industry, as this Dow commercial from the 1980s shows.

Or so that's what we've been told.  As we move into the 21st century, we more and more often see the dark side of the chemical revolution.  Cancers and other types of illnesses are on the increase, some linked to chemicals invented in the 20th century and into which we put our trust.  That which we create sometimes comes back to bite us.

I was thinking about our uneasy relationship with chemicals earlier today, before I started writing.  Today is Easter, a day of resurrection and hope in the Christian tradition.  I was in the shower and looking up to where some mold was growing on the ceiling thanks to the condensation that settles there day in and day out, and thinking that I need to wipe it down with a mold killer.  The mold killer is, of course, a chemical.  That chemical is potent enough that the instructions warn users to only utilize the product if the room is ventilated lest they breathe in and be overcome by fumes.  That got me to thinking about how many chemicals I use to clean the bathroom.  I use sprays to clean the toilet, sink and bathtub surfaces.  I use a toilet bowl cleaner with a brush to clean the inside of the toilet.  I use a floor soap with solvents in it to clean the bathroom floor tile.

That got me wondering about how many chemicals I use to clean the kitchen.  Surface cleaners, stove cleaners, scrubbing chemicals for the kitchen sink, and soap with solvents for the floor.  All of these chemicals near where I prepare my food and therefore, am probably ingesting.

But there's more.  The food I eat is often pumped with chemicals to help preserve it.  Farm-grown salmon, and many processed foods, are pumped with dyes to give them a correct and pleasing hue.  Processed foods are laced with chemicals for all kinds of things.  Not only food, but stuff I put on - the shampoos and soaps I use, the lotions that my wife uses, the sunscreen that I don't wear enough of - all has chemicals.  We take some clothes to the dry cleaner so that they can be cleaned with all kinds of chemicals.

The water we drink is loaded up with chemicals, some intentional and some not.  Fluoride, a chemical to help protect teeth is intentional.  The chemicals that leech into water tables from farms and sewage are not.  Agriculture uses chemicals for everything from re-energizing soils to killing weeds.  These are poured willy-nilly over commercial farms and thus leech into the soil and then into us.  Factories are supposed to properly dispose of used chemicals, but in the developing world they often don't, adding a whole new list of compounds into the environment that can pose short and long-term dangers.

I'm not trying to necessarily be anti-chemical.  Our basic body functions such as the conversion of food and oxygen into energy is a chemical reaction.  I've often heard that our basic emotions are complex chemical reactions that take place within our brains.  Love, sadness, depression, joy are all chemistry within the individual human laboratory that is our unique bodies.  We depend on chemicals to make us what we are.  It may even have been a chemical reaction that started the chain of events that led to all life on earth.

But those chemical reactions occurred and still occur naturally.  In a way, like we've done with other things, we came to see our ability to manipulate chemicals into helpful creations as a product of our genius.  We saw chemicals and our abilities with them as a hope of humanity, almost worshiping the idea of them in religious terms.  We could only see the upside of our efforts and many times, we didn't understand what the really long term consequences could be.  That carelessness and hubris led to toxic waste dumps, Love Canal, dioxins in the environment, the development of cancers in many individuals because of long-term exposure to chemicals in their workplace or environment.  Here's an example of what we didn't foresee - chemical resistant pests and weeds that have developed an immunity to the chemicals we dump on them, causing us to need to create stronger chemicals to fight them in a vicious circle.  In the early 1900s, most of our bodies were free of man-made chemicals.  Now, in 2012, we are saturated from chemicals that we ingest or which are absorbed through our skin.  Cancers and other illnesses have risen, possibly offsetting some of the gains in life expectancy that chemicals have bought us.

Like any tool, chemicals can be helpful but if we don't pay attention or don't quite understand how to use them, they can really hurt us.  As we learn about their benefits and costs, that knowledge helps but unfortunately, we often don't learn until we are exposed.  I think about when I was a kid, and my father and I would routinely throw plastic items on our campfires.  Of course, you can't help but breathe in the smoke from those campfires, now made toxic by burning plastic.  The place where we camped, at our property in Northern California, was near a railroad and we often took the old ties that were discarded by the railroad and burned them.  They burned really well and very hot and we sat around that fire and breathed in the smoke.  Those ties were treated with creosote, which may possibly have adverse health effects on people.

Dow Chemical is at the epicenter of what is possibly the worst tragedy associated with chemicals, the Union Carbide Bhopal, India disaster, when chemical and gas leaks from a pesticide plant killed at least 3,000 people instantly and perhaps another 8,000 from exposure.  Dow now owns Union Carbide and is responsible for the ongoing civil and criminal litigation.  We have used chemicals to build our society, and some of the seeds for that society were laid in Midland, Michigan.  We may celebrate our progress through chemical manipulation, but we also may yet rue what Dow, and other companies like it, have wrought for us.

Musical Interlude

This is a silly little ditty based on the periodic table of the elements, which lists all the chemicals known.  Since Tom Lehrer wrote this song, there have been other elements discovered, but it still gives you an idea of all the chemicals that are out there and, most likely, in you.

If you want to know more about Midland

City of Midland
MLive.com
Midland Chamber of Commerce
Midland Daily News (newspaper)
Midland Online
Midland Tomorrow
Northwood University
Wikipedia: Midland

Next up: Bay City, Michigan