Monday, December 13, 2010

Deer camp diaries: Steaks and stories at ‘does’ only deer camp


Dear diary:
I’m a big buck so I’ll admit it: I was scared.
After smacking a deer on M-55 Sunday night before the Opener, getting to the steak dinner at a female deer camp was the last thing on my mind.
Instead, as I peered along the side of the road with a flashlight, trying to find the deer I collided with, I was thinking of fleeing, heading home where I could bury myself in a heap of blankets and watch “Sanford and Son” reruns until the feeling burned off and I could face the world again.
My fingers trembled. My thoughts darted. It’s always so strange to see the vehicle that was in perfect shape just moments before dented, cracked and broken.
The impact had the same effect on my nerves.
How did this happen? I thought. I’m a notoriously slow, cautious driver. My wife-to-be chides me because I’m a wimp about passing slow trucks and senior citizens in sedans. I have an impeccable driving record. I’ve never even hit a squirrel.
Yet, there I was, my car in a ditch.
Moments after the accident, two dudes in a Volkswagen pulled a U-turn and drove up next to me. They looked like they were about to stop and offer some sort of advice or soothing words of encouragement, but they didn’t. They slowed down on the shoulder, gave me a strange look, and then zipped away.
“Thanks for the help, guys,” I thought.
But, I had to press on. My car was still operational.
I was free to go on my way. But where would that be? Sitting in my car on the shoulder of the road, listening for any strange noises coming from the running engine, most of me wanted to turn back west towards town.
But, I had a job to do. There was an all-female deer camp out there that had a steak waiting for me. The ladies at the camp would nurse my nerves back to vigorous health with a fine dinner and a little understanding. Calling everything off just because I hit a critter along the way would be a blow to my bravado. So, I headed east into the woods. I gave the camp a call to let them know I’d be late.
Gene Smoter answered. He was the one who contacted me about the camp. The ladies who hunt from it are his daughters and granddaughters.
Gene, an ebullient man with a large heart and healthy sense of humor, said, “You’re not supposed to get them with your car, you know.”
I laughed and told him I’d see them about a half hour later than expected.
When I pulled into the driveway of the cabin, I could see a man who I guessed was Gene with a woman I figured was one of his daughters standing on a porch landing that led up to the cabin.
“I see you still got both of your headlights,” the woman said. “That’s a good sign.”

DOES BEFORE BROS

Girls get preference at this deer camp, plain and simple.
Since the ladies have married names there’s no easy camp appellation. I suppose, technically, it could be called the Schmidtke/Sonkiss/Hanusack/Smoter deer camp.
Let me quickly explain. Gene Smoter, a retired autoworker from Dearborn Heights, has three daughters: Debbie Schmidtke, Brenda Sonkiss and Shelly Hanusack. Debbie and her husband technically own the place near Irons, but, from the moment I walk in, it’s obvious this is an all-out family affair.
There’s Gene and seven ladies in the cozy cabin that resembles any other northern Michigan cabin. There’s only one bedroom, I’m told.
A close family, especially come Opening Day, when all the ladies come up. Their husbands have to wait until Thanksgiving to come up for dude deer camp.
“We have seniority,” Debbie said, who has been hunting with her dad since she was 12. “We always thought we would marry guys who did not hunt so they could watch the kids. And then, they all started hanging out with our dad and learning how to hunt.”
Debbie and Brenda are the main huntresses, but, this year, they are initiating Shelly’s girls, Jennifer, 15, and Becky, 12, who both recently finished hunter’s safety.
Debbie and Brenda also have sons, who were only allowed to hunt Opening Day until a certain age.
“After they’re fourteen, they’re kicked out,” Brenda said. “They can come up Thanksgiving.”
I feel lucky to have been allowed inside this all-female hunting sanctum. From the moment I walk in, the family makes me feel at home. I’m seated at the head of the dinner table and humored with stories and jokes for an hour and a half, forgetting all about my car/deer debacle. It’s especially nice to discover that a lot of the family now resides in Livonia, where I grew up. Debbie’s daughter, Danni, even attends the same middle school I went to.
I’m put at ease immediately.
“We do a lot of laughing when we’re hunting,” Debbie said at one point. “The guys get kind of ticked off that we’re always successful with our deer camps because whenever they hunt with us we’re always goofing around and joking.”
But, I learn, the ladies also slay deer. The mounts and hides in the cabin are mostly from the girls’ kills over the years. In fact, Debbie’s husband, Mike, has to sheepishly admit to his buddies during the guys’ deer camp that none of the evidence of success are due to his hunting prowess, but his wife’s.
Debbie told a story how she scheduled an inspection for the cabin at 9 a.m. on Opening Day one year. Gene questioned her reasoning.
“I’ll be done by then,” she told her dad then. “We all laughed about it. We went out early that morning. First daybreak I got a doe. We were laughing, partying it up, waiting for our truck to come pick up the doe, heard some noise, (my dad) and I sat down behind a tree and here comes this buck right around the corner. Got the buck, too. I was all done by the time of the inspection at 9 a.m. That was kind of nice.”

BUCK NAKED

Firearms deer season is generally considered a primarily male activity. A man leaves his wife at home and joins his pack of friends in the woods where they drink up and let loose. There are plenty of common traits found at these deer camps.
With the ladies, though, things are a little different.
“You won’t find this at a guy’s camp,” Gene said, smiling, before he launched into a story about Debbie.
You see, Gene and Brenda usually hunt together. They’ve sat side by side on Opening Day for 27 years. Debbie, on the other hand, likes her solitude.
“Debbie is a bon vivant on her own. She was hunting on the side of hill 200 or 300 hundred yards away,” Gene said. “We’re on top of a hill watching Debbie’s doghouse blind with a little orange cover on it. At about noon, it looks like a huge turtle. It gets up. And this big round thing moves. And there’s her chair and fanny pack and her Thermos and a flashlight and a gun. I ask, ‘Why did she move fifteen feet for?’ Then, the turtle lifts up, and backs up.”
The blind had basically lifted up, moved over for a few minutes, then moved back over the gear. Later, Gene asked her what happened.
“She said, ‘Dad, when a girls got to go a girl’s got to go. You don’t think I’m gonna go behind a tree on Opening Day with 500 guys in the woods, do ya?’” Gene said.
There’s also the drunken tom-foolery men partake in during deer season that needs to be taken into consideration.
“There’s this one place I like to hunt over by the Pine River,” Debbie said. “There’s this huge camp that goes way back there. We don’t go back there too often anymore. All of a sudden, I could hear something coming through the woods. I’m getting my gun ready because this is where I got my six-point one year. I’m sitting there ready. I could see this light brown. And I’m waiting and watching with anticipation and all of a sudden here’s this naked man walking down the two-track! I think he had a rough night. I’m not sure where he was going, but I think he was heading back to the big camp.”

THE BEAR DEN

But these ladies aren’t squeamish.
Both Debbie and Brenda clean their own deer. Brenda even likes deer hearts, which she pickles.
Debbie can only recall an instance two years ago when her dad wouldn’t let her clean her own deer. He told her to stay put until he got there after she shot a buck from 170 yards away at the top of a ridge. The deer was at the bottom of a ravine.
She was impatiently waiting, wanting to go down there and start gutting, but Gene kept telling her to not go down until he and Brenda got there.
“They came up. Man, we never walked so fast down that hill. He said, ‘Here, hold the gun.’ The next thing I know, he’s cleaning the deer. And I said, ‘Hey, I always clean my own deer.’”
But her dad insisted on telling Debbie to hold his gun so he could operate. Within a few moments, the deer was cleaned and dragged out of the ravine, but Debbie still didn’t understand the hurry.
“I said, ‘What the heck? I always get to clean my deer.’ My dad says, ‘Well, that spot where you shot a deer on that nice little hump was a bear den,’” Debbie said.
Gene had run into a Conservation Officer while hunting grouse earlier in the month near the same ravine. The CO said there was a sow and two cubs in the area. Gene didn’t think Debbie was in a position to even shoot a deer there.
“She took her 30 aught 6. Cranked it over to the seventh power. Saw a deer on the other side. Put a scope on it and goes ‘bang’ and kills the deer just about where these poor bears are hibernating. But we got the deer out and nobody got hurt,” Gene said.
Gene, Debbie and Brenda have plenty of other hunting stories, all of which they excitedly relay before and after dinner, which thoroughly entertain. By the time I’m back out in the dark, cold night, I barely even glance at the dented hood of my car. I never got a look at the deer that did it, to see if it had spikes or not.
But, on the drive back to town, I think there isn’t really much of a difference between bucks and does after all.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Deer camp diaries: Nothing says revenge like a Bartles and Jaymes cut-out in a deer blind


Dear Diary:

I was lost.
It was dark.
The woods had repeated for miles by the time I came to a fork in the two-track. I’d been in the area last year to do a story on the very deer camp I was headed to. I should’ve known where I was going, but I didn’t.
Right or left, that was the question. One would get me to Chisler’s Lodge, where there was the promise of a barbecued buck and some beer. The other possibility could have taken me off the map, off the edge of the world for all I knew. I chose my way and, soon enough, electric lights were visible in the darkness of the woods. I could hear the deliberate sounds of humans. I pulled into a clearing, where a row of pick-ups were parked outside a well-lit cabin. I heard men laughing. I saw their heads through a window.
This must be it, I thought. It just looks a little different during the night. I’ve made it!
But, like that other explorer, Chris Columbus, I was wrong. What I took for the land of Chislers was actual the land of Linkes.
It didn’t dawn on me until I was out of the car and walking up to the door: I didn’t see one familiar face through the window as I went up to knock.
Still, the fellas waved me in.
“I think I’m lost. I’m looking for Chisler’s Lodge,” I said.
I explained who I was and what I was doing out in the woods that night with a camera dangling around my neck and a notepad in the back pocket of my blue jeans.
“Well, this is the Linke deer camp,” someone roared. “Come on in and have a beer.”
So I did.

LINKE DEER CAMP

Inside the cabin is what one would expect from a deer camp. Logs flaming in the fireplace, radiating hypnotic heat. An old Olympia beer mirror hangs on the wall. The furniture is about the same caliber as a college dorm room’s. A couple guys throw a game of euchre at a table. Opening Day isn’t until Monday and it’s only Saturday. Time to have some fun.
There is, of course, enough beer to go around.
“We used to have some parties out here, but we’ve scaled it down the last few years after our dad died,” Rick Linke said.
From what I could gather, Dickie Linke, Rick and Brian Linke’s old man -- the family that owns Linke Lumber Co. -- started the deer camp on 120 acres in the 1930s.
The dozen or so guys there that night were starting new traditions.
“This group is just starting to get together,” Rick said. “Stragglers from all over the place. Delvey’s always been around. And Brian, of course.”
Delvey Lindeman points to a picture on the wall taken around 1973 in front of the “old cabin.” There are about 10 or so guys clad in black-and-red. Four bucks are roped up behind them.
“I’m one of the ‘last of the mohicans’ in that picture,” said Delvey.
He was just a teenager in the picture. But, he explains, many of the other guys have died off.
A new cabin was built, mostly with whatever materials the guys could get their hands on.
“The lumber was torn off the walls of our (old) cabin and that’s what was used to do the walls in this one. We used whatever someone had laying around and brought up,” said Rick Linke.
Now, in the cabin, were friends and family from as far away as Pennsylvania up for the hunt.
“We eat, drink, play cards and get in a little hunting when we can,” one of the fellows said.
I ask if they get bucks.
“Usually there’s always a few hanging there Opening Day,” Rick Linke said.

DELVEY’S MISSING GUN

Delvey did the math of how long he’s been coming to the Linke camp.
“This is my 43rd year,” he said.
He’s inherited the duties as camp cook. That night, I had missed a feast of roast elk and mashed potatoes by about a half an hour. Bad timing. Delvey has a fairly elaborate menu planned out for the rest of the week that includes turtle soup and homemade sauerkraut.
Delvey has also inherited the role of camp storyteller. He tells me about the time Dickie Linke made off with his rifle in the 1970s.
“I ended up in a nice blind that had a roof on it and straw on the bottom,” he said. “I was sitting there. The sun was out. I peeled off my old wool clothes. I put the strap of my gun in my hand. I woke up, and there was no (cussing) gun.”
At this point, I have to interrupt.
“So, you fell asleep?” I asked.
The rest of the gang in the cabin -- drinking, watching TV, playing cards -- laugh.
“Yeah,” said Delvey. “And then what happened, he came up to me, and he started whistling like a buck, and blowing and snorting and kicking the ground. He said I never broke a snore.”
Dickie then slipped the gun out of Delvey’s sleeping hand and caught up with another guy from their camp who was out in the woods.
“Here they come over this little hill and I’m walking back and forth like a tin soldier,” Delvey said. “Here comes Dickie and Bob. They got their heads real low to the ground. They said, ‘Delvey, did you see that big buck? I wounded one.’ I said, ‘Dickie, if I would have seen him, I would have thrown a knife at him, because someone stole my (cussing) gun.’ That was it. They fell on the ground laughing.”

DELVEY’S REVENGE

But Delvey had his own fun playing pranks on both his own father, Delvey Senior, and Dickie Linke.
The first trick gives new meaning to the term “killing time.”
As Delvey tells it, Delvey Senior was hunting in a tree on the edge of a quiet swamp one year. Delvey sent one of the kids from camp to sneak into the stand with a surprise.
“I put a Big Ben (alarm clock) out there, wound it and set it for 8 o’clock in the morning. It was all quiet. You could hear a mouse squeal out there. Everybody’s looking up there. Pretty soon it’s 8 o’clock and ‘ring-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding’ And then, all of a sudden, ‘BOOM!’ It stopped. He shot it,” Delvey said.
Sidenote: when Delvey BOOMS he really BOOMS, filling the cabin with his large sound effect for mock rifle fire. The guys look up from the card game and howl with laughter.
But it wasn’t the first time Delvey made his old man shoot at an inanimate object. At least the other time, he thought he was shooting at a buck.
“I put a deer head up on my dad’s shooting lane,” he said. “It was one of these old ones that were over a fireplace. In the evening, he went out there, he wouldn’t see it for awhile. Pretty soon, he saw it, and it looked like a buck turned at him. But it was just a neck mount. It looks like a big buck staring at him. ‘BOOM’ I heard him shoot. ‘BOOM’ I heard him shoot again. ‘BOOM’ The third one knocked the stuffing out of it.”
For his other stunt, Delvey used a resource he collected while in the food and beverage industry: a life-sized cutout of Bartles and Jaymes.
One year, he put it in Dickie Linke’s deer blind.
“So, he’s going to his stand with his flashlight in the morning on Opening Day,” Delvey recalled. “He’s coughing at them, but later he said they kept smiling at him. He coughed again. And they kept smiling at him. He got a little closer and spit, and said, ‘Sir, that’s my stand. And, furthermore, you’re trespassing. This is private property.’ He was talking to them until he got up there.”
Delvey seemed to have gotten his revenge.
And, as I sat listening to him and to all the other stories the guys had to share with me, I realized that I was glad I’d gotten lost and ended up here.
I wasn’t so lost after all.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Deer camp diaries: Get your buck before one gets you



Dear Diary:
So, I got my buck.
Well, I’m not sure if it was a buck or a doe. I barely saw it.
I didn’t even need a gun.
I didn’t need to sit in a blind all day.
All I needed was my trusty Ford Focus, a stretch of M-55 and a little bit of dusk.
As you can guess by now, I haven’t yet bagged a deer this season, but one definitely got me. It came out of no where while I was driving to an all-lady deer camp last Sunday, just one of my stops as I traversed the county with nothing but a notebook and a camera in search of deer camp adventures.
Crash! Screech! Thump!
There I was in a ditch.
But I was a writer on a mission, so I pressed on.
Hunting deer is a tradition going back thousands of years in the Manistee area, from the Native Americans to the current camps that abound from the woods south of Wellston up to Copemish; from the big lake east to the hills of Marilla.
It was my aim to visit as many of them as I could to capture the true deer camp experience.
What ensued was a strange week where the personal trials and tribulations of this humble scribe threatened to overwhelm my attempt to cover the subject.
Deer camp is all about the thrill of the hunt, and there are always many obstacles: weather conditions, lack of deer, baiting laws.
My own mission was fraught with as many problems and difficulties.
But the journey itself is always part of the story.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

The quest started on such a happy note.
You see, I have good news, diary. The preface to my strange and bizarre week of deer camps is that I’m recently betrothed.
That’s right, Meredith and I are engaged to be married.
The weekend of Halloween, we went downstate for a party where we announced our pending nuptials to our families. It also gave me a chance to pick up the slug barrel for my shotgun, which my brother, Chris, had at his house. It was an opportunity that was thoroughly bungled.
We’re a family of bird hunters -- mostly grouse and woodcock -- and I’ve never bothered to bring the barrel to Manistee. But if I wanted to slay a deer, I’d need it.
The party was at Meredith’s parents’ house, an hour north of my brother’s in the Detroit area.
“Hey, dirtbag,” I said in the voicemail message I left him on his cell phone. “Grab that slug barrel and bring it up to the party, would ya?”
Maybe I should have been more pleasant in the message and cosmic justice would have been more in my favor. Or, I should have just called his landline.
“You bring that slug barrel?” I asked Chris after he arrived with his family.
“What are you talking about?”
“I left you a message,” I said.
“I haven’t had my phone since Friday,” he said.
There was no time to trek an hour south before heading back up to Manistee, so, instead, there I was, the Friday before the Opener, heading back downstate for the barrel.
I drove eight extra hours to get it.
I didn’t see a deer near the road the entire time.

IN THE HEADLIGHTS

The sad part is that I haven’t needed the barrel yet, mostly because of my car situation.
I’m having a hard time trying to envision myself strapping a buck on my loaner car (a sleek, red Toyota Camry). I don’t know how I’d explain any blood stains to the good people of Enterprise rental car service, or my insurance company. They’ve probably had enough of me already.
I got back into the Manistee area on Saturday, when the fellows at Chisler’s Lodge were having a little soiree to kick off the season and celebrate Ed Knaffle’s 90th birthday. I visited Chisler’s last year for a story, and they were kind enough to invite me out again this year. Since I’d been there before, you’d think I’d have no problem finding it.
No way.
I took a wrong turn in the woods and ended up at the Linkes’ deer camp, which will be featured in Tuesday’s newspaper.
I don’t need to go into any more detail about the rest of Saturday night. A deer camp kick-off party is a time for, ahem, discretion.
Sunday night, I was scheduled to go eat some N.Y. strip steaks with an all-female deer camp headed by father, grandfather and camp cook Gene Smoter.
The history of their deer camp will be featured in Wednesday’s newspaper.
En route to their cabin Sunday night, I was headed east on M-55 just as the sky was blackening. I was barely out of town when a flash of brown filled my high beams. It was running south and I just clipped its rump, but, still, the impact with the deer was tremendous. Its hindquarters bounced off my hood. Shocked, I did what I know you’re not supposed to do. I slammed on the brakes and ended up on the side of the road.
I grabbed the flashlight from my trunk and went into the woods, looking for the deer, but it had disappeared.
It had attacked me like a renegade guerrilla force, coming out of the woods, inflicting quick but lasting damage, and vanishing.
The front end of my Focus was crumpled.
Ruined.
But, alas, still driveable.
I contemplated canceling my dinner with Gene Smoter and his gals, but I didn’t. I soldiered on -- and I’m glad I did. The steak was delicious and their stories were great.
I would visit two more deer camps in my fractured Focus: the Dontz camp and the Berentsen camp.
To learn more about the Dontz camp, check out Friday’s paper. The Berentsen camp will be featured in Saturday’s News Advocate.

POWERLESS

I woke up in the middle of the week with a deer camp hangover and decided something should finally be done with the car. Getting it fixed would turn out to be a quest in itself.
My insurance company offered this improbable solution to my vehicle woes: take it to a collision shop in Ludington and pick up a loaner car in Cadillac.
So, instead of being in the woods, utilizing all the knowledge I’d picked up about deer hunting at the camps I’d been hanging around, I was stuck driving all around the region dealing with the car stuff.
Reviewing the damage with the insurance guy, I noticed a few strands of brown deer hair sticking out of a crack in my headlight.
An insult. A taunt.
But not as disheartening as the next obstacle I encountered.
I woke up the next morning and the power was out at my house. It was one of those dark, gloomy days when the sun didn’t offer any light. After showering and shaving with a flashlight, I called my landlord, who informed me his 79-year-old brother would soon arrive to check out the electricity.
Like many Manistee men (and women) this time of year, the brother was dressed for the hunt when he arrived at my house.
He wore those old school wool pants with the suspenders and a flannel shirt. He told me he hadn’t gotten his buck yet.
I had fiddled with the breaker box in the basement to no avail for a good hour. He came down, flipped a few switches, and within a matter of five minutes had the power back on.
“That went easy,” he said. “We had some good luck. Now, if only I was having better luck with the deer.”
Indeed, I thought.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Roustabout/fly fishing



The box where I keep fly fishing gear is an old suit case I like to call "The Roustabout." Here it is in the trunk of my car after a day of fishing this past summer. Someday, I will make more words about "The Roustabout." But, for now, here is an elusive fragment of it.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Deer camp diaries: Get your camp featured in the newspaper

Deer hunting is a grand part of our state’s outdoor traditions.
No where is this more evident than right here in Manistee County.
The frenzy starts in the weeks leading up to that grand day, Nov. 15.
Pick-up trucks seem to cruise through town with a little more zip. After the opener, blaze orange garments are a common fashion accessory on the streets and at the diners.
“Get yer buck?” becomes the most frequent overheard question.
But, most importantly, mid-November is the time for that annual, singular event on a man’s schedule: deer camp.
The doors and windows of the cabin are thrust open to air the place out. Generators are fired up. Twenty-year-old dirty magazines are pulled off a dusty shelf and spread on old coffee tables. A giant pot of chili is set to simmer on the stove range. Someone gets a blazing fire going. Beers are cracked and alarms are set for 4:30 a.m.
It’s deer camp time.
Now, don’t think I’m dissing you ladies. I’m sure camps all over the state have their female representatives. But, when it comes down to it, from what I know, deer camp’s a dude-heavy affair, what with all the bragging and flatulence.
For years, I’ve felt like I was missing out on this.
I’ve passed up many opportunities to go with the many buddies of mine who do deer hunt, though I’ve heard all of their illustrious deer camp stories.
You see, I didn’t grow up deer hunting. I go after grouse and woodcock, which means that when the firearm season starts, I put up my gun and stay as far away from the woods as I can until the season is over.
To be honest, my knowledge of deer hunting is pretty scant.
But I want you to teach me, Manistee.
I have a proposition for all of you. Let me come to your deer camp. Let’s have a beer and tell me your camp’s background and the stories that go along with it.
Don’t worry: I always follow a strict BYOB policy, so you won’t have to hide your coolers.
Also, don’t be afraid that some of the stories you have might not be suitable for a general audience. While I’ve never done deer camp, I have done similar camps for birds, trout and salmon.
I know when discretion is needed.
Last year, I spent a day at the Chisler’s Lodge deer camp, which has a 70-year history.
Those fellows had some wonderful stories to tell, and I had a great time being a part of their camp, if only for a day.
If you do want to get your deer camp’s story in the paper, all I’m asking in return is that you show a bird hunter the ins and outs of deer hunting.
I’m also aware of the amount of hazing and teasing there will be involved with a 33-year-old man going out on his first deer hunt when many of you have been doing it since you were 12.
I can handle most of this. But, if anyone tells me that the best way to attract the bucks is by running through the woods in my brown pajamas with a pair of fake antlers on my head, I’m not falling for it.
I’m looking to spend time at Manistee County deer camps from Nov. 15 -- 20.
You will then be featured in the series, “Dear Camp Diaries,” which will run soon after that.
If you’re interested, feel free to give me a call at (231) 398-3109 or email me at jcounts@pioneergroup.com.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

True confessions of an independent voter

I have fond memories of going to vote with my mom when I was a kid.
I wasn’t a toddler born with an innate political conscience, I just liked the voting contraptions.
The booths, the levers and the sheets seemed like a spaceship.
But it was the secrecy involved that was so thrilling.
“Who’d you vote for?”
It’s one of those questions you don’t dare ask someone, usually along with whether they believe in God or how much money they make.
It comes down to the three things you never talk about at a polite dinner party: sex, religion and politics.
So who did I vote for today?
Not telling.
Voting’s always been a spooky process draped in emotion.
It’s a decision we make that’s a little more poignant than what our brains are usually up to: pondering a Big Mac or Whopper; “The Biggest Loser” or “Jersey Shore.”
For me, it’s even more difficult because I’ve never voted across any party line. Ever since my first election (1996), I’ve went with a mishmash of Republicans and Democrats.
I’m the man in the middle; that elusive voter registered as an Independent.
I want to see economic prosperity and business growth, but don’t think we should sacrifice our humanity for it.
I want to see liberty, civil rights and the pursuit of happiness extended to as many folks possible in our nation, but within logical means.
I want to see government only get involved and use their power to tax when necessary.
When I see at least a glimmer of this in a candidate, I’ll pull their lever, connect their line, punch their chad, or whatever else needs to be done.
I’ve never bothered with the others on the list: Green, Libertarian, U.S. Taxpayers, Natural Law or Pirate Party of the United States, because, honestly, you may as well not vote at all. While third parties sometimes affect the election between the Grand Old White Dudes and the Do-Goody Donkeys, their presence is mostly symbolical.
In my 14 years of independent voting, I’ve found several hints helpful.
Now, the first emotional component of casting a vote is overcoming the dread and apathy.
It’s cliche to say you don’t like either candidate or party.
It’s easier to say, “What’s the point?”
We hear the phrase, “The lesser of two evils.”
The truth is, democracy is a large, messy affair, and elections are the only structured method we have to make sure we’re not going to continue to get royally screwed over and over again.
We may not be able to wine and dine the powers that be; we may not be able to afford setting them up in a Jacuzzi suite with chocolate-covered strawberries and a masseuse; we may not be able to contribute millions, thousands or even nickels to their campaign coffers, but we’ve got a vote.
One measly vote per person, but it’s all we got to sway something as large and unwieldy as government towards our personal, and sometimes highly emotional, wants and beliefs.
After giving myself this kind of pep talk, I’m ready to learn a little bit about the races and elections. During this process, it’s highly advisable to never pay attention to television ads. Both candidates will generally attempt to convince you that their opponent will set fire to your town if elected.
This may have been so in the time of the Visigoths and Huns, but we’ve evolved since then. Just a little, but enough.
Instead, I’ve always relied on newspapers, which cover elections with more expansiveness than television, which is usually quicker and dirtier (and making a fortune off those campaign ads).
Now, with the Internet, you don’t even need to get your information filtered through a newsroom. This is great for you folks who think we in the news-gathering business actually have time to sit around and slant the information we deliver in some sort of biased way.
It also gives the candidates much more “space,” of which the Internet has endless amounts of, to present their views.
I was happy to find a sample ballot for my particular precinct on the Secretary of State’s website. On the page, those candidate’s names who have their own sites are linked to them.
There is enough info on each candidate that you could literally spend hours and hours sifting through it all.
This is the final challenge of the independent voter who wants to take elections on a race by race case.
Time.
I certainly don’t have time to read through the entirety of the material for every candidate running for the Regents of the University of Michigan.
Generally, if I don’t know enough about a race, I’ll skip it. Sorry regents. An uneducated vote isn’t worth casting.
So, once I’ve educated myself fairly well on the candidates, I start weighing my options. I think back to those personal beliefs, and how the issues in the races relate to them.
I do what all voters do. I try to make the best decision in a sloppy, unpredictable system that fundamentally is better than anything else we’ve got.
Then, I drive myself to the polls, usually with a little cheat sheet so I don’t panic and forget what choices I’ve made.
Maybe you’ll see me there today.
I’m the one dressed in my Halloween costume, an astronaut’s spacesuit.
And when I’m casting my votes, I’ll probably still be wishing that pressing the lever will ignite my spaceship and blast me off to another world altogether, one where there aren’t two sides pitted at each other, bent on annihilation.
And I’m just the man in the middle.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Camping memories: Mom had a King Tut arm and Black Panther Afro

I was probably the first person in Manistee County to purchase the new state park Recreation Passport.
You see, my birthday was this past Friday, Oct. 1, the first day they were available.
A little background: instead of getting the $24 sticker you put in the corner of your vehicle window, it’s now only $10 and has been folded into the license renewal process.
The little 2011 sticker has a little P on it that will get me into any park until my next birthday.
There was no better present to buy myself than access to all the wonderful state parks and recreation areas, 98 in total.
Keeping these parks well-funded is necessary to keeping alive the long and storied outdoor tradition in our state.
Growing up in Michigan, camping was always a cheap way for our family to go on vacations.
Two weekends ago, my older brother, Chris, and I were sitting at the Platte River State Campground in darkness, drinking beers after an unsuccessful night of salmon fishing on the river.
We sat in fold-out chairs with our waders around our knees jaw-jacking with his brother-in-law, Andy, our other cohort in our outdoor sporting misadventures.
I don’t know what brought it up, but we started talking about camping. Maybe, since we couldn’t swap fish stories, we had to settle on a different subject.
My bro and I began reminiscing about camping when we were very small kids in the late 1970s, when my old man and my mom would pack us into the gray Chevy Suburban and we’d get out of Bay City.
“We used to go for two-weeks at a time! We’d go way up to the Porcupine Mountains in the Upper Peninsula,” my brother exclaimed. “That’s where we went when Mom broke her arm and had the Afro.”
Being only about 2 or 3 years old at the time, I don’t remember the trip. My brother, five years older, recalls a little bit better the camping trip where my little ol’ mom proved herself a true trooper.
The camping trip where she had the broken arm and the Afro.
I don’t remember it, but it was slightly my fault: my mom broke her arm in order to save my head from getting bashed in.
I was a tad hyper when I was a child. One spring day, to keep me entertained, my mom was pushing me around on a tricycle near an empty swimming pool.
Being the little spazz that I was, I managed to tip right over into the pool. My mom was luckily right there to grab me and we both fell into the empty pool together.
The arm she was using to cradle my head snapped in two during the tumble to the bottom.
Her arm was set in the plaster cast in an uncomfortable position: elbow bent in a V, her hand pointed away from her head, very Egyptian-like.
Since she couldn’t style her normally straight hair, she went to the salon and received a very poofy black perm.
My little Greek mom now not only resembled King Tut, but a Black Panther as well.
Still, that summer, nothing stopped our camping trips.
“You were only a baby,” my brother, who now has two kids of his own told me while we sat near the Platte River. “I don’t know how she took us camping.”
But there’s evidence.
A picture exists that makes my mom cringe with embarrassment when we bring it out of the family photo box.
She’s got the cast, the curls, wearing a blue denim shirt and thick-black rimmed glasses while sitting at a picnic table in the campground. She’s looking down at where I’m sitting next to her with a plate of potato chips in front of me, bawling my eyes out.
“You always were a little bastard,” my brother said at a different state park three decades later.
Still, I’m sure my mom wouldn’t have had it any other way.
While I was crying in the picture, I remember having a blast on camping trips when I was little. It probably even gave my mom a chance to rest a little since my brother and I were so taken with the outdoors.
I’m lucky enough to have memories like these, as I’m sure many of you are.
Hopefully, this new funding mechanism will allow future generations to make similar memories.
So, I implore even those of you who aren’t sure whether you’ll use a state park in the year you’re renewing your license for, pitch in the 10 bucks anyway.
If not for yourself, then do it for all those exasperated Michigan mothers with broken arms who need a place to take their hyper-spazz crybaby kids.

Monday, October 4, 2010

A happy ending? Movie business needs more time in Michigan

We’re a Rust Belt state with a rusty mentality sometimes.
We value hard work that doesn’t exist in these hard times.
Sometimes, we’re too hardheaded to see a good thing when it’s upon us.
So, please, let’s not ditch the the tax incentive for movies just because the non-partisan Senate Fiscal Agency recently found that there hasn’t been much of a financial reward to the state yet.
Let’s stress “yet.”
We live in a new economy. Foreign competition has got us all scrambling. The manufacturing jobs our state once enjoyed won’t be back.
It will never again be the way it was.
Therefore, it’s time to give the movie business a chance.
It’s one of the only positive things we have going for us. It generates conversation. It puts our ruggedly beautiful state in movies and television shows and makes more shows set here possible.
These are good things.
If we want to see a viable, moneymaking industry grow, you’ve got to give it time. It’s only been a few years, and ditching the generous tax incentives would bring everything that’s been brewing to a halt.
The impact is immediate.
Right here in town, we have 10 West Studios, which take advantage of the legislation. When they shoot scenes here, they bring excitement to our streets -- and put bodies in hotel rooms and mouths in restaurants.
Some Republican lawmakers in Lansing, especially Nancy Cassis (R-Novi), question giving such huge tax breaks to production companies -- around 40 percent of costs.
My question is: if it was an oil company that was having trouble setting up their pipeline, would Republicans be so quick to call the tax incentives a bust? Here, I would argue is the bigger reason: Republicans don’t want to publicly sponsor the liberal, Communist, homosexual propagandists from Hollywood who want to corrupt the minds of our youths with subversive and perverse themes in movies.
The Grand Old Party of Grand Old White Guys aren’t exactly the most culturally hip.
Let’s face it, Republicans: you’re just not all that entertaining.
For the most part, you like boring old Westerns and find anything morally ambiguous unnerving.
A good flick should have clearly delineated Good characters versus Bad characters, with Good always winning in the end.
A few of the folks in the entertainment industry you have on your side of the aisle are Charlton Heston (who, FYI, is in one of my favorite movies ever, “Planet of the Apes”), Chuck Norris and, I’m guessing, Wilford Brimley.
Putting them into the scene of a movie might go something like:

HESTON
The bad guys are trying to pry my gun from my cold, dead hand!

NORRIS
No need for firearms, I’m the cowboy of karate! Hi-ya, partner!

BRIMLEY
I will charm the enemy with this bowl of oatmeal. It’s nutritious and delicious!

The point is, the people in Hollywood making the most engaging stuff are, for better or for worse, usually pretty liberal, as highly creative people tend to be.
This should not be a reason to keep a potentially profitable industry out of our state. Even if it hasn’t paid off yet.
Just because it isn’t something tough like building cars or tanks, making movies in Michigan adds to the local communities where it films.
Let’s see if the tax breaks that have lured production companies here have a happy ending.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

An archive of oh pines!

What follows is an archive of the columns I wrote for the Manistee News Advocate between September 2009 and September 2010. They are in somewhat chronological order in which they appeared, though you wouldn't know it because they are undated. Therefore, some may have become jumbled. Sorry. Consider it a public file cabinet. Sometimes you find strange things when you look inside the drawers of others...
So, most importantly, what have I been writing about for the past year?
Well, a little bit of everything: visiting a bat cave, scary right-wing rhetoric, J.D. Salinger and Chet Lemmon.
And much more.

The Bill of Fights: Constitution Day inspires reflection

The United States Constitution is one of the most influential documents in the history of the world.
It’s been used as a template that has led to better lives for millions all over the globe.
This Friday, Sept. 17, celebrates the day 223 years ago that the document was signed by a bunch of radicals we now call by the more noble and austere appellation: The Founding Fathers.
These fellows put together a pretty neat little package. Liberty is the concept that was most important to them, even if it did take a few centuries for all humans on this soil to achieve the rights called for in revolutionary times.
The articles of the Constitution outline a method of government we all live by, the stuff we learned in high school civics class.
These are not oft debated. If they are, it’s usually by lawmakers with minds for minutia.
But if you wanna see a fight, start talking about the Bill of Rights.
Or the Bill of Fights, if you will.
Debate is healthy for the republic. It’s how we reshape those ideas for our own good and prosperity every generation. The fact that the founding radicals isolated topics we’re still arguing about 200 plus years later proves its relevance.
The Bill of Fights has stood up remarkably well over time. There are only a few rooms that need to be shut off from the rest of the house because of mold. And maybe a couple cracked windows.
Let’s take a look:
1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This amendment is number one for a reason. The only way to be free is if people aren’t messing with you for your beliefs, or what you want to say or write in the newspaper. Give government too much power, the people are miserable. Giving people the power keeps them on their toes.
2. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Well. Hmm. Do we really need citizen militias anymore? Not really. Our way of life has certainly changed since America was a wilderness in the 1770s. I’m going with the logic that if it’s OK for the government to have nuclear missiles, it’s OK for the average citizen to own a shotgun to go grouse hunting with. Or, a handgun to protect themselves. But, it’s when the right is abused by folks who think regular life is a warzone that it becomes frightening. This ain’t the Wild West anymore.
3. No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
I’m thankful that we haven’t had a major war on American soil in a long, long time. If we ever do, this could apply. Until then, if anyone comes knocking on my door in military dress, it better be Halloween.
4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This whole “probable cause” thing has most likely caused police and attorneys countless headaches. Good. No one should have the power to arbitrarily go through your junk, even if the junk is against the law. If we don’t follow along with stuff like this, then we’re liable to start goose-stepping our way down the path of history.
5. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
There’s always a moment in gangster movies when the criminals “plead the Fifth.” It’s so they don’t have to talk smack about themselves. Just one more protection for liberty.
6. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Without this amendment, the State could theoretically keep you imprisoned for long periods of time without a judgment ever being passed, which is, of course, a judgment of its own.
7. In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Twenty bucks, eh. That was probably what someone made in a whole year back then ... or a newspaperman’s salary now.
8. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Death isn’t unusual -- it happens to us all -- but it is pretty cruel. The death penalty is just one of those things that will be argued until the end of time.
And here are your last two amendments:
9. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Debate them, ponder them, just try to keep the fights clean.
And have a Happy Constitution Day!

Game over: Video games are relaxing black holes of time

I wasn’t John Counts this weekend.
I was Bond. James Bond.
That’s right. I didn’t spend my Labor Day weekend at some boring, banal barbecue. Instead, I was massacring henchmen in mansions and scouring Italian rooftops for devious villains.
Virtually, that is.
In reality, I was alternately standing and sitting in a living room staring at a television screen in my underwear playing the video game “James Bond: Quantum of Solace,” derived from the movie of the same name.
By the end of my 15-hour binge, my skin was a bit pastier. My eyes were burned out, glazed over. When I finally slept, I dreamed in the same jagged images of the game.
All holiday weekend, no one could get between me and my Wii.
I don’t own any video game console for this reason. They are addicting. They are addicting because sometimes it’s easier to get to the next level in a game than it is in life. They are addicting because you, the gamer, are in complete control over the universe before your eyes. They are addicting because while the games are all-absorbing, there is nothing truly at stake. When you see “Game Over” you can always hit reset and keep going. You can go back and redo things you messed up the first time.
You can’t do that in real life. Not yet, at least.
For those reasons, real life events begin to become less important. That’s when you find yourself at 3 a.m. reaching for a Code Red Mountain Dew to keep you awake for a few more gaming hours. You’re brain is usually too busy to question how you got there.
It’s not a pleasant place to be. Once your eyes wake up to reality and things begin moving at the speed of life again, there’s guilt. There’s remorse.
It’s why I’ve ignored video games for the past 15 years. The systems have come and gone. PlayStation 1, 2 and 3. Xbox. GameCube.
As the gaming systems have gotten better, the more intoxicating they’ve become.
They sure have changed since I was a lad in their nascent age of the 1980s. First, there was “Pong,” a game in which a dot moves back and forth on a screen and the player controls “paddles,” basically a thick, simple line, to bounce the dot back and forth. It amazed and stupefied us back then. Wow, we said.
Now, it compares to a monkey dipping a stick into an ant hole for dinner.
But beginnings are always quaint.
We were never the family that rushed out and bought the new gadgets when they hit the shelves. We’d wait until the hype died down -- along with the prices.
I remember the excitement surrounding the arrival of the Atari 2600 when I was about 6 years old. My older brother and I played “Donkey Kong,” “Frogger” and a game based on the “E.T.” movie for hours.
But we always played outside for hours, too.
When I was in middle school, we got the first Nintendo. We devoted so much time to the completion of Mario Brothers that the music is easily hummed and the images conjured to this day. Large amounts of my young life were also spent unlocking the secrets and mysteries of “The Legend of Zelda.” By the time I finally beat it, the map that came with the game was in tatters.
So were my nerves.
And what did I have to show for it?
“Dude, I beat Zelda,” I probably told my friends.
“Sweet,” they probably said. “Let’s go to the mall.”
I danced ever so briefly with Sega Genesis and the first PlayStation. I’d play them at other folks’ houses, but never gave in to the temptation to plunk down the hundred plus dollars to get one myself.
This would have been in the late 1990s. I’ve been relatively game-free since. Until now.
I knew where I’d be spending the holiday weekend had one of these newfangled Nintendo Wii systems. So, I went to the Family Video, and rented this James Bond game for what I thought would be a few hours of amusement.
By the time I was stripped down to my shorts and yelling obscenities at fake, two-dimension representations of people on a television screen, I knew I was lost.
I was back in the same mode I was in when I was 12, trying to figure out “The Legend of Zelda.”
In fact, I don’t even know where I found the time to write this column. I hope you all had a good Labor Day, Manistee, but I’ve got to go for now.
The game’s on pause.

Howling for a friend: New puppy brings Homeward Bound’s importance into focus

My girlfriend, Meredith, and I went to Homeward Bound Animal Shelter last Thursday just to take a look.
We adopted Rudy hours later and brought him home the next day.
It’s nearly impossible to walk through the shelter and not want to take all the pups home with you.
For instance, it was very difficult to pry the little fella away from his three sisters without bringing them along.
We almost did -- unintentionally.
The four 16-week old pooches all shared the same cinder block pen with a swinging chain-link fence door. Of course, while Meredith and I tried getting Rudy out to play before committing to adoption, all four dogs escaped.
We frantically ran around scooping them up and trying to get them back in the pen. The problem was that one would always manage to slip out when we put one in.
It made me question my future as the Paterfamilias of Puppy Land. Even though there’d only be one little guy, would I be cut out for it? If I can barely keep my own nails clipped, stomach filled and hair washed, how can I take care of a dog?
I didn’t have much time to ponder the big questions while chasing down the puppies at Homeward Bound. We finally got Rudy’s sisters into the pen and spent some quality time with him.
We fell in love.
He’s a little dog right now, white with a few black patches on his face and one spot at the base of his tail. He’s easily mistaken for a full-grown Jack Russell terrier, which happened twice at the Farmer’s Market Saturday morning, where we went to parade him around.
He doesn’t sound like a terrier, though.
His mother, Tip Toes, is a 2-year-old Lab mix (and still available for adoption), but Rudy’s definitely got some hound blood.
This little 14-pound squirt of a dog has a voice on him.
I know this for a fact.
We got started with crate training Friday night. From 1 until 4 a.m., Rudy paced the crate, cried and tried chewing through the bars.
During the most intense moments of his first-night blues, he reached a high-pitched hound dog wail that rattled the glasses in the cupboards.
Sorry, neighbors. I truly do apologize.
Every dog owner knows you have to let him cry it out or else he’ll always yowl in the crate. Start letting the dog boss you around and he’ll soon become the Paterfamilias of People Land.
As much as it broke our hearts, we left him in the crate that entire first night, ignoring all the yelps intended for his sisters back at the shelter to help him.
He didn’t yet know that he was part of a new pack.
Our pack.
I think he knows now. The next night went much smoother. He’s more settled in and sleeping through the night in the crate. He only howled once.
Life is good.
These experiences are to be treasured. This experience is also something that’s being threatened in Manistee County.
Homeward Bound is again in dire financial straits. Unlike tax-funded agencies, which always receive their funds no matter how bad they bungle things, the “no-kill” non-profit shelter relies solely on donations and fundraisers.
Please, be a friend to this wonderful organization so other people can benefit like we have.
Maybe you’ll need a friend too someday.
There are always plenty waiting at the shelter.
For now.

School days: Reasons to embrace the coming school year

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, kiddies, but your days are numbered.
Of summer, that is.
There are only 22 precious days left before it’s back to a life dictated by ringing bells.
After a summer of hanging out with friends, swimming and riding bikes, (or, more accurately, tweetering with friends and playing Xbox) it’s always difficult to get back into the grind of homework and tests.
But don’t feel discouraged, kiddies. Going back to school isn’t all bad.
Here are a couple of reasons to feel grateful about the end of summer:

YOU GOT THE SUMMER OFF

No duh, you say.
But what I’m getting at is: savor it, kiddies, because summer vacations end when you hit the real world.
Unless you become a teacher or a snowmobile repair man, they become a glorious thing of the past.
There’s no losing track of time because you haven’t had to be anywhere for weeks.
There’s no waking up and having that nice feeling that you have no clue what to do the rest of the day.
No, during a grown-up summer, you just do what you do the rest of the year: work.
Which is kind of a scam. Why everyone doesn’t get a summer vacation is beyond me. We could have invented a better situation than this. It must be that Puritan work ethic.
I say protest! Revolt!
So, kiddies, be thankful you’re starting school again for the year, and not just carrying on throughout the summer.

FIRST DAY EXCITEMENT

When I was a lad I would never admit it, but I was always brimming with excitement and anticipation for the first day of school.
I’d have my “E.T.” t-shirt, corduroy pants and Nikes set out on a chair the night before, the only time the entire school year I’d be so fussy and lay out my wardrobe.
My mom would always take a picture of my brother and I. Looking at the pictures now, the most noticeable thing is that the older we got, the more amount of hair gel we used.
I never slept the night before. I was too excited.
What would my teacher be like? Would my friends be in my class? Would there be any new kids at the school? What had everyone done over the summer?
Mostly, though, I was kept up all night with one burning thought: Would I get to sit next to Kathleen Brunson?
And if Kathleen wasn’t game, who would I ask to “go” with me that year.
So, kiddies, be excited that after a summer of hanging out with all your friends of the same sex, school once again puts you in contact with the other.

BACK TO SCHOOL SHOPPING

If you’re like how I used to be in my younger and more vulnerable days, you’ve probably been bumming around all summer in the same few pair of raggedy shorts and t-shirts.
Starting a new school year is prime time to get mom and dad to open up their wallets and get you some new duds.
Shopping for fall clothes is even something that’s fun for people like me who hate going to the mall.
My mom would take me to Fashion Square Mall in Saginaw. It would be a day of trying on new pants, shirts and shoes.
When it was over, I always had a nice ensemble for the first day.
After all, I had to look good for Kathleen Brunson.

Bedroom zoos: Give it up for all the slimy, slithery creatures

Kayaking the Little Manistee the other day put me eye to eye with a black snake hanging in a branch overhanging the river.
I threw my arms up.
I shrieked.
I almost fell in the river.
Finally, I straightened out my kayak and hightailed it away from the branch as quickly as I could.
My wimpiness discouraged me. After all, I had been around all sorts of reptiles and snakes when I was a kid.
My two best friends growing up, Junior Buck and Smitty (nicknames, of course), were budding herpetologists. They had a literal menagerie of lizards and snakes. According to Webster’s, a menagerie is a collection of wild or foreign animals kept especially for exhibition.
Both of their bedrooms, basements and garages were veritable zoos. They had chuckwallas, caimans and flying geckos in aquariums. They had Nile monitors, real chamelons (not to be confused with the cheap, tiny anoles) and bearded dragons in terrariums.
Smitty had a ball python named Llyod we’d feed a baby mouse to each week.
My buddies had a lot of emotional and financial investment wrapped up in their lizards. They should have charged admission.
Instead, we’d sit for hours watching the creatures. Wherever they were being kept was hot and damp from the heat lamps and water. And, yes, there was always a slightly funky smell.
Junior Buck and Smitty would pore through field guides trying to get their young American tongues to speak the Latin names of their creatures.
By the time he was 12, Junior Buck had so many lizards he took all the clothes out of his closet, ripped the door off of it and put a piece of Plexiglass over it.
It was his biggest terrarium yet.
He filled it with a waterfall, heat rocks and logs for the dozen or so lizards he kept in there.
Of course, they always got loose. Ruffio, his beloved Tokay gecko, was never caged. He had free run of the house. Whenever I walked into Junior Buck’s house from the front door, it wasn’t uncommon to see Ruffio hanging out on the ceiling above the television his parents were watching.
But the other lizards got loose too, making sleep-overs potentially terrifying. You never knew when you’d look down and find a little friend in your sleeping bag.
During the summers, Junior Buck slept in a rusted out pop-up camper in his backyard. The yard always flooded when it rained really hard.
All day, we’d be off at Hines Park, through which the Rogue River flowed, the same river Henry Ford built his infamous Rouge Plant on in the 1920s.
It wasn’t the cleanest river, but whatever wildlife that was in there, Junior Buck, Smitty and I would try to catch it.
There were box turtles, softshell turtles and snapping turtles. We’d grab them by their tails and pull them up from the muck and the mire and yell, “Got me a Swamp Dog!”
Whatever we caught, Junior Buck would keep in his flooded backyard. He’d tried to build pens around them, but they all always got away.
One time, he caught a black snake that looked suspiciously like the one that gave me an apoplectic fit the other day on the Little Manistee.
He kept it in an aquarium right outside his pop-up camper.
“He’s a mean bastard,” Junior Buck said as I pulled up on my bike. I looked at Junior’s arms, which were red and swollen with bite marks.
“He do that?” I asked.
Junior Buck, always fearless around his creatures, whether they were from exotic pet shops or captured from Hines, reached into the aquarium. The black snake’s mouth widened and he instantly struck, once again biting Buck on his forearm. He cursed at it.
“I’m taking it back tomorrow,” he said.
The next day, we rode out to the same place in the park where he’d caught it and set it free.
It took me another hour kayaking on the river the other day to remember Junior Buck’s black snake that wouldn’t stop biting him.
The subconscious memory is what made me recoil, I suppose.
Still, from that first one in the garden to those on a plane with Samuel L. Jackson, snakes have gotten a bad rap for too long.
All slimy, slithery things that creep through our forests and nightmares deserve just as much love as puppies and kitties.
But, unlike cats and dogs, maybe we should just give snakes their space.
Maybe they see us and shriek.
They can most definitely bite.

Running on empty: Oil spills will continue as long as we drive

Sometimes, we need to shelve the microscope and look at whatever falls into our scrutinizing eyes in large view.
Sometimes, a column needs to be a thought experiment.
So, what’s a thought I want to experiment with?
A world without cars.
Cars make us fat.
Car crashes kill more people before their time than anything else.
Cars are fueled by a resource that is not inexhaustible.
Cars pollute.
Looked at like this, it’s a wonder why tobacco and fast food companies get picked on the most as a threat to our health.
Last week’s oil spill on the Kalamazoo River (800,000 gallons!) has me thinking about all of this. Just as we finally plugged the last oil spill, another one pops its cork right here in Michigan.
The usual chatter in the media has followed. It will continue for months. It’s a narrative we’re all intensely familiar with after having gone through months of the Gulf oil spill.
The company’s at fault. The government didn’t regulate them enough, so it’s their fault. There will be a lot of devastating pictures of wildlife covered in oil. There will be pictorial diagrams of the pipe system my non-engineering mind won’t understand. There will be inscrutable acronyms. A line from a media report might sound something like: “Authorities of the GAA said the pipe wasn’t inspected by HDAD officials in over twelve months even though YWE codes call for them every eight months in odd calendar years. The HDAD is now casting blame on the GAA for negligent oversight of the YWE.”
Blah. Blah Blah.
The faux acronyms (and sarcasm) are all mine.
This is fine. The sad situation should be put under a microscope and examined in-depth so it can hopefully be prevented from happening again. Big businesses who run pipes underneath us have responsibilities to the public. So does the government, who we elect to protect the common good from “accidents” like this.
But in a broad view, how about we look at it this way: The oil spill is the fault of each and every one of us who plops our large rumps in a car each day. Myself (and my prodigious rump) included.
You can’t eat oil. You can’t build anything with it. It’s main purpose is to keep our cars running.
And America burns through some gas.
Think about the last ten times you hopped in the car. Where did you go? What did you do? Was it a necessary trip?
Probably not. If you’re like me, you hop in the car to run over to the Wesco to get an ice tea, even though it’s only a few blocks from our newspaper office.
Sometimes, we’re just riding around in our automobiles with no particular place to go.
We make needless trips because we can, because it’s our God given American right to be wasteful. That’s what liberty’s all about, right? If by pursuing our happiness we destroy the world, then so be it. Maybe man was meant to ruin the earth.
Don’t get me wrong, the internal combustion engine is a miraculous feat. Without it, our lives would be limited. There would be no Motor City, cross country road trips or the car chase in Bullitt.
These would all be bad things. Without the automobile industry, my grandparents wouldn’t have had jobs to support having children, thus no me (a negligible bit of the argument in the large view, but of vast importance to me). All we would know of the world is where our feet could take us, which slows down economic productivity and opportunity. And who doesn’t love the romance of Steve McQueen zipping around the streets of San Francisco in a muscle car.
So, alas, I know this is not a feasible, real world argument, but nor is it some liberal, hippie doomsday prophesy.
It was just a thought experiment.
But we can also experiment in real life.
This week I’m going to try a strange new thing I just discovered that doesn’t need oil, doesn’t make us fat, doesn’t kill you if you collide with another and does not pollute.
Walking.

World records: Does eating bicycles put you in the same league as Lincoln?

In the annals of human achievement, we think of things like Edison’s light bulb, the Wright brothers on Kitty Hawk with their glider, Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio cure.
We don’t instantly think of the French guy, Michel Lotito, who since 1966 has eaten 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven TV sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a Cessna aircraft and a computer.
He Pingping, the late two and a half foot tall Mongolian, also doesn’t come to mind.
Nor does Josh Anderson of New Zealand, who can eat a 12 inch pizza in 1 minute and 45.37 seconds.
And yet all of them will go down in the history books as Guinness World Record holders: the man with the strangest diet, the smallest man and fastest time to eat a pizza.
So, should they be honored in the same regard as the great inventors, politicians and creative minds of history?
Some might say they are frivolous wastes of time.
I say record-breakers should be right alongside the Lincolns and Henry Fords in the history books.
What got me thinking about this? Two record-busting-related stories were in the News Advocate recently, both having to do with largeness: a huge trout and a huge man.
On July 16, Roger Hellen, of Franksville, Wis., caught a 41-pound 8-ounce brown trout in Lake Michigan near Racine. It may tie or beat the trout Rockford resident Tom Healy caught in the Big Manistee last September for the world record.
I hope it doesn’t, but it might.
There was also a feature story about Robert Wadlow, the eight-foot, eleven-inch gentle giant who passed away in Manistee during the 1940 Forest Festival, when one of the leg braces he was wearing gave him a blister. Wadlow died from a subsequent infection.
These record setters, and all record setters, should be celebrated.
They may not fundamentally change the way we live our life, but having records means we’re continuing to measure our progress here on earth.
And nothing says progress like getting 900 piercings.
Or lifting a 160 pound 15 ounce weight with your ear.
People are interested in the extremes. We spend most of our time with people who look similar to us, have similar talents and capabilities as us. We are average sized and take our time eating our pizza. A shopping cart is definitely not on our dinner plate. Nor is a 40 plus pound brown trout.
Records are the stuff of imagination. It’s the stuff of dreams.
When we stop being dazzled and titillated by strange feats and unusual human body parts, or anything that strives to set a record, it means we’ve lost our ability to dream, to think in new ways, to not test the boundaries of reality as we know them, to know that our civilization has reached its limit.
It means our minds have gone stale.
I used to love the “Guinness Book of World Records” when I was a kid. I think I still have a well-worn version from around 1987, when I was 10 years old.
I was way into the fellow with the really long fingernails that curled around his hand and the twin fat guys on motorcycles. I’m glad to see the series continues.
But what’s the sure sign our civilization isn’t in decline? That we’re still at the pinnacle of achievement?
It has to do with another record.
What holds the record as the most stolen book from the library?
Well, the “Guinness Book of World Records,” of course.

Impure Michigan: Spoofs on ad campaign display its effectiveness

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
On the flip-side, spoofing is the insincere form of flattery, the misbehaving little brother of imitation.
This week, John Kerfoot is that naughty little brother. He’s responsible for the parodies of the Pure Michigan ads that have the Internet buzzing. The fake commercials became a statewide phenomenon after the Free Press did a brief write-up about the 34-year-old filmmaker from the Detroit area and his iconoclastic shorts.
I’m sure you’ve seen the originals on television the past couple years, part of the award-winning tourism campaign. They feature the smooth and serene narration of Michigan native Tim Allen of “Home Improvement” fame over images of our fair state’s natural beauty.
They all end with Allen pausing ever-so slightly, and with dramatic flair, saying, “That’s pure Michigan.”
The billboards, radio and TV spots were enormously successful, and gained even more attention when funding became an issue -- the campaign continues, but with about half as much cash.
As we know, the more successful something becomes, the larger it becomes as a target for parody.
That brings us to Kerfoot’s own campaign.
The five fake ads he’s made have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. And for good reason.
They’re funny.
And while some would argue their in bad taste for their foul language and subject matter, I applaud the videos.
I have a feeling Kerfoot loves Michigan just as much as I do. And sometimes being critical about something, but with a sense of humor, is just another way to express that affection.
So, what exactly are in the videos?
There are five in all, each poking fun at a different place or aspect of our wonderful state: Royal Oak, Construction, Mackinac Island, Lake St. Clair, and Grosse Pointe’s downtown known as “The Village.”
The video dealing with Royal Oak, a northern suburb of Detroit known for its hip, trendy nightlife atmosphere, talks about the types of, uh, er, male jerks who populate the streets. Except Kerfoot doesn’t use the term “jerks.”
By the way, before I continue, don’t watch these clips with children around. They are intended for mature audiences only.
Anyone who has sat in traffic surrounded by orange barrels and sweaty workers will appreciate Kerfoot’s ode to road construction, which seems eternal on our state’s roadways.
The Mackinac Island clip is a little on the gross-out side, drawing a visual comparison between the vacation spot’s famous fudge and what the horses leave behind on the streets.
Kerfoot, who is from the Grosse Pointe area, muses about the beauty of Lake St. Clair, and the irritating, swarming fish flies that take over the Pointes each summer. The Village video pokes fun at the number of coffee shops and lack of black people in the downtown area of Grosse Pointe.
It made me wonder how Manistee would fair under such an ironic attack.
Kerfoot’s love letters to Michigan may be cynical, ribald and irreverent, but they are love letters nonetheless. I hope he makes more of them.
In any case, you can judge them for yourself. They are posted at http://notsopuremichigan.com/.
The videos also display how effective the Pure Michigan campaign has been, and why it needs the cash to continue. Tourists need to know how beautiful and wondrous our state is.
Even if us natives know it’s not always fudge.

An ode to swimming: Taking the plunge helps drown out the noise

LeBron James. Tea Party candidates. ‘King’ LeBron James. The Gulf oil spill. LeBron James ‘The Chosen One.’
The noise of the world as it hums along boils the inside of the brain as much as the summer sun beats down and burns the skin.
There’s only one measure of recourse when the mind and body get overheated.
Take a dip. Get underwater and eliminate the roar of the world.
They’re ain’t no cure for the summer time blues like swimming. Get in a pool and do some laps. I prefer the doggie paddle (well, it’s not so much of a preference as it’s the only stroke I’m good at.) Play a game of Marco Polo with your friends. Or just sink to the bottom clutching your knees like Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate.”
Of course, here in Manistee, swimming pools aren’t necessary with the Big Lake just at the end of the street.
In the past two weeks, I’ve made a point to rush into the water at all of Manistee’s great beaches: First Street, Fifth Avenue and the ‘Water Tower’ Beach. This past weekend, I even went down to the Nordhouse Dunes, hiked a few miles, then made a dash for the cool waters of Lake Michigan when I got too sweaty.
The water was just fine.
I’m going to relish these swimming spots the rest of the summer. I’ve never had access to such great ones.
In my youth, there were swimming pools that were my favorites. I didn’t grow up with a pool in any of the backyards of the houses I lived in, but my Grandpa Basil had one at his house on Detroit’s west side. It was where I first learned to swim and spent hours of the summertime submerged, splashing and screaming with joy.
Grandpa Basil was a loud, gregarious Southerner from Arkansas who ran his own painting business. It was a good thing, too, because this particular pool needed to be painted every year. Only later did I learn that having to paint a pool is kind of unusual.
From the time I was able to walk, I helped throughout the entire process of prepping the pool, which usually started around Memorial Day.
“Boy, come on out here and help me with this pump!” Grandpa Basil would holler in his drawl.
He could have done it all himself -- he was a master at fixing things -- but always made a point to have me and my brother help out, probably to keep us busy and out of trouble.
The pool was reflective of the 1960s chic cabana style that still dominated my grandparents backyard in the 1980s and ‘90s. The overhang off the garage where the barbecue and picnic table were was always decorated with old-school tiki lights. The grill was hooked up not to a propane tank, but the actual gas lines running below the city. The pool itself was in-ground, oval, made of fiberglass and was always painted a bright blue. It looked like a giant Smurf bathtub embedded in their small backyard.
It was all very fancy stuff in 1967.
By 1984, the backyard was still respectable and in operation, but not gleaming with brand newness like it had twenty years earlier.
So, there was work to be done. First, you had to pump the dirty, brackish water that had been in the pool all fall and winter, and clean out all the leaves. Guess who got to go into the pool when the water was mostly drained and scoop up the slimy leaves and other debris with a bucket and haul it out?
“Boy, get on down there and get them leaves!”
I got very dirty and mucky and loved every minute of it.
Once all the gunk was out, we had to let the pool dry for a few days before laying in with the scrapers. It was always a group effort, with my grandma, mom, dad and brother scraping away the old paint and sanding the rough, fiberglass surface of the pool smooth. During the three or so days it took to scrap and sand, I’d accompany Grandpa Basil to Craigie Paint Company and get the bright blue aqua-colored paint.
“Boy, carry these buckets out to the truck,” Grandpa Basil would say while chewing on an unlit cigar.
They were so heavy I had to do them one at a time.
The top lip of the pool needed to be painted by hand. Since I was always too young to be trusted with a roller, this is where I’d help out, usually ending up getting more paint on myself than on the pool.
My brother usually got the honor of rolling the inside, standing in the bottom of the tub-like pool, going up and down the curved sides.
After two coats and a few days to dry, it was time to fill it up. Grandpa Basil always let me do the honors
“Boy, go get that hose turned on!”
I’d already have my bathing suit on even though it took an entire day until the pool was filled. I’d crank on the hose, yank it to the pool and stick it in.
Then, I’d wait. When the water was ankle-high, I’d walk in and splash around, then get bored and wait some more.
It was usually the next day before it was ready. If he wasn’t fussing with the perennially naughty pool filter that grunted away inside the garage, Grandpa Basil would be sitting on the deck with a cigar, the racing form and perhaps a gin and tonic.
I’d stand at the edge of the deep end and take that first thrilling dive of summer. Inside the house, while lunches and dinners were prepared, I would swim and swim and swim. There were jumping contests with cannon balls, jack knives and belly flops. There was water polo with overturned lawn chairs as goals. And sometimes, just before dinner, when everyone else was out of the pool except for me, I’d just sort of lazily float around on my back.
“Look at that boy!” Grandpa Basil would say from the porch. “He sure can float!”
Grandpa Basil’s been dead for ten years now, and the house in Detroit sold soon after that. But I learned something very important those long summer days in the pool -- when life gets too hot, just jump in some cool water.
All the world’s problems won’t go away, but for the few moments you can hold your breath underwater, they can be silenced.

On the road: Getting in the car and taking off

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
This opening passage of “Moby Dick” sums up the yearning to thrust yourself out of familiar surroundings and give the brain new landscapes to process, new voices to hear, different customs to comprehend.
Trips into the unknown are necessary so we don’t sink too far down into what we’re used to.
And the sea can just as easily be substituted with the road.
The road trip is a thing of American myth. And rightly so. With such a large, mighty country, it only makes sense to hop in the car to explore it every once and awhile.
I recently took off for a week, making it all the way from Manistee to New Orleans and back.
My travels took me through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama (for about 10 minutes). Oh, yeah, I went through Ohio too. How could I forget such a dazzling, interesting state?
Yes, it was hot in the Bosom of the Confederacy, but I saw so many strange and interesting things that it was worth the humid, scorching weather that greeted Meredith and I each day.
Let’s start in the Buckeye State. Meredith was very excited to point out a large statue of Jesus on the side of I-75 near Monroe, Ohio she had seen on a previous road trip.
“You’ve got to see this thing,” she said. “It’s huuuge.”
She wasn’t joking. It was impressively massive at 62 feet high. The Solid Rock Church’s ‘King of Kings’ statue also had its arms up in such a way, it looked like a referee signaling six points in the endzone during a football game. I wasn’t surprised to learn people had started calling it ‘Touchdown Jesus.’
We were among some of the last freeway gawkers who got to behold ‘Touchdown Jesus’ in all his glory. By the end of the day, the statue was struck by lighting and destroyed causing an estimated $700,000 damage.
I refused to take this as a bad sign at the beginning of our trip, though it was hard to let go of the nagging feeling that it was a sinister omen. But what else can you expect in Ohio?
Soon, we were in the South, where The War is still the Civil War, or, my personal favorite, ‘The War of Northern Aggression.’ Battlefield memorials from Shiloh to Vicksburg (both of which we passed) are constant reminders of the carnage this nation went through 145 years ago.
No where is the South’s conflicted history more resonant than in the novels of William Faulkner. We visited Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Miss. after, of course, paying our respects to that other great ambassador of the South, Elvis Presley, at Graceland in Memphis.
Finally, we arrived in New Orleans, my first time there. It’s a spectacular, magical place that seems to be suffering from the same bad luck as ‘Touchdown Jesus.’ First, the hurricane, now the oil spill. These two topics were, unsurprisingly, weighing heavily on the minds of residents in the Big Easy. The hurricane may have been five years ago now, but folks were still talking about it like it happened last week.
I was mostly in the French Quarter, which is on the highest ground in the city, and wasn’t as devastated as other areas.
But despite the bad luck, New Orleans is still a town bent on a good time. The laid back atmosphere is so very different than here in the North. It was refreshing to see people and places different than the ones I see on a day-to-day basis.
Regardless, it was good to get back home to Manistee.
But the next time I find myself deliberately stepping into U.S. 31, I’ll know it’s time for another road trip.

Thank you for being a friend: A tribute to sit-coms and their stars

Celebrities die in threes, we’re told.
So far, 2010 is shaping up to be the year we mourn actors from sit-coms. It’s only June, but we’ve already lost three.
Back in February, it was Andrew Koenig, best known as “Boner” Stabone on “Growing Pains.” Recently, only weeks apart, Gary Coleman and Rue McClanahan both passed away.
Coleman is best known as the wise-cracking Arnold from “Diff’rent Strokes.” McClanahan played the senior citizen sex pot on “The Golden Girls.”
These last two hit me the hardest. The characters they played always cracked me up when I was a kid, from Arnold’s trouble with The Gooch, his school yard nemesis, to Blanche Devereaux’s syrupy Southern belle seduction of elderly gentlemen callers.
That’s right, I watched the “Golden Girls” when I was a kid. I’m not ashamed to say it. When I was younger, like many of my generation, I watched a lot of television. Hours and hours of it. So much that it was sometimes too easy to forget the people on TV are actors playing characters. And while the characters will live on infinitely in re-runs, the actors end the way we all end.
In life, though, these three brought a very important gift into our living rooms, that of laughter. Watching characters struggle through “situations” in the half-hour comedy shows, no matter how unrealistic or how far they differ from our own lives, always makes us feel a little less alone in the universe.
They also help divert us away from whatever our own troubles may be: getting lost in a character’s problem on a TV show, a movie or a novel allows our own problems to temporarily drift away.
Talented actors are the vessels through which this process is possible.
So, I’d like to take a moment of silence for these three diverse actors.
I’d also like to take a moment of silence for the sit-com itself.
Now that I’m older and that I’ve had my own “growing pains,” and found out that “different strokes” do rule the world and that my friends and I are very much like “golden girls,” I don’t watch much television.
I don’t have cable, which in Manistee means you don’t have any television thanks to the new digital way it’s brought to us now.
But I don’t need it to know that great sit-coms are a thing of the past. I’m talking about the good old-fashioned sit-coms where families and friends sat around a living room cracking jokes you knew to laugh at because of the laugh-track.
Now, the laugh-track is dorky. Less sit-coms premiere each fall and are replaced by “reality” television, the cultural sign that the end is nigh.
Hit half-hour comedy shows like “The Office” have to pretend it’s a documentary to get people to watch.
Reality shows are vulgar, not only because they’re just as scripted as any other shows, but because they appeal to an audiences’ worst gossip-mongering tendency. That itch to look in through your neighbor’s blind to see what they’re up to. That desire to feel better than people when they’re down.
Half-hour fictions allow for the creation of great characters. They allow the creators -- the writers and the actors -- to participate in an artistic exchange with the audience.
In reality shows, it’s watching to see if “Joe” or “Donna” is going to slap whoever just called them a nasty name. Reality shows are nothing more than middle school on tape. Unfortunately, I doubt programming will change in the near future.
But I will be interested to see if anyone will be mourning Richard Hatch, the dude that won the first “Survivor,” when he dies?
What praises would we sing? What did he or anybody on reality shows bring to us that was special? Did they really have a part in bringing diversionary joy to our lives?
Maybe I’ll keep watching to find out.
Maybe.

OMG, Granholm: Texting ban sends the right message

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, socializing was mostly done through parents’ telephones or, if you were desperate, pay phones.
The term “landline” was still reserved for the military.
Getting directions somewhere meant pulling out a slip of paper and writing down the various roads and turns, or having someone draw you a map.
Then along came pagers, which more or less directed you to the nearest phone.
None of these things affected the way we drove as teens, because they all took place out of the car.
But then Al Gore, armed with a pickaxe and a miner’s helmet, went underground and dug the tunnels for the interconnected World Wide Web (thanks, Al).
“Just give me the address,” you now requested, usually over a cell phone, and then punched it into the Internet, printed out the directions and off you went.
Until, of course, GPS navigational units appeared in cars and directed you where to go with robot voices.
The state government has now deemed the biggest pain brought on by all this new technology is text messaging while driving. Amid much fanfare (it was broadcast on Oprah!) Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed into law a ban on texting while driving.
Starting July 1, texting while operating a vehicle will become a primary offense, which means police can pull you over if they see your busy thumbs typing away. The first offense is $100. The second offense can cast $200.
The thing Democrats aren’t even taking into consideration is that even without the distraction of cell phones and texting, teens aren’t always the greatest drivers.
When I was fifteen, a friend of mine was seriously injured in a car accident. He broke both arms and several bones in his legs. He was in a wheelchair for months afterward. Scars still trace down both forearms and his knees.
How did the accident happen?
He was reaching for a slice of pizza.
So, do we ban pizzas in our cars while we drive because the savory smell might be so distracting we lose control?
Do we ban putting on make-up, smoking and talking to other passengers?
More and more, the government is passing laws on how an individual chooses to live their day to day life.
It’s mostly coming the liberal “control-everything” camp, the same good folks who brought you political correctness in the 1990s. Liberals like this always haughtily take the moral high ground on such issues.
“You should live the morally ‘right’ way, and we’re going to show you how,” they seem to say.
With that said, I’m actually leaning toward being in favor of the texting ban, despite the voice on the other side of my brain saying that it’s an infringement on personal liberties.
I confess that I’m an occasional driver/texter. Not only is it distracting your thoughts, which are having a silent conversation with whoever is typing away messages on the other end, but it diverts your gaze away from the road and onto the tiny little screen.
I couldn’t count how many times I’ve been behind or beside an erratic driving vehicle only to see that they’ve got one hand on the wheel, and the other holding their phone up to their nose as they type really important missives to their fellow texters.
So, I’ll reluctantly go along with the law and keep my phone in my pocket where it belongs when I’m on the road.
Ttyl, Manistee.

Secondhand spring: Giving soul to our stuff

Spring is baseball, trout fishing and flowers.
It’s also the season when people start cleaning out their basements and attics, which can only mean one thing: garage sales.
The tables are laid out in driveways, items marked for prices and signs posted on street corners. Up until recently, I drove right past.
I would never stop at garage, rummage or estate sales because, for one, I’m not a ‘stuff’ guy. Besides a handful of personal possessions (pictures, books, my mirror with a poorly painted bullfighter on it) I’d leave everything else to burn in a house fire and not miss it.
Like most other dudes, I’m not too fond of shopping for new stuff, so why would I want to go look at other people’s old crap?
My girlfriend, Meredith, is the complete opposite. She is a junk junky. She likes to collect odd specimens found in odd places (me, for instance).
Needless to say, it makes it difficult to drive right past sales anymore.
Last junking season, we were almost the proud new owners of one of those old “vibration belt” exercise machines. You know the ones: the advertisements always showed housewives standing at the machine with a belt around their back, jiggling and shaking them while they darned a pair of socks.
The machine Meredith found at a garage sale was at least from the 1960s and, at $15, quite the bargain.
We reasoned that it could be a great party novelty: whomever was mixing up the martinis only need to strap themselves in and hit the “on” switch.
I was almost sold on it. In the end, we succumbed to our better judgment and left it in the owner’s driveway.
This season, I’ve already been, mostly begrudgingly, to four or five estate or garage sales here in Manistee.
To be a good sport, I usually make a sweep of the house or the tables, and then go and wait on the front lawn until Meredith comes out.
At one particular estate sale, I wasn’t so lucky.
For those who don’t know what an estate sale is (I didn’t know until recently), it’s when someone who is moving has an open house to try and unload as much stuff as possible. At this particular estate sale, I made my routine sweep of the upstairs, pretended to look at a few things, then followed Meredith down into the basement.
I looked at eight-track tapes, an organ and a box of Mason jars. There were old clothes, a reel to reel and an old sofa, cream-colored with a bursting orange flower pattern.
Two men decided to purchase the couch and lifted it up while I was in another room looking at a mound of electronic equipment I couldn’t identify. I decided I’d head upstairs and go outside and wait.
When I got to the stairway, the men were pushing the couch up it. When they got it to the doorway, they stopped. They could go no farther.
The couch was stuck. So was I.
I was trapped in the basement for fifteen minutes while the couch was maneuvered out the door. I was furious at first. I was impatient. I wanted out.
But there I was. Eventually, I calmed down. It gave me time to reflect about other people’s stuff. Slowly, I started to realize that there is something endlessly fascinating about junk. Each item contains a part of the life of whoever owned it. If we give our “stuff” soul, maybe we’ll be less likely to shuffle it off into a landfill whenever the whims of mass consumerism strike us.
Getting something from someone else for so cheap is a bit like sharing. Trading goods leads to a community.
Our “stuff” is just one thing that can bring us together.
Loftiness aside, I admit that I was the first one bounding up the stairs once the couch was out of the way.
I didn’t buy anything then, but I did enjoy playing a little Word Yahtzee that Meredith picked up at a subsequent garage sale the other night.
The box the game came in was worn and old, born the same year as me: the copyright at bottom of the scorecard said 1977.
I wondered about all the conversation and laughter contained in the 32-year-old box. I was happy we were giving it new life.
You certainly don’t get that feeling with something from Wal-Mart.

Don’t tread on us: New roar from the right is disturbing

The hysteria and histrionics started soon after Obama was elected president.
“The government is going to take my money and spend it on other people!”
“The government is going to take away my guns!”
“The government is the enemy!”
But it’s getting even more serious than those tired old complaints.
A few months ago in Texas, a guy killed himself and two others when he crashed his plane into an IRS building because he didn’t want to pay his taxes. He left behind a long letter, which was basically an anti-government screed.
The recent passage of the health care bill that forces people to get insurance through private companies (a real Bolshevik plot if I’ve ever heard one) has resulted in politicians receiving death threats.
In Columbus, Ohio a few weeks ago, a Tea Party protester berated a man with Parkinson’s disease who was calmly sitting on the ground holding up a sign espousing his own pro-reform beliefs. The Tea Party protester mockingly threw money at him and said, “Here’s your handout.” You Tube it and see for yourself. The Tea Partier eventually apologized and said he’d never attend another rally.
Throughout the incident, the Tea Party crowd chanted, “Kill the bill!”
When the bill did pass, the moronic bimbo queen of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, said it was time to “reload.”
The most disturbing event happened earlier this week right here in Michigan with the arrest of the Hutaree, the Christian militia that plotted to kill law enforcement officers downstate. I cover the police beat here at the News Advocate, and spend a fair amount of time with the good men and woman who put their lives on the line to keep Manistee safe. These people should never be a target.
But they are because they wear a badge, which makes them part of that evil regime: The Government.
This new roar from the right is imbued with a violent rhetoric that is downright disturbing.
Many of them come from a “fringe” element. It’s not fair to group them in with all conservatives and Republicans in the same way that it’s not fair to say every Democrat is a drug-toking, whale-saving, bearded Trotskyite. Or, a baby-killer, which is what Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, yelled at the anti-abortion Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak after the health care bill vote.
Still, limited government to downright anti-government is what the right wing’s always talking about.
They want to exist on an island, which we know from John Donne, no man can. They see themselves as pioneers/patriots who just need their plot of land to live, which they will do peacefully as long as the government stays out of their way.
Just don’t expect any services like schools, water or protection from theft, fire or your personal well-being.
What anti-government people want isn’t so much a lack of a government, they just want a government that allows them to stay separated from doing any kind of business with people they don’t want to: the poor, the tired, the huddled masses.
The truth is, you are the government and the government is you.
We’re all in this world together.
If you don’t want government, move to Mars. But, if more than a few people join you, some sort of organized government would form because it is a natural human enterprise.
Because if there is no common good, no social contract between us, we’re nothing more than animals.