Obligatory Year-End Reminiscences, 2008

Highlights of 2008

* Our four day canoe trip down the Au Sable in August. The best vacation Kristine and I have taken in years.

* Continued improvement and growing student enthusiasm in my class on "Writing the Watershed."

* My late August trip to fish the White Fly hatch on the Au Sable. The best trip of the year, despite some shaky mental health at the time.

* Best Meal: Out--Chicken Picata at Wiltse's brewpub in Oscoda. (I know--Oscoda!); In--the first batch of gazpacho made from our own tomatoes.

* Best Drink: Presidenté martini at Habana while out for my birthday.

* Best Book: Jim Harrison's The English Major.

Lowlights of 2008

* My trip to the hospital with chest pains last April. Turned out nothing was wrong, but still rattled me. Made me miss the trout opener too.

* No hunting.

* Writing projects started but not finished.

* My first trout trip of the season last May. One of those where I return wondering, "why do I even bother?"

* A class last spring that utterly imploded, due partly to poor planning, partly to erratic participation by a community group we worked with.

*Worst Meal: Out--Pancakes in a Tawas City diner; In--quinoa salad overwhelmed by garlic and vinegar. The amounts looked excessive to me, but I trusted the recipe.

*Worst Drink: Miller High Life during our canoe trip.

Honestly, it's hard to remember a lot of standout moments from 2008, which isn't such a bad thing. There were happy times, but few bad times that linger in memory. That's reason enough to be thankful.

Happy New Year.

Gastro-Economic Indicator II

I just learned that one of my favorite sources of food and drink, Bello Vino Marketplace, will be going out of business just after New Years'. I suspect it's another victim of the economic downturn, and I will admit to having a hand in its demise. Against a backdrop of banks failing and automakers imploding, Bello's closure may not be of much consequence. In my little world, though, it is. Over the years the store, in its various forms, helped give that world some of its more pleasing contours.

When my wife and I moved to Ann Arbor at the end of 1999, we were occasional wine drinkers. We enjoyed the odd bottle of California Hearty Burgundy with spaghetti, or married our pot roast to a genuine vintage cabernet or merlot produced somewhere in the former Soviet bloc. We were taking an interest in microbrews, having lived not far from the Michigan Brewing Company, but had only the slightest idea of the variety of those that were out there.

That changed when we discovered a Merchant of Vino in a nearby strip mall. Merchant of Vino was a small chain of gourmet specialty shops around suburban Detroit, though the one by us was aligned with the Whole Foods chain. We checked it out one weekend and were impressed by their selection of craft beers. We sampled that selection regularly, and also began venturing into those daunting wine racks that consumed four aisles of the store. We began buying a few better wines that we'd heard of before--French Rhones, some of the less pricey California Zinfandels and Merlots, Riojas, Chiantis, Australian Shiraz.... The staff were only too glad to recommend wines, and their recommendations usually were gems. They were always enjoyable to deal with, never betraying snobbishness or hauteur. No question was too dumb, no mangled pronunciation of a French or Italian name brought a smirk. The beer people (yes, they had dedicated staffs for each) were also quite friendly and extremely well informed. They sounded intimately familiar with every brew they sold, and their characterization of every one I bought from them proved dead on.

So for the next couple of years we drank pretty well, usually enjoying a good bottle of wine or two and a couple sixes of some premium beer every weekend. I hate to think of what we spent on it, but at the time we could afford it, not having car payments and not having launched major home improvement projects. And we could always justify what we did spend by observing that we could have spent a lot more: when some of Merchant of Vino's bottles of wine cost hundreds, a $9 Montepulciano D' Abbruzo felt like a bargain we could hardly pass up.

Merchant (as we called it) was, as I mentioned, run by Whole Foods, and when Whole opened a massive new store down on Washtenaw Avenue in 2004, they closed Merchant. But within a few months, someone opened up a near-duplicate of it in the same space. They called it "Bello Vino."

The party was back on, but over the years we attended less and less. Our neighborhood grocery improved its beer and wine selection; why drive another mile if I didn't have to? Plus, as other expenses appeared, we spent less on beverages. Even so, we usually got to Bello at least once a month, and when we wanted to buy a really good wine, or try something new, it was the store of choice.

Over the past year, with our finances getting tighter still, I doubt we'd been in there ten times. I stopped in last Saturday to grab one of their readymade sandwiches for lunch and saw the "Going out of Business!" signs. It's sad, but really not surprising. With people worried losing their jobs and their retirement savings, luxuries will be the first thing to go, and Bello offered little else.

Until they close on the 15th, they are offering some generous discounts on their remaining stock, so I shall have to investigate their rhone selection, and perhaps sample some of those quirkily labled Belgian or English strong ales lurking along the wall between the wine racks and the beer coolers. This new years', in a melancholy respect, I will indeed party like it's 1999.

Living Word

This morning in church we read a passage of scripture which has long intrigued me, a portion of Psalm 147:


Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion....

He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly.

He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes.

He hurls down hail like crumbs— who can stand before his cold?

He sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow.

Scripture referencing both language and the natural world is bound to get a grip on me.

What I appreciate in these lines is the notion of words as physical forces, and of God's words registered in tangible events. Christians commonly refer to the Bible as "God's Word" and assert the verbiage it contains represents the utterances of the most high. Which I can agree with, to an extent. But the core teaching of Christianity, the Incarnation of God in Christ, affirms a more concrete form of divine language. Christ was, as the gospel of John says, "the word" that "became flesh and dwelt among us."

The writer of John actually uses the greek term "logos," which denotes something far more expansive than a mere utterance. "Word," in this case, is simply a convenience of translation, which I think is the case most of the time when Christians talk about God's word. We use speech or writing as a kind of metaphor to describe spirit acting in the world. This isn't to say God never speaks to people through written words, though if his happens, I believe, it's less because the words themselves than because they open up a sense of something greater. The sort of word that scatters frost can also shatter egos.

It's appealing to believe that printed or spoken words fully represent, or at least largely approximate, the message of God. But that belief is an attempt to confine God to our comfort zones. It's a rationale for confining one's awareness, a step toward having eyes yet not seeing, having ears but not hearing.

The seeker of the holy could do worse, the Psalm suggests, than to turn his attention to crackling frosts and melting snows.

Film the River

A poster at the Michigan-Sporstman.com forums created this video tribute to the Au Sable river, overlaying Alan Cayn's song "River of Sand":



I like the scratchiness, like you'd see in an old film. It complements the historic feel of the video.

Alan Cayn, appears to have a number of fishing related songs. Maybe I can commission him to write an FTR theme song.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas.

Snowy River Ski

With the heavy snow that fell here over the last week, a cross country ski outing was in order. It's always a goal for my holiday break, but snow conditions seldom permit it. Made it out yesterday into near-ideal snow conditions at Huron Mills Metropark. I'd considered trying the larger trail system at Kensington Metropark, but I thought it would be a good time to take some pictures along the Huron River.





Not much else to say. Perfect snow, with more of it falling most of the time, few people on the trails. Not having had any real outdoor fun in a while, I'd almost forgotten how ful-filling it was: immersing myself in woods, water, even weather tends to renew awareness of the richness in life--my life, and that of the world.

I think that the senses can forget things as easily as the mind can. Any kind of sustaining understanding of life requires awareness from both.

I sat down today figuring I should offer some kind of Christmas Eve meditation, though I couldn't think of any to offer. As usual, this major season of the church year, an important moment in many spiritual traditions, actually, doesn't have much impact on me spiritually. But thinking through yesterday's outing and my reaction to it, I may have found my Christmas inspiration. The Feast of the Incarnation is, among other things, a reminder of a sacredness, a light, if you will, within even the humblest of creation's parts. To forget and separate oneself from that creation is to walk in a kind of darkess.

Merry Christmas.

Photo Finds

Stumbled across a couple of interesting photo sites...or sites with interesting photos, however you want to put it

One is the web site of Superior View Gallery in Marquette, MI. The gallery sells photos (mostly) of northern Michigan locations, printed from original negatives that date from up to 150 years ago. I've linked the index here. If you're a Michiganic, you could spend hours surfing through these old images, seeing what some favorite places were like before you knew them. Here are a couple:

Trout Boy

Wish I knew where he was.


South Marquette, 1860

It still was a rustic area then. Today it's a downscale commercial zone stretching along US 41.



The other is Third Year Fly Fisher, by Bob Thompson. I've followed Bob's reports and photos on different forums over the years (I could swear it was more than three...), and he is a more than able hand with both rod and camera. Check his fish photos and videos, as well as his blog.

Bailey's Reckoning

It's a headline you might not want your children, or any friends buoyed by the rituals of the holidays, to see: Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life. So expounds Wendell Jamieson in Thursday's New York Times, offering his take on It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's now-classic film that becomes all but inescapable during the holidays. Jamieson appreciates the film, but not as an affirmation of individual worth and goodness in the world. "It’s a Wonderful Life is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams," he writes, "of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation."

This is how I've seen it too. I've been stunned by the rawness of Bailey's building desperation and the vehemence of its release. Like Jamieson, I see Bailey's descent into hopelessness as the film's most powerful and authentic element. There is a reality to it, rooted in common experience, which is lacking in Bailey's triumphant emergence from his journey through the underworld of the might-have-been with Clarence the angel.

I wonder if that's why I never emerge with him. By the time Bailey leaps from the bridge to save Clarence I more or less concur with him that life is futile and our situations tend to conspire against getting what we want or deserve. As Bailey pulls the wingless angel to shore, I keep floating downstream, slipping beneath that shelf ice. Continuing to watch, I'm too numb to take inspiration from his redemption at the end of the film. That redemption is too sudden, the break with his disappointments too clean.

Jamieson does not come away from the film so dispirited. The closing scene where Bailey's brother Harry pronounces him "the richest man in the world" chokes him up, he confesses. Granted, I'm prone to depression. Though people often call IAWL a piece of fluff, I'd recommend it for resilient or habitually cheerful minds only.

Jamieson shares another of my reactions to the movie. Had Bailey never been born, Clarence shows him, wholesome (if sleepy) Bedford Falls would have become Pottersville, a heartless pocket of vice and misery. Audiences are expected to shudder at this dismal locale, but to Jamieson, Pottersville "looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking." I wouldn't mind hanging with Bailey at the roadhouse for a while, drowning the sorrow provoked by the film's midsection. It occurs to me sometimes that if someone out there had never been born, my neighborhood could have been a lively adult entertainment district. Jamieson opines that Beford Falls might actually have been better off as one too: "In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of It’s a Wonderful Life manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.... On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving."

Needless to say, I usually avoid watching the movie, though sometimes relatives will have it on in the background at holiday parties, and sometimes I will sit though part of it. And while the ending is lost on me, I can imagine a compelling sequel to the film growing straight out of that ending. It is possible to appreciate and even love a life that isn't the one you hoped for, but prior disappointments seldom fall away completely in the process. How do you move ahead, living out a faith in self and community, in spite of older wounds inflicted by both? Plenty of films and novels have taken up similar questions; I think George Bailey, with his caring but impulsive personality, forging on among the upright but sometimes un-neighborly denizens of Bedford Falls, would be an excellent vehicle for seeking one more answer.

Table Talk

Went to a holiday reception put on by the dean of my college this afternoon. I knew no one there and was sitting at a table by myself when a couple of guys walked past discussing a gun purchase.

"I've got to get a gun before I go back down," said the older one. "I don't need something big, just something rapid fire. Is anyone sitting here?"

"No," I said, itching to hear more of the conversation.

"Get a Ruger 10/22," said the younger man, going on to describe it further.

"Luger?"

"No, Ruger. 10/22."

"Is it rapid fire?"

"It's semi-automatic. It'll shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. You can even get a 50 round clip if you want."

It turned out the older man wanted it to shoot snakes around his vacation place in Florida, where copperheads, diamondback rattlers, and water moccasins covered most of the ground, I gathered. He didn't know much about guns, he admitted, not having held one since he went partridge hunting in northern Michigan as a kid.

"Partridge hunting," said his companion, "the sport of kings."

He turned to me and gave a quick smile. It was obvious I was listening in.

"My sport too," I said.

His eyebrows arched. "Really?"

I nodded. The older guy, who it seems was a music professor, started in on the difficulty of shooting partridge. I couldn't but agree. We ended up talking about hunting and fishing for a while. Turns out the younger one, a professor of communications, owned 120 acres up near Glennie where he spent most of the summer and as much of deer season as his teaching schedule allowed. I mentioned that I fish the Au Sable fairly often. He rarely fished anymore, he said, aside from catching eater brookies from the creeks up there. Yet when he was younger, he told me, he had speared steelhead in some of the Au Sable's tributaries. "I don't do it anymore," he said quickly. "It's not sport fishing. It's more 'satisfying a primal instinct' fishing."

I think I felt my eyes boggling but I managed a wry laugh. I snagged salmon when I was a kid (though it actually was legal at the time). Spearing seems a more brazen kind of violation, though it may be a more honest one: at least it doesn't present an illusion of legal angling.

It's a shame some of the people who proudly denounce "effete intellectuals" weren't around for this.

Counter-Sprawl

An article in today's Free Press discusses options for remaking the city of Detroit via recourse to the 89 square miles of vacant land within its borders. Schemes for rebuilding Detroit into a major metropolis with the size and density of population it had in the 1950s are no longer realistic, say some urban planners, possibly informed by the failures of such efforts attempted over the last forty years. A better prospect, in their view, is remaking Detroit as a "leaner, greener city," with the vacant lands (some of which now support extensive grasslands, complete with populations of pheasants and coyotes)used for parks, forests, or even commercial farms.

It's an exciting idea, one which, according to some gives Detroit "a chance to invent an entirely new urban model." There's something satisfying about the notion of the old urban cores reversing the sprawl that began in them. Of course, any such project would face massive obstacles, not least the immediate human problems of poverty, crime, and dysfunctional governance. A few months ago, Harper's, ran an article by Rebecca Solnit exploring a similar concept that was stunningly underattentive to these issues. Presumably, locals would take them more seriously than roaming journalists.

Yet residents would face other, less tangible hurdles to creating a garden city. A geographer quoted in the Free Press observed that people are often resistant to the idea of "downsizing" cities. Which is an understandable reaction in a culture where bigger is usually better, and where communities typically measure their success by growth in population, business activity, and tax revenue. The "growth" already underway in Detroit's vacant spaces has inspired some to imagine a new destiny for the city; perhaps Detroit's response to its green potential could inspire a wider re-definition of growth in cities and suburbs.

That isn't the only new thing the undertaking might show us. Detroit is hardly the first city to envision integrating extensive natural spaces within and beside its built environments, though most that have done so have been relatively affluent, white communities. Would a viable green city sprung from one of the nation's poorest and most heavily African American communities look different?

I'm not sure how much the answer to that matters, but I hope one day it comes.

Self Pity Alert

Like other bloggers, I have one of those site meter thingies that tell me how many visits I've had and (usually) where they come from. It's flattering to see visitors from all over the world venture into this little corner of the web, though I was a little chagrined to see the majority never get to the home page. The bulk of visitors arrive via searches for information about the late Fred Trost or to see some picture I filched from some other site--a painting of the Ascension of Christ seems currently to be the #1 draw to FTR.

I feel invisible!

Tonight it's off to the annual family Christmas party in Kalamazoo. This year we switched from exchanging gifts to giving to each others' favorite charities. I've always liked that idea, but I probably wouldn't do it unless I was certain someone really preferred that to a gift. No one asked me, but I never needed convincing. And, as one of my sisters said, it just makes more sense than passing gift cards to each other.

The Economic Crisis, in Microcosm

Yesterday I went to a meeting in downtown Toledo, passing along the way a row of shops at the edge of a depressed neighborhood which formerly included a mortgage broker. Glaring yellow sticky letters in its windows had spelled out enticements such as "Zero Down!" [exclamation in original], "Bad Credit OK!"

I drive that way fairly often, and earlier this fall I noticed that the mortgage broker had gone out of business. The interior was empty, though the signage remained as vivid as ever. But yesterday I saw that the glowing letters were gone, and that a new business had taken up in that space: a pawn shop.

An acute summary, I thought, of how we've gotten to where we are and where we may be headed.

Wall-Hanger Fish

As a Christmas gift to each other, Kristine and I bought another fish print by Ladislav Hanka, "Manifesting Grayling."


It cost a bit more than I'd like to spend right now, but yesterday a publisher called asking me to evaluate a new textbook. The honorarium will just cover the cost of the print, including shipping. Once in a while, all the stars line up.

Gastro-Economic Indicator

The local Whole Foods no longer displays the company's stock price over the customer service desk. I can see where this move would spare them some embarrassment.

Evil Thought...

If Michigan's economy continues to slide into the abyss...and people continue to leave the state to find work elsewhere...will that mean fewer people on trout streams, or in grouse thickets? Not that I'm rooting for greater economic pain and uncertainty, but there could be a silver lining to it. At least for those of us lucky enough to still have work. I doubt I'd entertain these ideas if I thought my own job was in jeopardy.

There hasn't been much news about the atrocious theme park planned for the Grayling area of late. When the state was last holding hearings on the issue last summer, the developers still hadn't been able to secure financing. If they hadn't got it by then, there's little chance they'll find it now. What's been bad for Wall Street has been bad for Main Street, but good for the jackpine flats of Crawford County.

Have I become one of those environmentalists who favors trees and trout over people? I think my humanitarian credentials are still pretty decent, based on where I direct my charitable efforts and dollars, and on the values that drive my professional life. But like all humans I do have a selfish side, and I think it comes out most strongly in relation to outdoor pursuits. I want as much time for them as I can get, and I when I get on the water I want it to myself, or for me and my buddies on the rare occasions I fish with others. I covet trout and open space; others covet homes beyond their means or high returns on dubious investment products. Whose wants have taken more from America's workers, homeowners, businessmen, and retirees?

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

In parts of Appalachia, it's getting harder to Find the River, and it's going to get harder still, thanks to a parting gift from the Bush administration. A proposed change to mountaintop coal mining rules to allow dumping of rubble in streams has received a lot of coverage in the last few weeks, and now it's a done deal. Tuesday, the EPA announced it had agreed to the change. This comes in spite of the agency's own acknowledgement, in a study released last summer, that waste from mountaintop coal mining was "strongly related to downstream biological impairment."

I'm not going to add much to the stream of ink, or electrons, already unleashed about this. But I found one graf from this Washington Post article quite revealing about the thinking behind these decisions:

Coal industry and administration officials said many of the streams that will be covered in mine waste are small or ephemeral. "You're not talking about big, ecologically valuable areas," the senior Bush official said. "This will not be a negative environmental impact."

So if a piece of water ain't big...if you can't see rafts of waterfowl in a given spot...if you can't drop your line in and pull out a mess of eater catfish...it's nothing much.

The locals have more sense:

Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy said some of the waterways that have been lost are significant even if they are not major rivers.

"With this rule change, the outgoing Bush administration is poised to eliminate forever more of our headwater streams -- the very lifeblood of our mountains and the source of healthy water resources that future generations will depend upon[.]"

Perhaps an Obama EPA could mandate a short course in stream ecology for all officials involved with water management. Better yet, seek applicants who have fished brook trout. Those folks would know that headwaters aren't just significant, but sacred.

(Timidly) Wishing You and Yours the Best

This year, as usual, my wife was asked to design her company's holiday card. Generally, she's asked to create a "non-religious" greeting. Sensible enough. This year, though, the directions call for a card that is "non belief system specific." Oddly enough, this construction makes the task itself more ambiguous, though perhaps more interesting. How do you skirt around affirmation of any particular belief system, secularism included, while evoking warmth and merriment? Maybe with a caption along the lines of "Thor rest ye merry gentlemen, hear Kokopeli play, Remember Christ our savior, a dredel's made of clay..."

Retail Ritual

It should come as a surprise to no one that I skipped the Black Friday shopping rampage. Neither crowds nor feckless spending bring me pleasure; vexation and guilt would be the likely outcomes were I to plunge into the ruckus. I'm always a little bemused at the eagerness some people show for the early morning sales or their determination to be part of the big event--why so important to shop that day and not others?. I'm disgusted to see people storming retailers' doors like they're fleeing demons, especially when people get hurt or, in the case of the Wal Mart worker in New York, killed in the melee. These scenes stand in disturbing contrast to the quiet preparation for the holiday that goes on in Christian circles. But the more I reflect on this, the more I can see a spiritual dimension to these spectacles.

Black Friday shopping is a ritual in both the common-usage sense and in the anthropological sense. It is a kind of routine that American consumers participate in annually, sometimes without much thought to its significance. But one could also argue that it, like religious rituals, represents a grasp toward some higher, ideal circumstance or value that lies beyond ordinary reality, yet should penetrate and inform that reality. In the case of holiday shopping, that higher realm would be a network of stronger and more loving bonds with family and friends, those for whom we buy gifts. The exchange of material treasure would symbolize and enact the display of love we otherwise find it hard to manage.

There are better ways to show love, of course, than buying the latest electronics or fashions. But then, there are better ways to celebrate the birth of Christ than to erect a manger scene on the front lawn.