2007 Superlatives

It's time for best of/worst of reminiscences. Usually being more concerned with the gestalts of things I like rather than neat point by point comparisons, I've never really been keen on keeping lists of top fives or tens. I can think of, say, a book I liked especially well, maybe more than anything else I read in a given year, but then I have a hard time ranking all the less satisfying ones--I liked or disliked them for different reasons, and my preference for one over the other could shift according to my mood, whatever I've read in the meantime, or whatever is happening in my life at a given point. I may decide that one of my "second best" titles was in fact the best--then change my mind. Honestly, I've given more effort into this self-analysis than I've ever put into making a list of favorites.

In place of a set of lists, I'll offer some randomly selected highlights of 2007.

Best Book Read: Tie--Choke, Chuck Palahniuk; Black Swan Green, David Mitchell.

Best Film Seen: The Lives of Others

Best Meal: Pasta with the season's first batch of Putanesca sauce whipped up from tomatoes from our garden--actually, this may be tied with the season's first batch of gazpacho whipped up....

Best Wine: a 2004 Grande Domaine Venuer Cote du Rhone du Villages we enjoyed at Easter.

Best Beer: A Belgian trippel imperiale from Brasserie des Rocs.

Best Fish: a 15" brown caught in a narrow, brushy, gin-clear section of the Manistee. I've caught bigger, but maneuvering this spirited brown around and away from ubiquitous logs and clots of branches with a 6X tippet, while myself hopping over and around said obstacles, and actually seeing the fish during the entire fight, pumped more adrenaline into me than any battle I've had with a fish in a long time.

Best Fishing Trip: My hex trip.

Best Hunting Trip: My second daytrip to mid-Michigan. Bagged my sole bird of the year, and got shots at 4 or 5.

Best Hike: Up and down Mt. LeConte, North Carolina.

Best Professional Moment: At the end of this fall semester, when some of the students working on term papers for my "River Class" (ENLG 1140, "Writing the Watershed," which in involves studying, writing about, and publicly presenting on local environmental issues and history) started to make their work their own, when the need to fulfill a requirement transformed into a desire to learn, and they began to see a connection between their hopes and desires in life and the condition and possibilities of their local waters and landscapes. I loved it when they rushed up to the podium before class to dish about the great sources they'd found and what discoveries these had brought, or when they effused about how their research was gathering a momentum they couldn't have imagined. That happens in other classes too, but never as commonly as in that one.

I had to scour my memory hard to assemble that list. Most experiences of this year have fused into an amorphous conglomeration of images, moods and words. I can make out tarnished fractals, radiant sherds, but few portraits, stories, or songs.

Which suggests a new year's resolution--in 2008, I need to witness my life more deliberately. And I guess that means, among other things, more blogging.

Unsteady Aim?

While my central ambition in life is to move back to the UP Michigan, my wife sometimes expresses ambivalence about moving north. She's in pretty good company, as I discern from my occasional readings of Wife in the North, a blog by an Englishwoman uprooted grudgingly to hyperboreal precincts of the UK. According to her Blogger profile:

Moving to Northumberland from London was not my idea. My husband was in fact the only one terribly keen on the move. When I asked my younger son what he thought, he confided: “Bears might eat me”. "There are no bears," I told him as I looked into the darkness and the growling started.

Her exile makes for interesting prose, at any rate. I enjoyed her account of participating in a driven bird shoot posted last week. They're a bit more casual about certain aspects of hunting over there:

The shoot starts with coffee and bacon and sausage sandwiches and there was much shaking of hands and making of introductions before the alcohol came out at around 9.30 am. It is my belief that country folk have larger livers than townsfolk due to the inordinate amount of alcohol they consume while still remaining sober. Ideally the more dangerous the past time, the more alcohol is consumed.

Riding a horse? "Pass the hip flask."
Zipping along on the quad bike - without a helmet? "The bar is in that cardboard box on the back of the bike over there."
Firing a loaded weapon? "Would you like whipped cream on your Tia Maria coffee?"
There was at least an administrative reason for this first round of alcohol - the local Percy special of cherry brandy and whisky. Thinking about it, there often is a reason for a drink in the country; reasons which include "I'm here" and "Well, if you're offering."

The day ended without any fatalities, fortunately.

Wife's post is more entertaining than anything you'll find in Upland Journal. One commenter at her site did suggest the whole thing was fabricated, and I had suspicions about that myself, but does it really matter? At times, I turn to the outdoor sports as a mental health maintenance strategy; at others, exercise of the imagination--with or without empirical assistance--does the job. It's hard for me not to like a piece in which someone joins these to help survive in a bleak spot.

Saturday Quote, 12/29/07

[T]ime is never present; only we are. We are time wearing space as a mask, and with each breath we become smaller and smaller until finally nothing is left of us.

--Alta Ifland, "Elegy for a Fabulous World"

Some years back, reflecting on the disappearance of grayling from northern Michigan waters, it occurred to me that the trout which displaced them are like shimmering, animate tombstones, marking the spots where grayling once held. Reading Ifland's quote, I wondered if it would be more correct to say that grayling and trout (or simply the trout of different generations)that have lived in a given place are different instants of time that slipped on the same aqueous masks.

No Ski for Me

Kristine and I had been planning a cross country ski trip over the New Year's holiday weekend. Earlier this week though, we squashed those plans due to a lack of snow at our intended destination. We could head to western Michigan, where snow has been returning, but I have too much work on my plate now to spare 3 days away, so this is just as well. Still the paucity of snow in most of lower Michigan the last few years is disappointing. Sometimes, we haven't had enough snow in the UP for New Year's ski trip there--that's seriously screwed up.

Winter doesn't feel like winter without snow on the ground from the end of December to the beginning of March or so. It doesn't feel like a protracted fall, either. It feels like nothing, or, I should say, makes familiar ground feel somehow unreal. This is really all I needed to accept global climate change as a reality.



Links are in the process of being restored--if I've forgotten you, or if you'd like me to add you to this august collection, leave a comment.

Housekeeping

Due to updating my Blogger template, I've lost links. I will begin reestablishing those soon. If you notice that I'm no longer linking your blog, please don't delete me in retaliation! All will be restored.

Also, FTR is adding a new feature--on the ground fishing and outdoor reports during my multi-day trips. Come spring, when I don't get back to my computer after a day on the river, I'll be posting news of my outings (including water and hatch conditions) via my mobile phone and twitter.com (mobile reception permitting). Check "Field Reports" in the lower right hand corner of this page.

Zzzzzzing!

We had a nice, quiet holiday here. Church Tuesday morning, then off to the sister-in-laws for an afternoon and evening of awkward conversation, videos, and excessive food. No alcohol, though, and if there was ever at time we needed it...

The highlight of the day was opening my first present from Kristine. She had gotten me DVDs of the last season of The Wire, but when I unwrapped the package, this was the box I saw:



Now, I watch this Animal Planet series online occasionally, and I have a soft spot for the little sandy-nosed buggers, but not so much that I'd want to watch their exploits again and again. I had no problem feigning surprise, though my effusions of gratitude were Oscar-worthy.

I should have known something was amiss because the Meerkat Manor box wasn't shrink wrapped, but shock must have befuddled me. Kristine told me to open the box, and only then did I find what she'd really given me.

She had actually created that package design herself and printed it at work. You expose yourself to this sort of thing when you marry a graphic designer.

One of these days, I'm going to get her back, big time.

Holiday Hopes

This holiday season, I've been taking note of secularized pronouncements of the Christmas gospel, i.e., exhortations or meditations, apparently or explicitly detached from Christian belief or doctrines, on the themes that churches connect to the birth of Jesus: peace, care for the lonely and forgotten, the power of love to rescue us from alienation and despair.

Of course, free-floating wishes of "peace on earth, goodwill toward men" have filled the December skies like snowflakes as long as mass media and mass merchandising have existed. Usually, though, such language retained at least nominal ties to the Christian celebration--quite often flanked by images of angels, bells, or stars, or accompanied by strains of sacred Christmas carols. For the last several years though, ones with no such ties seem almost ubiquitous; in store displays and shelves of Christmas cards, in music and other holiday entertainments, generic invocations of peace, light, joy jockey for position with tales and scenes of theophany in a stable, and it remains to be seen which will claim the larger corner of the public square.

Taking a long view, or one long view, there is nothing surprising here. Midwinter festivals predating Christmas celebrated the return of light and hope for renewal of the earth. People always, everwhere, have hoped for peace, love, and new beginnings (either in this life or another). However, I think that centuries of religious celebrations of Christmas (among other things) have left the post-Christian world with impossibly high hopes of these kinds, with a longing for some harmony or deliverance that, by any reasonable accounting, is unattainable. The manger may appear empty to many, but annually they bow nonetheless. Far from being simply a frenzy of materialism, secularized Christmastide is essence a societal cri de coeur for transcendence.

I heard a commentary on the radio a couple of weeks ago in which the commentator, after confessing deep doubts about the existence of God and the usefulness of any religion, opined (unfortunately I'm paraphrasing loosely) that the Christmas story is reminder that, "out there somewhere," there is "something more" to existence than survival imperatives and the utilitarian economic and political calculus that directs and shapes most of our lives. All that a Christian could quibble with in that is the "out there, somewhere." The gospel of Luke may reference heavenly choirs, but the coming of Christ and his work of redemption took place here, on the earth. Christmas invites us to look for that "something more" around us and within us. Perhaps in that looking, you find Christ. But I'm certain that a careful and loving attention to one's own and others' humanity, and to the world encompassing it, is the true beginning of peace on earth, and goodwill among all.

Merry Christmas.

Solstice Walk

Blogging isn't the only ritual I resumed this week. For a good part of my 30s, at least, I made a habit of being outdoors somewhere at sunset on the solstices, usually taking a long walk in some woods. These observances held no special emotional or spiritual import. I just thought it was appropriate to take notice of these turnings of the year, the great comings and goings of light.

Yesterday, I put in a conscientious late-morning/early afternoon of course planning, then donned my new K-Mart hunting boots and set off for the Pinckney Rec Area. I wanted to hike an unfamiliar portion of the area, hoping that it might hold some grouse cover. It might have, 20 years ago.

But the hike was nice anyway. The southern Michigan woods in winter are no scenic wonder, but I did have that portion of them to myself. There is still a good 8 or so inches of snow on the ground, and while it was too warm yesterday for good skiing, I could have had great snowshoeing. It would have been pretty tough hiking if snowmobiles hadn't (illegally) run the trails earlier.

No especially notable sights (see ¶ above), though some of the frozen ponds and marshes were worth lingering over.



While I was getting my camera out, a large hawk lumbered over the marsh on long, straining wingbeats.

My wife was at her company Christmas party last night, feasting on Chilean Sea Bass atop Detroit's Renaissance Center. I made do with fish and chips at the bar in Hell, MI. Decent fish, soggy fries--so often, that's reversed.

Somewhere yesterday, I'm sure, there were more convivial and boisterous observations of the solstice, but I can keep making do with the sort I had, at least for the next few decades.

The Grinch Won't Steal Christmas THIS Year!

Seen in my neighbors' yard:

Hey Again

I need to get this going again, for mental health reasons among others. Haven't been able to drag myself to write anything, anywhere lately. Having put so much into this the last two years, I feel somewhat obligated to continue.

There is little in the way of "big news" to report. The most interesting thing going on, or at least on the horizon, presently is my sister Gretchen moving over my way. She landed a tech coordinator position with the Ypsilanti schools, quite a juicy post, I guess, with an 8 figure budget and a staff of ten. Though I haven't stayed really close to my family since I finished college (and I wasn't all that close to start with), I'm actually looking forward to having her close by. It will be someone else (all right, scratch that--just someone) to get together with, talk to. Maybe water our garden when we go on vacation.

Had the annual family Christmas party in Kalamazoo last Saturday, which went OK. The trip included the mandatory stop at the Dark Horse Brewery in Marshall. Their tap room is possibly my favorite bar in the world--good beer, and maybe the most welcoming and laid back atmosphere of any drinkery I know. Well worn, but clean, it occupies a shed behind a party store. Unpretentious and, whenever we're travelling across southern Michigan, irresistable. The two guys who started it began brewing in their dorm room at my undergrad alma mater. I'll bet nobody wanted to miss their keggers.

As I said, the party was fine, but the food offerings were weird. Usually at these things, we get some pizzas or a party sub or something, though only after grazing for an hour or so on junk food and cookies. This year, my sister decided to skip the entree "since we always fill up on snacks anyway." This seems like erring in the wrong direction. But from our bunch, not unsurprising. I come from a clan of world-class snackers. Growing up, I assumed that Seyfert's potato chips and Oreos were staple foods. Yet we also went on periodic health food kicks. Given my schizoid dietary upbringing, there's really nothing shocking about me being a semi-vegetarian who craves wild game.

May the holidays bring you the repast you most crave.