A Lovely Weekend at the Turn of the Weather

We got to flip a calendar page this past weekend and I thought I'd share with readers some of what I indulged in from COB Friday until Monday morning.  Sort of a day-in-the-life of cancer survivor awaiting transplant therapy.

o  Today, for the first time since last fall, the entire state of Minnesota was depicted in yellow on the US weather map, indicating that the highs today would be at least 60 degrees statewide. Woohoo! Can leaves be far behind?

Susan and I got a sneak preview of spring Saturday when we drove down to Stone Lake (about 90 miles south of Duluth) to spend the day with good friends, Ray & Elsie Martin. They had leaves down there, and the green in the winter wheat was mouthwateringly verdant. (To be fair, the air temperatures were still chilly and we put the fireplace to good use after dinner. So there's still considerable warming to accomplish before going crazy with Japanese eggplants in the garden.)

o  Yesterday afternoon, Susan and I attended a surprise birthday party for a friend named Nelson. It was held outdoors at a marina in Superior (which worked out OK if you were in the lee of the building, bathed in the late afternoon sun). In addition to meeting gobs of Susan's friends and local connections, they served a catered sit-down meal centered around pasties and a delicious cole slaw. 

There is nothing more evocative of place than characteristic food, and pasties are inextricably linked to the North Woods for me. I last wrote about them the last time I enjoyed a pasty (Catching the Ferry in 2010) when I spent a couple weeks vacationing on Drummond Island off the Upper Peninsula, and it all came back to me with the first bite. Finely chopped potatoes, carrots, and onions commingled with meat shreds in a savory pastry shell. Yum!

o  Since taking the plunge back in 1999, my favorite recreational pastime has been playing duplicate bridge. To be sure, I enjoy many things and love game playing generally, but nothing beats bridge at the duplicate level. I used to play regularly (once a week) at duplicate club in Kirksville when I lived in northeast MO, but I've only managed to play one time (last August, while visiting Sandhill) since leaving MO last June.

Of course, mostly this got set aside in recent moths to attend to my health, but I'm well enough now to indulge in occasional card playing and I was happy when Susan suggested that we play bridge with Ray & Elsie Saturday afternoon. While we only got in about 10 hands it has great fun (especially for Susan—the birthday girl—who was dealt one terrific hand after another) and I had the chance to play a couple of slam hands, the best one being off an ace with the king of trumps lying offside. When the defense failed to cash their ace on the opening lead I was able to wriggle out of losing it by establishing a side suit, and my 12th trick came from playing the seven of spades (a side suit) after roughing out the defense's 10. Very satisfying.

Susan plays bridge on Thursdays in a teaching class and I've been invited to go with her this coming week to see where I might fit into the Duluth duplicate scene.

o  Over the weekend, Susan and I started mapping out our support schedule for my coming stay in Rochester (in conjunction with my stem-cell transplant at the Mayo Clinic, starting July 12). We are blessed to have four different folks who have volunteered to do a shift while I'm in Rochester and take over the role of primary caregiver for a few days, giving Susan a break. In all, I've been told to expect a stay of six weeks, and it will be great for Susan to have regular breaks.

While she and I like being together, there are limits. Planning for breaks at the outset creates a more humane schedule. Here's what the support person will be asked to provide: 
—Escort me to and from Transplant House to Mayo's for daily testing and treatment.
—Be my cheerleading squad, helping me stay in good spirits while I cope with the heavy duty chemotherapy.
—Encourage me to get regular exercise  (seeing how quickly my body atrophied after three weeks in the hospital in Feb, I am determined to do what I can to not suffer as much physical deterioration this summer).
—Cajole me to drink enough liquids (three quarts daily).
—Get me to eat enough protein (despite the expectation that my appetite will be diminished).

This should leave plenty of time for visiting, working crossword puzzles, reading novels, and listening to Giants games on radio (streamed via my laptop). Who knows, maybe I can find four for bridge among the transient members of Transplant House.

o  Gradually, I've been upping the ante on social engagements as my strength improves. Susan and I attended a local performance of the Broadway musical, 42nd Street, Friday evening; we drove to Stone Lake WI for the day on Saturday; and we attended a birthday party Sunday afternoon. While I don't intend to be busy like that every day, it's nice to know I can handle it.

In fact, despite the increased activity level, I was able to navigate the entire weekend without once relying on extra medication to see me through. It's nice to have additional spring in my step right as there's additional spring in the air.

When I'm 64... Like Today

When I woke up this morning the ground was covered in white. Kinda like me.

Of course, in the ground's case the hoar from our first hard frost will melt before noon. In my case, there's only going to be more white from here on out, excepting the bald spots.

I was up until midnight last night, producing a trifecta in the food processing kitchen. It's the end of the harvest and time to wrap up. Yesterday I made our final batch of tomatillo salsa, whipped up one last round of tomato salsa, and incubated tempeh for the first time in more than a year.

I was pushing it yesterday because today's my birthday and I wanted to clear my plate for half a day of celebration with Ma'ikwe. Given that: a) birthdays are an appropriate time for reflection; b) I'm 64; and c) I've always had a soft spot for whimsy, I've decided to play off Beatles lyrics for today's commentary...

When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now,

To be fair, I started early. I had a receding hairline by the time I was 30, and the amazing thing to me is that I have any hair left on top.




Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?


After putting out lunch today and cleaning up (concluding my 24-hour cook shift that started yesterday), I'll head over to Dancing Rabbit and enjoy the rest of the day with Ma'ikwe and Jibran. In this case, Ma'ikwe will be my valentine and I'm sending myself to her. In addition, we will be imbibing unfermented fruit juice tonight as we continue our commitment to be alcohol free while in therapy. But that's quibbling. The right celebratory energy is there.

If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,

While I rarely get home after midnight, Ma'ikwe likes to retire early and it's common for me to return to a dark house after a trip or a late date. Trying to make as little noise as possible, I brush my teeth and crawl into bed with my wife asleep. So far, knock on wood, she's never locked the door.


Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?


There's always been something off for me about that line, "will you still need me"—something a bit codependent. I want her, and I want her to want me, but "need" is tricky. I need honesty; I need support; I need understanding; I need love, but I don't think that Ma'ikwe has ever needed me in order for her to be a whole and vibrant person, and I'm not looking for that to change.

oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oooo
You'll be older too, (ah ah ah ah ah)
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.

It's eerie how this is exactly where Ma'ikwe and I are at: the point of decision about whether she'll have me in her house. We'll be starting an experiment about that right after Thanksgiving (when I'm 64).

I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.

As a homesteader with basic skills in wiring, there's no doubt I can mend a fuse (and perform myriad other household maintenance tasks). The question is whether I'm home enough to be reliable, and have enough maneuvering room on my dance card to get to the tasks in a timely way.

You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride.


While Ma'ikwe isn't a knitter; shes definitely a sitter, and we spend quite a little time on the sofa by the wood stove. So we're solid there. In the context of the car-conscious lifestyle at Dancing Rabbit, I think we can safely translate the Sunday morning ritual into a walk, rather than the recreational consumption of hydrocarbons.

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

I've been together with Ma'ikwe for eight years now, during which time she's consistently projected herself as someone whose drawn to gardening as an Earth-centering practice and restorative ritual. While her health and other pressing priorities have often gotten in the way of her spending much time with her hands in the soil, I know this is a powerful association for her. Maybe, once we succeed in establishing a single household and get on top of our home improvement priorities, we can spend quality time in the dirt together. I can imagine it at least. I like the image of feeding each other.

Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save

We definitely like vacations together, of which I have fond memories, including our last one in New Mexico in April. While the Isle of Wight is not a likely destination, we had a lovely time on Drummond Island in Lake Huron four years ago...  and it definitely requires some financial planning to make vacations happen.


Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck, and Dave

I have two grandkids now—Taivyn & Connor—with no immediate prospects for more. Thus, I have no idea where Vera, Chuck, and Dave will come from, but I'm fine with that. And while I like family members to be pro-active, I don't need anyone to be pro-creative on my account. 

Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, Wasting Away.


While poetic, this is the weirdest stanza in the song. I aspire to be living in the same house with Ma'ikwe, not linked merely by postcards from the edge. To be fair, we do have a challenge staying well connected while I'm on the road (where skype offers more promise as a medium than the US Postal Service), and we're also working on more direct communication (aren't we all?), so there is some cogency to the lyrics.

For all of that though, the signature seems so passive and resigned that I can't relate to at all. Hmm, I've put on some weight over the years. Maybe if we adjust that to "waisting away" I could get behind it.

Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?


While Ma'ikwe and I have found epistolary exploration of our relationship dynamics to be especially potent, I can't see asking her to fill out a form with respect to an update on our prospects for long-term intimacy (unless this is an oblique reference to our marriage license six years ago). That part, which might be referred to as the $64 question we've asked each other a thousand times, will always be done face to face.

Whoo!

Whoo, indeed.

• • •

Here's the valentine that Ma'ikwe sent me this morning:

Dear Beloved Whats?band,

Happy 64th Birthday! And happy 8 years of flirts, fights, fucks, facilitation, funks, fun and food. Also freeze/thaw cycles... metaphorical and literal.

We're in an odd, odd place together, are we not? And yet birthdays keep happening, anniversaries come and go. I have no regrets about the journey, and am glad you goaded me into taking it seriously 8 Novembers ago when you asked me to marry you. The bottom line is I love you, admire the hell out of you and have been more stimulated by your presence in my life than nearly anyone else (and it is a fine, small club you are part of, even if you aren't the sole occupant.)

I'm glad you are coming over today and we'll get the afternoon and evening together. Other than cooking and snuggling, what would you like to do today?

Love, the Whats?ife

• • •

Did you notice that 64 is eight years times eight F's? It's a sign! Now all I have to do is puzzle out its meaning.

Wringing in the New

Yesterday was 1/1/11. It's hard to look at that and not think of fresh starts. (I guess you could look at that and think of stuttering, but that hardly seems the stuff of inspiration.)

Of course, toward the end of the year we'll get a chance to experience rampant 1s again, on this year's anniversary of Veteran's Day: 11/11/11. However, it seems more auspicious to reflect on beginnings now, when ringing in a new year, tearing the cellophane off a spanking new calendar, and celebrating the incrementally longer days since the Earth made its ponderous turn past winter solstice. November seems more suited for exhalation than exaltation, so let's not wait.

Like many others, for most of my life I've periodically pondered the Question, "What do I want to do when I grow up?" Even as the years have steadily mounded up and I'd already established a satisfying career as a community builder, there has always remained a residual wanderlust, to consider the roads not taken. As full as my life has been (and I'm not complaining) it's been pleasurable to pause now and then to look out the window and ask, "What if… " following in my mind's eye those blue highways leading away from my marked path in enticing directions.

By degrees, I've come to accept that I will probably never be a cabinetmaker, a US Senator, or a contestant on Iron Chef. I may never see the geysers of Iceland, Ayers Rock in Australia, or the Inca engineering miracle of Machu Picchu. I don 't know if I'll ever get to canoe the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories again. Gradually, I've come to accept that I'm probably as grown up as I'll ever be. At 61 years old, The Question has morphed into: "What do I want to do with the rest of my life?"

I want to write more
For a long time I was hung up on the conundrum: When have I learned enough (and become articulate enough) that I have something to write about? Or perhaps more to the point, when have I digested enough of life that my collective attempts to share my observations are a worthy addition to the blogosphere? How can I tell when my contributions are worth their weight in electrons?

While I'm still unsure of the answer, the die is now cast and I'm willing to take my chances as a writer. Three years into my career as a blogger, I am no longer afraid I'll run out of things to write about, and am pleasantly surprised to discover that something interesting to reflect upon happens as a nearly daily occurrence. (Why didn't I notice this amazing fact earlier!) Now, even as I'm striving to enhance my ability to be current in the moment, there's also a small part of my consciousness that's regularly devoted to observing the moment (in contrast with experiencing it), tracking potential topics to write about. These days I talk less and reflect more, and I like this shift.

I want to teach more
As a social change agent, I regularly ask myself, "In what ways can I most effectively contribute to creating a better world?" After years of steadily developing a career as a group process consultant, it occurred to me that I'd reach a lot more people if I could teach others to do what I do. Thus, eight years ago I began an experiment to see if I could teach the kind of dynamic facilitation that I could practice. I needed to know if my approach was a circus act (watch the amazing man extract golden nuggets from the apparent dross and snarl of anarchistic chaos!) or something that could reliably be passed along to others. That is, was I a freak or an inspiration?

After completing four rounds of my two-year facilitation training, I now know that my skills can be learned (I really didn't want to be a freak anyway) and teaching group process has become my greatest passion as a consultant. While I still need to keep my hand in as a practitioner (it's both my greatest recruitment tool for attracting students and keeps me on my toes), I want to teach as much as possible. I feel incredibly blessed to have so much to offer while I still have the energy and constitution to deliver it.

I want to hand off my work well
Over the years I've accumulated a lot of responsibilities. Now, while I'm still high functioning, I need to be more deliberate about planning for my replacement. In addition to finding candidates with the appropriate qualifications (the right mix of skill, availability, and motivation), I need to manifest the income stream sufficient to compensate people at rates more reasonable than the pittance I can operate on as a member of an income-sharing community with no debt.

I've already largely succeeded in getting myself out of being essential to operations at my home community, Sandhill Farm. Now I have to accomplish the same thing as the main administrator for Fellowship for Intentional Community. In the process field, my students will continue my work, adapting it as appropriate. Or, if my body of work ultimately proves to be less potent than that of others, then it will fade away and that's as it should be.

Mind you, this is not about stopping working, or even easing my foot off the gas; it's about not being essential, which is really just an ego trap.

I want to travel more
I'm already on the road 60% of the time, yet the vast majority of that travel is work related. This past summer I took two weeks off with Ma'ikwe to enjoy Drummond Island in the northwest corner of Lake Huron, with a cook's tour of upper and lower Michigan thrown in for good measure. It was a wonderful time and I'd like to travel for pleasure more—preferably with my wife. While this will probably have to await the manifestation of greater financial abundance, it's always a good idea to state the intention.

I want to love more
Who do you know who truly loves as if they've never been hurt? As fearless as I try to be as a professional facilitator and community builder, I'm more cautious in intimacy, where I identify more easily as damaged goods.

One the most precious aspects of my partnership with Ma'ikwe is her constancy in inviting me to intimacy without pretending that my feet are made of anything other than clay. The miracle of her love is that she sees me as stubborn and arrogant as well as tender and compassionate… and loves me anyway. While I don't understand such love, I'm in awe of it and am inexorably drawn toward it. I want to spend a goodly portion of the next few decades gamboling in the meadows of our love, exploring, laughing, and breathing deeply.

Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal
I identify with this bumper sticker, which neatly encapsulates my view on reality. I'm not saving the champaign until all the bubbles go flat, and I'm not banking on there being another time around. I intend to wring as much out of this life as I can.

Today, I think, is a terrific day to begin.

Hope on the Rocks

One of the ways I knew that Ma’ikwe was seriously interested in me as a life partner was when she told her father (Jim), a wildlife biologist, that she’d finally met a guy whom she felt she could bring bird banding without fear of embarrassing himself. While I could tell this was an important yardstick to be measured against, I had little idea what she was talking about… until last Sunday.

After spending a couple post-Drummond Island days [see my blogs of June 27-July 7 for more about that] puttering around the northeast quadrant of the Upper Peninsula, Ma’ikwe and I rendezvoused with her mother (Kay) and son (Jibran) at Uncle Ted and Aunt Barbara’s house on the St. Mary’s River outside Barbeau (just southeast of the Soo). Ted is Jim’s brother, and more to the point, they are both Fred Ludwig's sons. Fred was a doctor by profession and a bird bander by avocation. Starting around 1929, Fred got seriously interested in banding baby birds that nested in the Great Lakes, to help with wildlife research. He ultimately infected both his sons with this same zeal. By 1996, the extended Ludwig clan estimated that they’d banded about 650,000 birds, roughly 1% of the all those banded in North America. We’re talking serious banding.

While Fred passed away in 2002 and Jim has retired from banding, Ted keeps his hand in. A doctor like his father, Ted is also every bit the amateur supporter of avian wildlife that Fred was. Appropriately enough, Ma’ikwe asked Ted about his recent banding exploits after dinner, and it wasn’t 15 minutes later that Ma’ikwe, Jibran, and I were in Ted’s boat, motoring off to a special island he knew about two miles into Lake Huron, where common terns were hatching. Suddenly, Jibran and I were on our way to getting baptized as “real” Ludwigs.

I borrowed waders from Barb that I could just wedge my feet into without socks and off we went (the red welts on the top of my feet disappeared by the following morning).

The “island” turned out to be a modest pile of rocks, barely poking out of the water. It was more a miniature archipelago measuring all of 30 feet long by 12 feet wide, mostly disguised by reeds. Nonetheless, there were perhaps 50 pairs of common terns nesting there, and all the adults reluctantly rose up and hovered raucously 30-50 feet above us as we banded the babies.

As my community, Sandhill Farm, has had chickens every year since 1975, I’ve seen a lot of baby birds (no small amount of them have been incubated in our living room), and a chick is a chick. (My co-founder, Annie, had this particular trick she developed where she’d pop a baby in her mouth [after carefully wiping its clawed feet] and then causally mingle with folks, only to open wide at the appropriate moment and have the chick cautiously cock its salivated head toward the speaker inquisitively—it invariably stole the moment. But I digress… )

A few of the chicks we encountered in Lake Huron were still wet and exhausted from just having exited their shell. Unlike baby chickens however, these were a mottled brown that blended naturally with the reed nests and nearby stones, helping to keep a low profile against air-borne predators, such as gulls. While they may or may not have justified Ma’ikwe’s claim to be “the cutest chicks in the while world,” it was not hard to root for them. My favorite moment was when the chick I'd been holding (awaiting Ted's ministrations) horked up a fish that was three-quarters as long as it was, exiting tail first. I guess being held and banded by 200-pound monsters temporarily put it off its feed.

One Good Tern Deserves Another

As we were merrily banding away (Ted would expertly slip a marked aluminum band—they are only 1/4-inch wide and open like a letter C—over one of the legs and then squeeze it carefully closed with needle nosed pliers, leaving plenty of room for the leg to grow without pinching; our job was to tenderly place each bird back in the approximate place we found it), Ted explained that the common tern is rapidly becoming less common all the time. In fact, it’s one of the most endangered birds in the Upper Great Lakes, struggling to find decent habitat for breeding, and to compete successfully with cormorants for food.

Their fragility was poignantly apparent as strong winds out of the south had been blowing all day, piling water up at our end of the lake. This effectively raised the water level by several inches. Because the island had so little freeboard, an alarming number of eggs were floating in the water, which severely compromised the temperatures needed for successful incubation.

As you might imagine, the adult terns were highly relieved when our commando operation was over and we had shoved off from their spit of land. In perhaps 20 minutes, we had banded 69 chicks. While that’s only 0.01% of what’s been accomplished by Ludwig banders overall, I had finally gotten off the schneid.

The Dangers of Mixing Book Conception with Fertility Drugs

Today is my last full day on Drummond Island, and it seems appropriate to offer up a progress report on my book. 

When I struggled for more than three years to get traction on this project, my wife, Ma’ikwe, wisely took the initiative and scheduled these two weeks in northern Michigan where my principal task was to finally spend time working on the damn book.

Now that I’m actually up here doing it, things are getting out of hand.

Here I am in a protected, nutrient-rich environment (lots of unscheduled time, a beautiful setting, a loving partner, good coffee, and internet access), regularly thinking about what I want to say. I arrived two weeks ago looking forward to how my labor pains this fortnight would lead in a straight forward way to the birth of my first literary child, sometime in the year ahead. Now it’s beginning to look like quints.

I reckon that’s one of the risks of placing myself in an artificial environment expressly for the purpose of enhancing conception—sometimes you get more than you bargained for.

I knew I was in conceptual foment by Day Four when it first occurred to me that I have too much to say about facilitation to just shoehorn it into a chapter or two about cooperative group dynamics in general (which was the topic I originally thought could reasonably contain all of my publishable musings). When I went for my daily walk on Day Five, I set for myself the task of brooding about whether I was going to write one book or two. Two hours (and eight miles) later, mitosis had struck again, and I was up to four books, having added one on power & leadership, as well as a fourth on sustainable economics. Good grief!

• • •

Let me pause here in my narrative to describe a bit about how I’m approaching this project. Because I already have a lot written (perhaps 100 reports to clients, 75 articles in Communities magazine, 60 workshop handouts, nearly 290 blog entries, and enough private correspondence with peers to clog a high-speed shredder) almost all of my work on the book to date has been devoted to organizing—sketching out all the subjects I want to address, figuring out what I have already written about that topic (and where I’ve stored it!), determining which pieces naturally fit together, and figuring out how things should be sequenced. Mostly this amounts to drafting a Table of Contents and then diligently walking through my files to review 12 years worth of accumulated offerings to determine what writing is strong enough to be brought forward as book material. Whenever I unearth something that looks promising, I dump a copy into the appropriate chapter and move on. Sometimes I make a discovery that causes me to create a new chapter. It’s a dynamic process and involves a fair amount of meandering.

At this point I guess I'm only 10% done with my review, and that means that gobs of work remain before I'll need to think about finding a publisher. However, now that I have a road map for how to proceed, my hope is that I'll be able to regularly grind away at it, a la the brave hopes for setting aside time that I expressed last fall [see my blog of Sept 25, 2009, Booking My Future].

• • •

Thus, after my Day Five revelation, I paused to draft a Table of Contents for each new book, so that I’d have a broader and more appropriate field in which to sort as I electronically walked down (random access) memory lane. This was a good discipline in that it helped me see right away which subjects I had a books-worth in me to write about.

By Day Seven I was having second thoughts about a book on power & leadership. My would-be Table of Contents there was not filling out and I went back to the idea of covering that in the book on cooperative groups. Whew! Also, I could see that the book on sustainable economics was a new enough focus for me and a different enough topic that I could safely leave it the corner for now, to be developed only after I’d birthed the other babies. So at the end of the first week I was at three books: one on cooperative groups, one on facilitation, and one (down the road) on sustainable economics.

However, even with all of that sorted, I kept walking and kept thinking. By Day Nine I’d added a book on nonprofit administration, especially slanted toward those organizations dependent on volunteers rather than a staff paid market-rate wages. I had no trouble at all filling out the Table of Contents for that one.

By Day Eleven I gave up trying to cover everything I have to offer about consensus as a single chapter in my book on cooperative groups—which I am determined to focus in such a way that it depends neither on living in intentional community, nor on making decisions by consensus. While I continue to think that decision is a wise one (in the interest of greatly broadening its application), the truth is that I’ve been living and breathing consensus for more than 30 years and it just wasn’t working to cram everything I have to offer on that topic into one chapter. Thus, two days ago I yielded to the inevitable and it became the fifth book. While Ma’ikwe thinks this is all amusing, she’s not the one making commitments to the work. When will this end?

I’m debating whether I dare go for a walk today, or should just leave well enough alone.

The End of the Road

For the last 10 days I’ve been vacationing (and writing) on Drummond Island, located in Lake Huron, just east of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ma’ikwe and I are staying at a cabin that’s located beyond the eastern terminus of State Highway 134. Tucked up into a northern corner of the island, there are roads that continue to the north and east of us, but just barely. The tarmac peters out only a mile from our cabin and it’s only rock beyond that.

As part of my daily routine, I go for a long walk whenever the weather permits. Invariably, I turn north when I exit the driveway, heading away from “civilization.” In just two miles, I come to the first patch of Avlar grasslands, a rare and protected area that I never tire of visiting.

But I’m spoiled. I mainly associate the North Woods with wilderness canoeing (I’ve spent close to a year of my life in a canoe, mainly in northern Minnesota and western Ontario), and it’s been a struggle to tolerate a steady stream of noxious motorized vehicles rattling past me as I attempt to lock into the smells and sounds of the North Woods.

Yesterday I reflected on the traffic patterns more deeply, and today I’m writing about my discomfort.

—I’ve probably walked about 50 miles so far. In that time I estimate that I’ve passed people around 200 times. Twice I saw people jogging; once I encountered a pair of cyclists pedaling the other way. Everyone else was enjoying the wilderness via motor assist. Perhaps 10% of the traffic has been ORVs (they used to be called ATVs: All-Terrain Vehicles; now they’re Off-Road Vehicles), which are much easier on the gas and much louder on the noise. The vast majority of the traffic has been SUVs or pickups with camper tops, driving outbound one minute, and then returning from their jaunt 15-30 minutes later when the road ends and they have to turn around.

—I have not seen a single other person simply walking. With the notable exception of the joggers and cyclists, land-based recreation here translates into getting into your vehicle and driving around. (Actually, most people up here are into water-based recreation—that is, fishing. They do that by getting in a boat with a motor and an electronic fish finder, looking for whitefish that they’ll catch and then buzz back to shore and freeze.) Taken all together, wilderness recreation here is highly energy consumptive.

—At first I was impressed with how little litter I found along the roads. However, upon reflection, how littered would you expect roads to be that lead nowhere? Slowly, I’ve been picking up the trash as I go along on my walks. If you’re keeping score at home, the tally yesterday was Budweiser 8, Red Bull 2, and Coca-cola 1. (I guess Anheuser Busch is still the king of boors beers.) While I have no idea how long it’s taken for these to accumulate (and thus cannot compute the idiot-per-passenger-mile ratio), I was nonetheless collecting non-biodegradable containers chucked out the window in a protected wilderness area. Think about that. It’s hard for me to write this paragraph and not experience hypertension.

—Yesterday was squally (the weather, not just my mood) and I experienced several periods of light drizzle during my walk, which helped keep the temperatures down (even up at the Canadian border, it reaches into the 90s in mid-summer). Thankfully, it also kept the dust down as the parade of vehicles rumbled by me. There is this one stretch in the Alvar grasslands where there’s a broad shelf of bare limestone that the road passes right through. It’s so wide that it forms a rough circle about 50 feet in diameter, and it’s a special place to visit—it’s a wonder that Nature has produced something so old, so flat, and so large. When I came upon this spot yesterday, it appeared the limestone had been magically transformed into a pond, as the surface puddles reflected the sky and I could see no rock from my low-angled approach. The moment was marred, however, when I walked onto the circle and saw how the wetness brought out the skid marks of recreational enthusiasts who use this spot as a favorite place to demonstrate their prowess at executing doughnuts on their ORVs. (Perhaps it stands for Overpowered Rotational Vermin.)

Alvar Constitutionals

I’m vacationing on Drummond Island, just east of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I have two priorities for the next two weeks: spending time with my wife as she recuperates from fibromyalgia and some version of chronic fatigue, and working on a book about cooperative group dynamics.

As neither of those priorities tends toward the aerobic, I’ve fallen into the habit of taking a break mid-afternoon and going for a long walk. My favorite so far takes me north along the access road to our cabin. Within a mile I pass through a lovely fen, replete with marsh grasses waving in the summer breeze, murky water (stained deep brown with tannic acid from the ubiquitous conifers) gurgling through culverts on its way to Lake Huron, and myriad birds darting through the air fattening up on the plentiful insects that thrive in bogs.

Just another mile down the road, I can reach a rare exemplar of Alvar grasslands, which are fragile eco-systems supported on shallow beds of limestone. This one—part of the Maxton Plains Preserve—is in full bloom, showing off its variety of wildflowers, sedges, and marsh grasses. It’s an odd mix of arctic tundra and Great Plains prairie grasses that survive on thin soil too meager to support trees or shrubs.

Because it is based on limestone—not the pre-Cambrian granite that characterizes the surface geology of most of the North Woods—and because the soil is so thin that conifers cannot get a purchase, the habitat is slightly alkaline. That stands in sharp contrast to the dominant soil pH of the taiga (think wild blueberries and the highly acidic soils needed for them to thrive). The limestone shelves were scoured clean 10,000 years ago by the last Ice Age, and lays so flat that portions of the roadway are nothing more than bare limestone.

It’s an excellent habitat for many rare plants and birds and Alvar grasslands exist only in patches of the upper Great Lakes, in a portion of the Baltic region of Europe, and on some islands off Sweden. What a delight to have stumbled upon a patch so close to our cabin! A daily stroll through the portions of the preserve accessible to me on foot offers a perfect restorative after hours hunkered over a keyboard.

For reasons that escape me (it is, after all, the last day of June, it’s been a wet spring, and we’re unquestionably in the North Woods) we haven’t seen more then 10 mosquitoes in four days and have not spotted a single black fly. (Can you hear me knocking on wood?)

Although most of the folks renting the other cabins at our resort are here to fish (whitefish, trout, and salmon), I intend to catch mine at an island restaurant later in the week. There’s a firm rule here that you are not to clean fish in the kitchenettes. We haven’t even been tempted.

We have a small TV in our cabin, and apparently it’s hooked to cable. However, even though the World Cup is on screen daily, we haven’t even turned it on yet to find out. As Bill Watterson noted in the title of his 1993 Calvin & Hobbes classic, "The Days are Just Packed."

Catching the Ferry

Ma’ikwe and I are on Drummond Island, which is as far east as you can go in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and not get out of your car. We’re tucked just under Sault Saint Marie and, as Sarah Palin would have already told you if she weren’t busy going rogue, you can see Ontario from our front porch.

We’re here for two glorious weeks, and so far the mosquitoes are not. While the daytime temperatures can dance into the 80s, it reliably drops into the 50s at night. That means sleeping with a blanket, which is only a wistful memory for those trying to negotiate the sultry summer nights back on the farm in northeast Missouri, where sheets are sometimes a bit much.

Ma'ikwe's Vacation
This is a recuperative and nostalgic vacation for Ma’ikwe. When she developed the symptoms of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue last November & December [see my blog of Dec 14, 2009, Adventures in Hydrotherapy, for more on this], she decided, wisely, to scale down the 2010 construction season on her new house. Instead of working right through the summer, she scheduled a break in late June, with the option of a second session in late summer if the building’s needs and her available energy were adequately aligned.

Removed from all the temptations of life at Dancing Rabbit, Ma’ikwe’s priority this fortnight is rest. One of the most insidious aspects of her illness is that she can do too much and not find out until 12-36 hours later, when body aches and lethargy descend to inform her that she had inadvertently drifted into deficit spending of her energy budget. It can take days to recover from an ill-advised burst of enthusiasm that, maddeningly, felt totally fine in the moment.

The journey up here has also been a stroll down memory lane. Ma’ikwe spent 7-8 years of her youth living in different places in the UP, and many summers in the area helping her Dad band birds on Great Lake islands as a wildlife biologist. As we drove up Wisconsin and made the trek across the UP from Menominee to St Ignace, Ma’ikwe would tell stories of what happened in her life at this point and that.

• We got out of the car in Manistique and sat on the dock where the family boat was often moored—she pointed out the exact berth where her father, brother, and she sometimes waited days for the weather to clear. The routine then was reading book after book, with the boredom of weather-bound ship life punctuated by forays to the nearby Pizza Hut.

• We pulled over at a little roadside store near Little Hog Island (just east of Naubinway), drawn by signage offering an improbable menu of pasties, Mackinac fudge, smoked fish, wild rice, maple syrup, and UP wines—a combination of local specialties you wouldn’t dare consume in the same sitting. Ma’ikwe had had it in mind all day that we’d stop in just such an establishment to get pasties and that alone would have made the stop successful. But it was better than that. In addition to scoring the meat-and-root-vegetable-filled dough pockets characteristically found of North Country mining culture (my wife claims pasties are the one and only way to appreciate rutabagas), Ma’ikwe secured a bottle of her favorite cherry wine from Traverse Bay Winery, and I happily bought a filet of smoked trout. While alcohol products are a staple of such hole-in-the-wall (or in this case, hole-in-the-woods) convenience stores, you typically cannot expect to find quality beer—there just isn’t enough space in the cooler. We knew however, that the Force was with us when we glanced at the beer selection as a last impulse. Along side a variety of de rigueur malted products from Miller, Coors, and Budweiser was one lonely 6-pack of Wild Blue, a potent blueberry-flavored micro-offering from Blue Dawg Brewing in Baldwinsville NY, that just happens to be Ma’ikwe’s absolute favorite beer. Yeehah!

• Outside Epoufette (where do they get these names?), we paused to appreciate the Cut River Gorge. Though the 231 steps to the bottom were more than Ma’ikwe wanted to negotiate (actually, it was the 231 steps up that she wanted no part of), I decided that a bit of aerobic activity was a nice contrast with two days of car travel and I traipsed to the bottom, where I admired how much earth moving (gorge forming) could be accomplished by the steady hydraulic audacity of a stream no more robust than a babbling brook. As an example of what can be accomplished with time and determination, it reminded me of the pyramids.

Laird's VacationThis is a working vacation for me. We’ve rented a small cabin for two weeks: it’s a modest 20x20 structure that’s not much more than a bed, bathroom, and a kitchenette (the smallest of 18 offerings available at Papin’s Resort). While rustic, it comes with electricity and internet access and I’ll be able to keep my oar in the water when it comes to handling email traffic, which claims about 2-3 hours daily. The cabin also comes with a view of Lake Huron from our front porch, and I’m anticipating many relaxing hours there with Ma’ikwe, a book, a drink, and a journal (in any combination).

In addition to gobs of unscheduled time with my wife (which is priceless), I’ll be working on a book about cooperative group dynamics [see my blog of Sept 25, 2009, Booking My Future, for more about this.] While I’d planned last winter to start carving out a couple half days per week to move this project along, I’ve enjoyed little success with that plan, always allowing the press of more immediate needs to claim my time. It was Ma’ikwe’s idea to set up this writing retreat as an alternate strategy, and she was wise to do so. (I just hope she wasn’t motivated to get sick to up the ante on my prioritizing the time away.)

In the next fortnight I intend to:

—Review what I’ve already written (which is a bunch)

—Determine my audience

—Organize the presentation into digestible chunks (read chapters)

—Select a style (probably a combination of principles illuminated by anecdotes & examples)

—Line out what writing does not yet exist, and what needs to be overhauled

With luck, I’ll even get to the point of doing some writing (other than blog entries).

• • •

We had started Saturday outside Green Bay (where, incidentally, I finally completed my NFL blackout bingo card by personally visiting every US city sporting a franchise). With only 300 miles and change to get to Drummond Island we took our time driving into and across the UP, and made a number of little stops along the way (some highlights of which I’ve reported above). Yesterday morning, before leaving our motel, Ma’ikwe had researched the ferry schedule from De Tour Village (which has to be my all-time favorite name for a ferry terminus) to Drummond Island and learned that a boat departs eastward every hour, at 40 minutes past the hour.

As we were “on vacation” and the wait couldn’t be more than 59 minutes, we weren’t paying attention to time. Imagine our surprise when we entered De Tour Village and noticed that the digital clock on the bank read 5:39. Turning the last corner, the ferry was immediately in front of us and the attendant waved us right on board. We had no sooner crossed the threshold, than they drew up the gangway. One minute later we were under way.

If timing is everything, this vacation is off to an auspicious start.