East 2010 Day 11 Petoskey, MI

6-26-2010 0720 Petoskey, MI. Wailing softly, we left the Upper Peninsula...apparently residents refer to themselves as Yoopers...with its moderate temperatures, bright sun, massive rains, and overall resiliant intransigence regarding full participation in the consumptive society. It feels like Maine in that regard. There are also Moose, a mark of such places. I am told Alaska is similar. It would be possible to hypothesize that moose pheremones have something to do with it. But distance and poverty probably are a more significant factor.


The big trees are gone. White Pine, which formed a pretty continuous monocrop over much of the Upper Peninsula was the object of the 15 year harvest, with Seney at its center. At the zenity of its life, in the late 1800's, Seney had something like 15 saloons, hotels, boarded sidewalks ( to avoid the deep mud that logging creates) and a raft of brothels. It also had over 3000 residents, plus god knows how many drunken brawling loggers. It burned several times, during the harvest years. But there was still quite a bit of town left when Hemingway returned in 1919, age 21, with a war wound and his brothers. He had changed trains here in Petoskey, then gone, still in the same train car, across Mackinac straits on a train ferry. Now there is a big bridge. He'd been hitched up to a new engine, and gone left to Seney, rather than right and north up to 'The Soo'..the areas around Sault St Marie where locks give access from Superior to Lakes Michigan, Huron, and eventually Erie and the St Laurence.

The scene that Nick describes in 'Big Two Hearted River', is a little more burned than Seney was in 1919, but otherwise pretty much what you see. Today there are no signs of the burns. And no sign of the town, either. Seney is pretty much a couple gas stations and a combined post office cafe and bank, where we had breakfast. But the steel railway bridge is there, and you can walk out on it, as Hemingway/Nick did, and look down. Yesterday, when I did, the clear brown water was up, and the pools that Nick describes, and later fishes in, were a bit washed out. Good, said the locals, we can use the rain.

The short story has been described as 'wandering stream of consciousness'. Reading it, I realize that Hemingway, more than Steinbeck and Faulkner, and maybe even , talks quite a bit about feelings, letting us feel them, as well as showing us the settings and the actions that produce the sensations that lead to the emotions that create the feeling. The story can be found on line these days.
We drove through Seney without going for a Pictured Rocks cruise...it was raining pretty hard, and we had a look the previous day from the shore. It rained harder later on, coming along the top of Lake Michigan. We stopped for a pasty...derived from the same product in Cornwall, England and Kingston Jamaica I guess...this one was more pepper and less spice, and perhaps more potato, but still worth the eating. The bridge looks like the GG Bridge, will have to check later to see if its the same designer. And then were were back in civilization, in Mackinaw City, where Sala tried valiently to find affordable accomodations on Mackinac island. But it was raining heavily by then, and the first Friday of the tourist season. So, after a brief stop to buy fudge from a iconic tourist trade shop near the restoration of Fort Mackinac, and then smoked whitefish and smoked whitefish pate at a store filled with stuffed animal heads and a freezer full of fish, we headed on into lower Michigan...and Petosky
The Petosky stone is a fosillized coral, hexagarnia perconiata, that polishes up into a beautiful usually reddish and patterned rock. I was given one by my great Uncle Al long ago. Al lived in Dexter or Flint, nearer Detroit, but came fishing up here. Petoskey was the end of the rail line, but he, working at Ford, preferred to drive. He probably fished the same streams that Hemingway did, but I imagine thought about them somewhat differently. Or maybe not, Al was pretty close with his feelings...with words in general.
So we stopped here, and ended up, on this busy weekend, settling into a $147/might accomodations, which are not thata different than the $55/might family run motel we stayed at in Musining. Sala really liked the Upper Peninsula. What she liked best...learning about ma jong from a group of ladies who had taken over the back room at the Breezy Point Bar and Grill (down on lake Michigan, on route 41) who had finished their noisy lunch and were commencing their noisy afternoon of games. In the front part, the menfolk were shooting pool, or having a beer. Outside, Fuji and I went for a walk,a nd Fuji got very wet chasing birds. It was a good time for all.
Today I want to learn more about attachment. I have been using the term incorrectly. And most important, I already have learned enough to want to categorically state that I have never intended to impute non-attachment to any teaching of buddhism. I think my problem has been in conflating the term attachment with my own feelings of guilt (and other feelings) about my own attachments. But hopefully, as we roll south towards Saginaw, Flint, and eventually into Ontario, I will become clearer.
la lucha continua siempre

alan