U.P. Reader -- Volume #6 E-Book

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 483

Beschreibung

Michigan's Upper Peninsula is blessed with a treasure trove of storytellers, poets, and historians, all seeking to capture a sense of Yooper Life from settler's days to the far-flung future. Since 2017, the U.P. Reader offers a rich collection of their voices that embraces the U.P.'s natural beauty and way of life, along with a few surprises.
The forty-one short works in this 6th annual volume take readers on U.P. road and boat trips from the Keweenaw to the Soo. Every page is rich with descriptions of the characters and culture that make the Upper Peninsula worth living in and writing about. U.P. writers span genres from humor to history and from science fiction to poetry. This issue also includes imaginative fiction from the Dandelion Cottage Short Story Award winners, honoring the amazing young writers enrolled in all of the U.P.'s schools.
Featuring the words of Phil Bellfy, T. Marie Bertineau, Don Bodey, Sharon Brunner, Larry Buege, Mikel Classen, Tricia Carr, Deborah K. Frontiera, Elizabeth Fust, Brad Gischia, Sienna Goodney, Paige Griffin, J.L. Hagen, Heidi Helppi, Mack Hassler, John Haeussler, Richard Hill, Douglas Hoover, Sharon M. Kennedy, Chris Kent, Kathleen Carlton Johnson, Tamara Lauder, Ellen Lord, Raymond Luczak, Robert McEvilla, Beck Ross Michael, Nikki Mitchell, Cyndi Perkins, Lauryn Ramme, Christine Saari, T. Kilgore Splake, Bill Sproule, David Swindell, Ninie Gaspariani Syarikin, Brandy Thomas, Tyler Tichelaar, Edd Tury, Victor Volkman, Cheyenne Welsh, and Donna Winters.
"Funny, wise, or speculative, the essays, memoirs, and poems found in the pages of these profusely illustrated annuals are windows to the history, soul, and spirit of both the exceptional land and people found in Michigan's remarkable U.P. If you seek some great writing about the northernmost of the state's two peninsulas look around for copies of the U.P. Reader.
--Tom Powers, Michigan in Books
"U.P. Reader offers a wonderful mix of storytelling, poetry, and Yooper culture. Here's to many future volumes!"
--Sonny Longtine, author of Murder in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
"As readers embark upon this storied landscape, they learn that the people of Michigan's Upper Peninsula offer a unique voice, a tribute to a timeless place too long silent."
--Sue Harrison, international bestselling author of Mother Earth Father Sky
The U.P. Reader is sponsored by the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association (UPPAA) a non-profit corporation. A portion of proceeds from each copy sold will be donated to the UPPAA for its educational programming.

Leseprobe

U.P. Reader

Volume 1 is still available!

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is blessed with a treasure chest of writers and poets, all seeking to capture the diverse experiences of Yooper Life. Now U.P. Reader offers a rich collection of their voices that embraces the U.P.’s natural beauty and way of life, along with a few surprises.

The twenty-eight works in this first annual volume take readers on a U.P. Road Trip from the Mackinac Bridge to Menominee. Every page is rich with descriptions of the characters and culture that make the Upper Peninsula worth living in and writing about.

Available in paperback, hardcover, and eBook editions!

ISBN 978-1-61599-336-9

www.UPReader.org

U.P. Reader: Bringing Upper Michigan Literature to the World — Volume #6

Copyright © 2022 by Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association (UPPAA). All Rights Reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Photo: by Mikel B. Classen.

Learn more about the UPPAA at www.UPPAA.org

Latest news on UP Reader canbe found at www.UPReader.org

ISSN: 2572-0961

ISBN 978-1-61599-660-5 paperback

ISBN 978-1-61599-661-2 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-61599-662-9 eBook (PDF, Kindle, ePub)

Edited by- Deborah K. Frontiera and Mikel B. Classen

Production - Victor Volkman

Cover Photo - Mikel B. Classen

Interior Layout - Michal Splho

Distributed by Ingram (USA/CAN/AU), Bertram’s Books (UK/EU)

Published by

Modern History Press

5145 Pontiac Trail

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

www.ModernHistoryPress.com

[email protected]

CONTENTS

About the Cover – Grand Sable Falls by Mikel Classen

Problems We Can Solve by Donna Winters

Rain Falls from The Sky as the Stars Bleed Away Their Dreams by Cheyenne Welsh

The Freshman by Victor R. Volkman

Up In Michigan by Edd Tury

Lucy and Maud by Tyler Tichelaar

The Ospreys by Brandy Thomas

Autumn Jewel Box by Brandy Thomas

The First Time by Ninie Gaspariani Syarikin

Copper Country Crochet by Ninie Gaspariani Syarikin

My Surprising Encounter With a Baby Raccoon by David Swindell

The Animals Sing Their Songs to You

Joe Linder: Hockey Legend from Hancock, Michigan by Bill Sproule and John Haeussler

Poet’s dream odyssey by T. Kilgore Splake

Cliffs magic by T. Kilgore Splake

The Beaver by Christine Saari

Abandoned Dreams by Christine Saari

Superiority Complex byCyndi Perkins

Seeds Well Planted: Healing Balm from a Keweenaw Garden by Cyndi Perkins

Astrid the Lighthouse Keeper by Nikki Mitchell

Dinner for Two by Becky Ross Michael

Doe Season byRobert McEvilla

Woodpecker by Raymond Luczak

Solivagant by Raymond Luczak

Sorrow’s Lament (A Found Poem) by Ellen Lord

Interlude by Ellen Lord

Saying Goodbye by Tamara Lauder

Novel by Tamara Lauder

Coffee in the Morning by Kathleen Carlton Johnson

Hunting Season by Kathleen Carlton Johnson

Christmas Eve at the Dead Wolf Bar by Chris Kent

Lemon Cookies by Sharon Kennedy

A Day at Marlene’s Beauty Parlor by Sharon Kennedy

Extinct by Douglas Hoover

The Document by Douglas Hoover

Iroquois Island by Richard Hill

Maxwell by Richard Hill

Three Poems Linking Emerson, Besonen, and Custer by Mack Hassler

The Most Remarkable Thing Starring Norwegious Ida G by J. L. Hagen

Finders & Keepers by Elizabeth Fust

The Stubborn Snowblower by Deborah K. Frontiera

Silent Witness by Tricia Carr

I’m So Sorry Margaret by Tricia Carr

Troubled Waters by Larry Buege

The Pasty Smuggling Ring by Sharon Brunner

Kid by Don Bodey

Snow Child by T. Marie Bertineau

Nimishoome: Chronicle of A Life Untold – Questions for Curt, the Uncle I Never Knew by Phil Bellfy

U.P. Publishers & Authors Association Announces 3rd Annual U.P. Notable Books List

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley Review by Tyler Tichelaar

Tin Camp Road by Ellen Airgood Review by Tyler Tichelaar

The Sideroad Kids: Tales from Chippewa County by Sharon M. Kennedy Review by Brad Gischia

Young U.P. Author Section

Birdie by Lauryn Ramme

The Letters Under the Floorboards by Siena Goodney

The Blood of My Love by Heidi Helppi

Olive Branch byPaige Griffin

Help Sell The U.P. Reader!

Come join UPPAA Online!

Comprehensive Index of UP. Reader Volumes 1 through 6

About the Cover Grand Sable Falls

by Mikel Classen

Grand Sable Falls, as featured on the cover of the book you are holding, is located on the eastern end of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Though it is not the largest waterfall in the park, its beauty makes it one of the park’s premier sights. The falls are located a mile west of Grand Marais off County Highway H-58, a well marked parking lot is the trail head. The walk to the falls is short and not difficult. The 168 steps to the bottom provide different views of the falls on the way down and from here can be seen this 75-foot cascade in its entirety. The stream is surrounded by hardwoods of maple and aspen adding to the falls’ ever-changing look with the seasons. This is an incredible autumn destination. Look closely during the summer as Trillium and Lady Slippers can be spotted in the forest.

This has always been a special place and marks the beginning of the massive Grand Sable Sand dunes. A small walk from the bottom of the falls to the beach, just a few yards, awaits one of the most spectacular views on all of Lake Superior. Standing there looking up at the immense sand dunes that stretch in an arc to Au Sable Point 15 miles away, is a moment worth walking to. As a suggestion, walk the shore back to Grand Marais from here. It’s a great alternative to the stair climb.

The eastern end of Pictured Rocks gets much less traffic than the west end at Munising. Grand Sable Falls is one of the overlooked attractions at the National Park. Missing this is a big mistake. This is a must-see for any trip into Grand Marais.

Special Note: This attraction is located within the National Park. It was announced that the National Park Service (NPS) would be instituting fees or requiring passes for park visitors beginning this year. At this moment it is unclear what that will be and how this will affect visitors to Sable Falls. I advise stopping into the NPS visitor’s center first to learn what the requirements are if any. Access has always been free and open before.

Mikel B. Classen has been writing and photographing northern Michigan in newspapers and magazines for over thirty-five years, creating feature articles about the life and culture of Michigan’s north country. He is the founder of the U.P. Reader and is a member of the Board of Directors for the UPPAA. In 2020, Mikel won the Historical Society of Michigan’s, George Follo Award for Upper Peninsula History. His book Points North: Discover Hidden Campgrounds, Natural Wonders, and Waterways of the Upper Peninsula achieved the HSM’s highest honor, The State History Award. Learn more at MikelBClassen.com

Problems We Can Solve

by Donna Winters

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association or its Board of Directors.

I usually refrain from expressing my opinion publicly because it generates pushback from those eager to point out the errors in my thinking. Nevertheless, I’m going to propose changes here that I see as beneficial. You may disagree, but if you do, please don’t tell me about it. Write your own position paper and put it out there for all of us to consider. On the other hand, if you agree, I’d be glad to hear from you!

Missing Persons and Privacy Issues

Have you ever watched a news report of an elderly person with dementia who has walked out of a care facility and is now lost? It’s a heart-wrenching problem. And what about a toddler who has wandered off? Or worse yet, been kidnapped? It seems only reasonable that toddlers and those with dementia should be fitted out with GPS trackers. The technology is available, and depending on the type of device, it’s quite affordable, with prices as low as $26.95. So why do we leave the most vulnerable members of our society unchipped? Wouldn’t chipping be more expedient and economical than sending out a search party?

“What about privacy issues?” you may ask. If your toddler or grandparent is chipped, they lose control over their privacy. Americans are ultra-sensitive to privacy issues thanks to social media data exploiters. Okay, I get it. Really, I do, and I closed my social media accounts with the most irresponsibly run corporations on the planet. Which makes me wonder: If you’re concerned about privacy issues, have you closed your social media accounts? Missing persons is a problem we can solve. Data exploitation is a problem we can solve. But do we want to?

Football Injuries and Deaths

For some time now, I have been saying that football ought to be outlawed. It’s simply the contemporary version of ancient gladiators entertaining stadiums full of eager witnesses to brutal battles. In my opinion, it’s uncivilized, disgusting, and phenomenally costly in blood and treasure. But for almost fifty years now, football has been the most popular sport in the US, and with the National Football League raking in $15 billion in annual revenue, it’s not going away anytime soon.

Concern over the dangers of football goes back to at least 1905. That year, Teddy Roosevelt held a White House discussion on how to reduce brutality in play. Athletic advisors from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton participated. At least forty-five football players had died from 1900-1905. The cause? Unnecessary roughness. Victims had often been kicked in the head or stomach, causing brain or internal injuries that eventually resulted in death.

More recently, studies have been done on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain condition that’s thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head and repeated episodes of concussion. Through autopsies of 111 brains belonging to players in the National Football League, 110 of them showed CTE—more than 99 percent. An individual with CTE could suffer from a number of symptoms including: memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, Parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia.

In September 2021, new position-specific helmets were introduced in the NFL for offensive and defensive linemen. While I’m all in favor of extra padding for the brains of professional football players, I’m more in favor of them walking off the field and preserving their brainpower, or what’s left of it, for their retirement years. If enough did that, maybe we could move closer to eliminating the game altogether. Having said all that, does football show up on our TV? Absolutely.

Holidays that Hurt

This is such a touchy subject I almost didn’t write about it. But I’m going to go ahead and let you grapple with the concepts I put forward.

Each year on Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day, a large portion of our population celebrates while a smaller portion goes into mourning. When I first learned about the portion who were suffering, I thought, “What do you mean? This isn’t a celebration of the bad things that happened to indigenous peoples; it’s a time to go to a Columbus Day sale or gather with the family for some turkey.”

As the curators of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC have said, “The past never changes, but the way we understand it, learn about it, and know about it changes all the time.” For me, change began with knowledge of my ancestry and discovering that, like 35 million others on the planet, I’m a descendant of Mayflower passengers. With the recent 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing, a plethora of books about that event were released. I read several of them and learned that the decades following 1620 tell of a horrifying past regarding the indigenous tribes of New England.

At this writing, we have just celebrated/mourned Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Several states (10-14 depending on the source) have made Indigenous Peoples’ Day an official holiday. About an equal number of other states celebrate it by proclamation, and more than 100 cities celebrate it. For the first time ever, a US President has declared Columbus Day, which started in 1934, to be Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Some groups argue that Columbus Day celebrates Italian American heritage, but their counterparts claim it celebrates genocide, trauma, and colonization. Is it possible to reframe Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day everywhere in America? I believe so. Its time has come.

Similar controversies have arisen over Thanksgiving Day. While many gather for a family feast of turkey and all its delicious accompaniments, others mark the day with a very different tradition. Since 1970 (the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing), protesters have been gathering on top of Cole’s Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, to commemorate a “National Day of Mourning.” Comparable events are held in other parts of the country. But would it really be possible to rename and reframe a holiday with roots going back 400 years—a celebration that was officially proclaimed by President Lincoln in 1863 and was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1941? If we really could rename and reframe, what would we call such a day? The National Day of Mourning (currently held in Plymouth, Massachusetts), Unthanksgiving Day (celebrated on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay), National Day of Listening (scheduled for two days after Thanksgiving 2021), Native American Heritage Day (scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving 2021), Restorative Justice Day (since 1996, International Restorative Justice Week has been celebrated for eight days starting on the third Sunday in November), American Family Day (currently celebrated early in August)?

Creating a paradigm shift around Thanksgiving might take a very long time, but it could happen. And, coupled with the changes afoot for Columbus Day, we could eradicate two holidays that hurt from our American calendars. This is a problem we can solve.

Donna Winters has been a published writer since 1985 and is the author of the Great Lakes Romances® series. She has over twenty titles in print and has been published by Thomas Nelson Publishers, Zondervan Publishing House, Guideposts, Chalfont House, and Bigwater Publishing LLC. Learn more about her and her books at amazon.com/author/donnawinters.

Rain Falls from The Sky as the Stars Bleed Away Their Dreams

by Cheyenne Welsh

Day by day, sunrise to sunset, I’m pushed under the waves of my own subconscious. Emerged within the sea, the bitter cold bites away at all the remaining feelings I have left. My legs become heavy like the anchors attached to a ship, pulling me farther down. At first, I am afraid of the pain drowning would bring, but as I sink farther down, the coldness wears away and everything becomes numb.

With my eyes forced open, water distorting my vision, I watch the sea of life swim by. Everything begins to speed up as my heart slows down. The water that burns my lungs is an acquired taste I long since learn to enjoy.

The loneliness of drowning underneath the waves while the souls around me move on begins to feel like home. A place once feared has become my shelter. And reality has become the starving hunter that stalks me at every turn. It seeks vengeance for my refusal to come back to the surface of the living. It will bait me with shallow promises spit from the mouth of a false god.

But I know what will happen when I emerge from the water: my dreams will fade away as my soul and body are sold off to be just another piece of meat in the market. I’m not anything special. There is no hero coming to save me. I’m on my own, forced to confront every hunter that seeks to hurt me. Forced to relive this cycle until my heart gives out.

So why should I emerge? Why come back to the surface when all that’s waiting for me is the cold bite of reality ready to drain me of my dreams. I’d rather drown in the sea of my subconscious, drifting away until reality is something of a dream itself. Until all I know is this other world.

I’d forget everything I’ve ever known so that I may dream forever. Once I’m ready to stop fighting the inevitable, it will all fade away into a blissful nothing. My brain will devour the last drops of chemicals that fire off, taking me far away to another world, a better world.

I just need to take that first step into the water. The rest will fall into place.

Cheyenne Welsh just recently joined UPPAA when she submitted “Rain Falls From The Sky as the Stars Bleed Away Their Dreams.” She hopes to eventually complete and publish a collection of poetry. Cheyenne is a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and has lived on the reservation in the Upper Peninsula her whole life.

Escanaba – out for a sunday drive

The Freshman

by Victor R. Volkman

September 3rd, 1982, I arrived as a newly minted freshman at Michigan Technological University in Houghton at the tender age of 18 years, 3 months, and 2 days. My love affair with the U.P. began about four years earlier, when I had attended a week-long summer camp at MTU for teenagers, known as the Summer Youth Program (SYP). It was the same year I had learned the barest basics of computer programming in the eighth grade. Although we lived in the suburbs of Detroit, our family was staying with friends in northern Michigan, so it was only another five hours from thereabouts to Houghton. I remember the campus was nearly deserted except for us teenagers and the instructors, often high school teachers from the local area supplementing their summer income.

We were all in the smallest, coziest of dorms, Douglas Houghton Hall, built in 1939 with the traditional communal bathrooms and a dining hall furnished in ancient hardwood. I immersed myself in learning FORTRAN and writing programs on the IBM keypunches in the basement of the Electrical Engineering Resource Center (EERC), a building where I would years later spend many hours in pursuit of a degree in Computer Science. It was the time of my life, freedom to learn and a small modicum of independence. It was heady stuff. The next twelve months, I started a very small paper route with the goal of earning enough to cover next year’s week of SYP for tuition, room, and board which I think was in the neighborhood of $250.

The second summer, a week in July 1979, was just as glorious as I got to learn the basics of “machine language”, this time on microcomputers the size of an adding machine, instead of the school’s massive mainframe. I had no trouble hanging out with the other kids and even made a friend for a week. I remember the R.A. chiding me for spending too much time reading textbooks in my room. Anyway, my fate was sealed by then. I would attend MTU and earn my degree in Computer Science. Everything I did for the next four years was in service of that goal.

Being a kid from a working-class family in a rich person’s suburb, it was always clear in high school who had money and who didn’t. Those who didn’t seemed to have no chance whatsoever with winning a girlfriend, so I can say without reservation that I never even tried to strike up a conversation. I liked my crushes to be silent and, therefore, immune from rejection. I moved through the school with nary a ripple, as the lack of photos in yearbooks will attest.

I only applied to one school—MTU, despite a flurry of letters from other institutions in the Midwest after my PSAT, SAT, and ACT were all said and done. In those days, there was neither online application nor any kind of master application that could be transmitted to dozens of institutions with a single mouse-click. Mice were still years away, much less an Internet. Also, I don’t remember ever having a conversation with my parents about what schools they could afford —we never ever talked about money, period. So, I figured a state school was the way to go anyway, the Ivy League was incomprehensible to me and then there was the money thing. So that nine-or-ten-page application was sent along with transcripts and then the eventual acceptance letter came.

Back to September 1982… my first week at college was a whirlwind of activity, immersed in people but in fact overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness I had not even known I could experience. I had great hopes for a college roommate experience, my only real experience being TV shows I had seen where the old roommate was always the crazy best-friend. Although I was back in DHH, my dorm of four years prior, this was nothing like that. Instead, I was “over-assigned”—poor planning by university housing had a hundred of us bunked three to an eleven-foot square room clearly designed for two people. In that tiny space, you couldn’t really get more than six feet away from anyone. Worse, it was already occupied by two other kids who had gone to the same high school in another rich suburb, not exactly friends, but they had the easy acquaintance of a shared four-years prior experience.

I was the interloper, simply waiting for another room to open, somewhere, naively assuming that such a thing would magically happen in a few days or perhaps a month. As such, I was mostly the punchline, the butt of jokes, the sexually inexperienced goof who could not even participate in their endless lurid conversations about the practical applications of cunnilingus. Our room was carpeted in lush purple shag Brian H. had brought with him. He and Pete K. conspired to purchase the loft that the prior tenants of room 210 had sold us. A rickety collection of 2 x 4s, bolts, and a homemade ladder that pinned us a mere eight inches from the ceiling, making turning over in bed a chore and not to be taken lightly. They would begin studying around 11pm, just as I was ready to turn in for the night.

It’s hard to understate the social isolation of moving 600 miles in an era before a hundred kinds of communication were possible. It would take all day to list what we didn’t have: email, cellphones, Internet, WhatsApp, instant messaging, Zoom, Skype, Instagram, FaceBook, TikTok, LinkedIn, chat rooms and on and on. Sending email was still five-plus years away. Long distance charges were horrendous back then, on the order of $20/hour before late night discounts. But I had no one to really talk to. By a weird quirk of fate, all my former friends had been a year or two younger by virtue of the one club I had joined in high school. I knew that to even try to explain my reality would be so far off as to be incomprehensible to them.

People were quick to make their alliances in the dorm, literally within days of moving in. I knew I had to escape the confines of my three-man hell. Luckily, there was a next-door neighbor, Tim Brown, who was easy-going, a natural socializer, and OK with an introverted friend who didn’t speak up much. Tim Brown had befriended Amy Brown (no relation), an ebullient and cherubic Yooper from Newberry. I fell for her hard, but didn’t want to have my hopes crushed so I never made a definitive move in her direction. The three of us could then sit together at the cafeteria, goof around, and hunt down frat parties without having to worry about romantic encumbrances. Alcohol was the drug of choice in the 1980s, more on that later. They took me shopping to St. Vinnies to get my first set of flannel shirts, a form of attire I had never really considered.

Romantic attachments were never in the cards for me at MTU; I would have better luck at the roulette table putting all my money on double-ought. I had not done my research (nor was there a way to do it) and discovered there were five guys for every girl on campus. They were not lacking for attention in any way, and I had no game. There was worse news: in my major, the representation was far worse. A typical Computer Science class had perhaps three women out of 100 students. In those days, there was no cachet in being the nerd. No one had heard of Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs. True to my nature, I developed a crush on my best friend’s girl and of course nothing came of it.

Back to September 1982… there were just a couple days of orientation, and then finally the “first day of class”. I guess I was expecting something more like the 1973 film The Paper Chase with Sir John Gielgud bemoaning how our “heads were full of mush”. Instead, my first ever lecture was by an oldster named Jack who spoke from the stage using plastic slides and an overhead projector for Econ 101. I was underwhelmed. The opposite experience was my Calculus One class taught by a fledgling mechanical engineering grad student named Glenn. It was his first time teaching calculus and our first time learning it. We were ill-suited for each other and his tests bore little resemblance to the curriculum. In fact, I turned in an “F” grade quality test for my first exam. I was mortified—could my college career really have ended just four weeks into my first semester? I knew from my degree plan that I must complete four successive calculus classes. It was a heart-stopping moment… Luckily, Glen was mortified too, since the average test score for the class was well below 50%. He stood with the exams poised above the trash can now hoisted to his desk. He merely said, “Any objections?” and you could hear a pin drop as he summarily shit-canned our exams. Another more reasonable exam landed me with a B, I think.

Friday and Saturday nights were always the same, going out in search of a frat within walking distance that had all the beer you could drink for $5. In theory, the goal was to socialize but I drank quickly to numb my loneliness and the music was so loud you couldn’t pretend to have a conversation anyway. I had my first blackout within a semester, which scared me enough to cut back to some reasonable level of inebriation. I did manage to graduate without a minor in alcoholism, although in retrospect, it now seems miraculous and was probably aided by the 21-and-over drinking laws at the time which slowed me down a bit.

I made my first real faux pas just a few days into the semester. It was K-Day (for Keweenaw Day), when the college would call off classes for a half-day on a randomly chosen day of the second week of school. It was based on the day they thought would have the best weather and festivities were held at McLain State Park on Lake Superior a few miles out of town. I can’t remember but I think there might have been busses back and forth as I was not to own a car until four years later. I was with my tiny little group plus one of Amy’s friends. The girls went up to get their beer cups filled at a frat campsite, they were more than welcome to do so but after I stepped up, my glass was grabbed and dumped into the grass. No words were spoken but it was clear that furious fists were coming my way if I didn’t clear off in a few seconds. So much for K-Day; I couldn’t wait to get back to campus.

The first semester’s classes were fully planned out for freshmen except for a single elective P.E. class we could choose from. What could possibly go wrong? Well, I had chosen Orienteering because I thought I liked the outdoors, and it would mean some fresh air while wandering the forests outside campus. I soon learned how useless a map was without knowing where you were and how unhelpful a compass was again without any idea where you were. Ostensibly, it was a two-hour class that I expect most students finished in 90 minutes or less. I would always wander back after about three hours, wet and near hypothermia. At one point, I had crossed a river in my blue jeans and sneakers up to my armpits. That was a typical Thursday afternoon for a whole semester. It earned me the nickname “Ranger Vic” for my total outdoor ineptitude.

Travel to and from Michigan Tech was always a leap of faith for anyone who didn’t own a vehicle—and I certainly did not have the money to keep a car I would only drive a couple times a year. Again, for lack of technology, the “Ride Board” ruled the day. This was a big corkboard in the Student Union that was a matchmaking service for drivers and riders. Looking back, frankly I’m surprised at how often I got a ride lined up with a single phone call. The local radio station also read them out over-the-air daily. In five years, I was never stranded nor stood up. Typically, it would be 5 guys in a mid-size car for the 10 hour run to Detroit. Only a single stop was allowed by protocol—gas, food, and bladder break in Gaylord, Michigan—the logical halfway point. Sometimes I managed a ride all the way home, but more often my parents would have to drive at least 45 minutes to some pickup location. Oddly, I never bothered to keep the same driver and no drivers ever came looking for me on later trips. Us passengers tried to sleep as much as possible and smalltalk was simply not done. The driver would usually have a cartridge of a dozen cassette pop music tapes and there was no point in picking one tape over another—by the end of trip we would listen to all of them end-to-end. When was the last time you listened to a whole album in one sitting? The one time I was allowed to take a driving shift, I landed the car in a snowbank at 3am about 40 miles out of St. Ignace. By a miracle, a guy with a truck and winch showed up and hauled us out of the snow with hardly a word. I emptied out the contents of my wallet—about $15—handed it to him, and apologized that I couldn’t do better. I will never forget his kindness or that night.

Only a couple things kept my freshman year from becoming an unmitigated disaster. First was the exodus of the third roommate, Pete, to a frat house. He had become intolerably snobby after rushing the frat and Brian and I quickly grew to despise him. When we were down to two, Brian and I had no trouble getting along, we were both easygoing and his girlfriend Julie kept him busy enough, so we weren’t jammed together.

The other piece of my salvation was a grand startup idea called “Michigan Tech Software” that would use legions of student programmers to compete in the commercial market. As we were a spinoff, with no legal ties, apparently, we weren’t bound by any type of non-profit corporation rules. Tim Nelson, the president, landed a huge contract for online self-teaching software to be delivered on brand new color graphics terminals from DEC called GiGis. It was a crackpot idea, but it employed more than two dozen of us computer science students of all classes from freshman to senior over the summer semester.

Summer in the Copper Country was as glorious as I had remembered from living there at age 15. I managed to score half-price off-campus housing at the closest available frat house and thus came my introduction to hashish and other wonder drugs. It was huge Victorian monster of a house that probably held 30 people during the school year but there were only six of us for the summer. We had beer bashes on the roof facing US-41 almost every evening it seemed like. Like that famous Beatles concert at Apple Studio, we setup the speakers on the roof and brought down the police at once. Our most audacious act I suppose was shelling the bank across the highway with bottlerockets launched from the aptly named “turret room”. One of the guys was an Army ROTC rappelling instructor and he took us out one Saturday for a rappel down Douglas Houghton Falls. To this day, I cannot believe that I suspended myself 50 feet above rocks, but I did so wearing only sweats and an improved rope harness.

We had several other misadventures that summer. We were rounded up by a local farmer to help him bring in his hay harvest, which was three hours of backbreaking work. We didn’t actually negotiate for wages in advance so we were “paid” with a home-cooked meal. None of us ever spoke of that Friday evening again. The scariest event was when we took Jim’s Edsel over to the public beach in Hancock for some harmless summer fun. Little did we know that his parking brake was dead and the car lurched down toward the beach within minutes of our arrival. A woman was struck by the car but I think she did not get a serious injury. Even so, the townies were massing with pitchforks and torches and were about to teach us stupid tech toots a lesson. We sensed the vibe and managed to escape without a Deliverance re-enactment.

The MTU Software crew became my true people and I enjoyed being able to work and earn money for college year-round. I’m still in contact with a couple of them and roomed with some of them in subsequent years off-campus. If I had a couple hours between classes, then I’d do some programming at the Hamar House, an old home landlocked in the middle of campus between DHH and Fisher Hall, so it was never more than a three-minute walk from where my classes were. Without that job and those people, I’m sure I wouldn’t have made it the four years. It took me a whole year to “orient” myself (Orienteering not withstanding) but by September 1983, I felt like I belonged, and I could do it, no matter what. We did some cool projects over the years, including a revolutionary standalone interactive kiosk for Uniroyal tire selection that included a LaserDisc player. It was heady stuff for 1985 technology. We were always after the “next big thing” and somehow it was always out of reach.

Taking it a bit slower than other students, due to my never-ending struggle with the capstone Differential Equations class, I graduated with a small class in November 1986, just six months behind schedule. My mom and dad came up for the first and only trip together that they would make in twenty years. They were barely on speaking terms for as long as I could remember, so it boggles my mind that they endured a 20 hour roundtrip to see me. My father passed away a mere 10 years later.

I had already secured a place in the grad school to go on for my Master’s in Computer Science. Everything was in the cards for that, except for the fact that MTU Software was to go broke in February of 1987 and took my job with it. I couldn’t see myself teaching undergraduate classes; I was much too shy for that and had never had a conversation with an adviser in person. The final nail in my U.P. experience was the return of a medical issue I had just before my freshman year. I sought out a local G.P. finally and he had no idea what I should do about it, so I resigned after one semester complete of grad school, moved back to Detroit, got properly treated, took up a fulltime software development job and that was the end of my U.P. experience.

Victor R. Volkman is a graduate of Michigan Technological University (class of ’86) and is the current president of the Upper Michigan Publishers and Authors Association (UPPAA). He is senior editor at Modern History Press, publisher of the UP Reader. He knows in his heart that he can never be a yooper because real yoopers are born—not made.

Historical - Mackinac Island man & woman top hat - circa 1880

Up In Michigan

by Edd Tury

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

—Ernest Hemingway

When my grandfather put a bullet in his head it stayed there. Not like Hemingway, who Grandpa greatly admired. No big mess for some poor soul to clean up. Cranial vault intact, but just as dead. He always liked precision. Grandpa, not Hemingway. Well, Hemingway too, at least in his prose. So, when Grandpa decided it was time to check out, he simply put his special cartridge in his deer rifle, sucked the barrel, and pushed the trigger. Clean and dead.

Grandpa sometimes talked about a special cartridge, but I never knew what he meant. Whenever I asked, he’d just say—you know, like I load for deer. A special round for a special job—and I’d say what job and he’d say—you’ll find out one day. It’s not important now. Remember what I told you about the right tool for the job? A bullet is just a tool. You wouldn’t shoot a deer with an elephant gun, now, would you? And I’d just scratch my head and say the deer would sure be dead and Grandpa would say—yeah, but you’d ruin half the meat.

Ever since I was a kid, I had been fascinated by the things my grandpa did and the way he did them. Early on, I knew Grandpa loved deer hunting, deer camp, guns, and some writer named Ernest Hemingway. When I got older, and actually read some Hemingway, I wasn’t too impressed; Grandpa and I had some heated discussions about what was good writing and what wasn’t.

Grandpa asked, “What was your English teacher’s name?”

“What teacher?”

“The one that read the first line of some Hemingway story and made fun of it, telling you what a bunch of dull, macho crap it was.” He had me there. It was my eleventh-grade Advanced Lit teacher.

“Mr. Hall. How’d you know?”

“I just know. I had a high school English teacher who called Carl Sandburg Carl Sandhog and made fun of every one of his famous poems. He’d read ‘the fog comes on little cat feet’ in the most smarmy voice and the whole class would laugh. As if we knew what we were laughing at. I hated Sandburg for years until I decided to reread him. For a laugh you know. I found I liked a lot of it. Had I gotten stupider? Or maybe just a little more open minded, a little more willing to trust my instincts and not care what someone else thinks.”

So, of course, I went back and reread Hemingway, trying hard to keep an open mind. Except now I had my grandfather’s bias to contend with. I guess my old prejudices and the new influence sort of canceled because I found myself reading the stories with the feeling that I was reading them for the first time. I liked much of it; some I loved; some I thought missed the mark. All seemed extremely well crafted and the short, declarative sentences, so maligned by my eleventh-grade teacher, revealed their clarity to my newly unblinded eyes. Grandpa never even said ‘I told you so’ when we had our first Hemingway discussion after my rereads. He was cool.

I remember one of the first discussions we had was about “The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber.” I think it was Grandpa’s favorite Hemingway short story, though he never said it. I told him that it was a good story, but I found it a little depressing.

“Depressing?” he asked. “Why is that?”

“Well,” I said, “Here’s this spineless wimp finally finds his balls and his wife offs him.”

“Well, that’s true but ol’ Frankie doesn’t get depressed about it—he’s dead. His last moments were his happiest ever. Besides, life’s like that. Few happy endings. A good story leaves you thinking. That’s what I think.”

I knew he was right. I didn’t care for stories that were too ‘easy’, too ready to make you forget them once you were done with them. We discussed a lot of Hemingway’s work, but not to the exclusion of other writers. We had lively discussions about Steinbeck’s humor and Faulkner’s density. Most often we agreed, but not always. I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed arguing more than Grandpa. He didn’t consider them arguments. Debates, he called them. And they were oftentimes heated, with raised voices and table thumping. Occasionally, Mom or Dad would come down to the basement where these debates took place, to make sure everything was all right. It always was—our faces were just redder than usual.

The best times, though, were at deer camp. Grandpa loved to hunt and loved to camp. He always seemed younger there. Even later, when the fire in his debates grew smaller and his voice slowed, he would seem to step back in time a decade or so when the tent was pitched, the fire started, and all that was left to do was to shoot the bull and wait for opening day.

I started hunting when I was fourteen and Grandpa was sixty. For the first ten years we hunted together, I never thought of him as old. He moved through the woods with grace and pleasure—fast if need be; slow as a stalking cat if the situation called for that. He taught me all I know about hunting whitetails. For the most part it was by observation—but if I screwed up, he’d tell me about it that night. In front of the wood stove, when dinner was over and the dishes cleaned up, it would be, “Jesus Christ, what the hell were you thinking out there today? Just because you’re bored you don’t get up and stroll around. I know I pushed a buck past your blind. But were you in your blind? No, you were screwing around at the swamp edge.” My dad would just laugh. He’d been through it all before.

The lessons happened early in my hunting career. I learned fast. Partly because I didn’t like Grandpa yelling at me and partly because I really enjoyed deer hunting and studied it. My dad enjoyed it; the hunt and the camp, but it never became a passion for him. It did for me, just as it was for Grandpa. We had twenty good years.

Up until Grandpa was seventy-five years old, he held the camp record for the biggest buck our camp had ever taken. That year I shot a bigger one and Grandpa couldn’t stop grinning. It was a huge deer, both body and antlers and, to tell the truth, I really did outsmart the son of a gun.

I had to tell the story a dozen times that night around the wood stove. Dad was happy for me because he understood what it meant. Grandpa rocked back and forth on his camp chair sipping scotch and, when he wasn’t asking questions, grinning from ear to ear.

“Fell in his tracks?”, he asked.

“Yes sir,” I said. “Hit him in the shoulder where you showed me.”

“Didn’t move?”

“His leg twitched, but that was it,” I answered. “Those handloads are the right tool.”

Grandpa rocked and grinned some more. Later, when Grandpa crawled into his sleeping bag, he said he was going to sleep in and not to wake him in the morning. In sixteen years, this was the first time he ever did this.

Well, no one in camp got up the next morning; too much celebrating. It was okay, we had a great buck on the buck pole. I think we had breakfast around noon.

We were poking around camp, cleaning up and having a little hair of the dog, when Grandpa asked me if I ever read Baker’s biography of Hemingway. I said I had, and he asked if I read all the notes in the back of the book. I said no.

“Well, when old Ernie decided it was time to go, he loaded a shotgun, a twelve-gauge double barrel, stood in the porch of his home, put the barrels in his mouth, and pushed down the triggers. Now, that’s a sure way to go and I doubt he suffered much, although he was suffering plenty beforehand. Enough to make it not worth the trouble to go on. Anyway, it explains in Baker’s footnotes that he blew out his rear cranial vault which is just fancy talk for splattering your brains all over the wall, taking the back half of your head with it. Pretty disgusting picture don’t you think?”

Well, no kidding. I knew he had killed himself that way, but Grandpa made it too vivid, and the image stayed with me awhile. I did think of the people who had to clean up the mess.

“If someone’s going to do themselves in, they should have a little respect for those left behind. It doesn’t have to be messy. Even if a bullet to the brain is the method of choice.”

I let that stand.

After Grandpa turned seventy-six, he seemed to deteriorate. No, deteriorate isn’t the right word. Slow down doesn’t cut it either. He just flat out got old in a hurry. It was hard to watch, and I tried to deny it, but it was there. Deer camp was still fun, though Grandpa didn’t go in the woods near as much. Our ‘debates’ were still lively but lacked a lot of the table thumping I used to look forward to. Dad helped. When we discussed Grandpa and his ‘slowing down’ he reminded me that it’s a natural thing. No one gets out alive. Just hope he’s happy to the end and doesn’t suffer. I was depressed for a week.

Grandpa turned eighty in the spring and buried Grandma. Sixty years of marriage gone in a failed heartbeat. Grandpa started trembling that summer, fingers shaking and hands unsure. It was sad to see.

Grandpa called me down to the basement late that summer and said he needed help. Of course, I was going to do anything I could. He said it was time to test his newest tool, his special load. I said, okay, and how could I help? He said go get five honeydew melons. Huh? Just do it, he said, and I did.

As I drove to the market, it hit me what was going on. The feeling in my gut was almost too much to bear. I pulled over thinking I was going to throw up. That sweaty, clammy feeling lasted a long time before I realized there was nothing I could do but help. What was going to happen was going to happen whether I was there or not. I cried all the way to Grandpa’s.

“Do you know what’s going on?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re one tough son-of-a-bitch, like Hemingway. I love you and wish you wouldn’t do this. You want to turn me into Kevorkian but I don’t want to. Can’t you just let things happen?”

My tears wouldn’t stop.

“I’m just testing a load. That’s all. Besides, someday you’ll learn that it isn’t the dying that’s so scary—it’s the losing control; the feeling that things have gotten away. I don’t ever want to know that feeling. I refuse to be a burden to anybody.”

“Thus, your special round.”

“Yeah, well, these shaky hands won’t be able to do anything soon. Help me out here. Do what I say.”

So, I followed his instructions and we built ten rounds of ammunition, two each of five different loads. A round of ammunition is a simple device. A brass case holds a primer in its rear end and a bullet in its mouth. The body is filled with gunpowder. Different types of ammunition are built to do different jobs. A military round typically carries a bullet with a full metal jacket—designed to maintain its shape while it drills a clean hole through the enemy’s flesh. Non-lethal hits, then, don’t destroy a lot of tissue and the wounded can be treated and live to be shot another day. It’s a Geneva Convention thing.

Hunting bullets, however, are designed to maximize shock and tissue damage. This is achieved by designing bullets that expand when they traverse flesh, then sending them out the barrel at extreme velocities. A seven-millimeter diameter hollow point, expanding bullet traveling at 3000 feet per second will exit a deer’s chest, leaving a hole four times that size and a hell of a wound channel. The same bullet traveling half as fast may stay in the animal, perhaps lodged against a far rib. Grandpa loaded his ammo hot. An exit wound leaves a good blood trail in case the deer runs after the hit. The new rounds had half the powder Grandpa normally used and the bullets he selected were light and frangible—something one might use to shoot a coyote.

Out at the gun club, I set out the melons and Grandpa proceeded to shoot each one at very close range. The fourth melon seemed to be the one. The bullet came to rest against the far side husk turning the inside into melon goo. Grandpa put the matching round in his shirt pocket and threw the others into the weeds. I fought off the urge to retch.

I was torn, of course. Grandpa never swore me to secrecy, but in a way he did. We had a bond that needed no words and, as much as I wanted to run to dad and talk, I just couldn’t do it. Looking back, I think it’s because I didn’t believe it was going to happen.

During our last debate, before deer season, I looked Grandpa in the eye and said, “Your special handload has a shelf life of at least twenty years.”

“I don’t.”

“Just promise me this,” I said. “Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You’re in good shape. A lot of people love you.”

“I know they do, and I know how I feel. It’s how I feel at deer camp that matters to me now. People don’t go on forever. Like I said before, no one wants to be a burden. Especially not me. We’ve had a lot of good years and I really don’t care to have my favorite grandson see me rot while I’m breathing.”

I couldn’t speak.

The tent looked great, as it always did, pitched among the pines. With the opener on a Monday, we had an opportunity to pitch camp a day early and took it. It was an extra day to kick around camp, drink beer, smoke cigars, tell lies and laugh our asses off. Grandpa was in great spirits; he didn’t seem to shake so much. During the two days in camp before opening day, I spent a lot of time tending to Grandpa. So much so that he told me to ease up, which stung of course, but I did. He was as happy as I had ever seen him. Even dad commented on Grandpa’s spirits and said he thought he’d hunt ‘til he’s a hundred. My stomach hurt.

Opening morning in deer camp is what keeps hunters hunting. The anticipation is palpable. Breakfast tastes great despite being wolfed down in minutes. Last minute gear checks are done and last-minute visits to the open-air john are cursed and laughed at.

I watched Grandpa as he got ready for the day’s hunt. I tried to catch him slipping his special round into his pocket, but of course I knew that it was probably already there.

We were all on post before dawn and the sound of gunfire increased with the eastern light. I had trouble concentrating, waiting for Grandpa’s rifle to go off due west of me, but the only one in our group to shoot was my uncle, who killed a dandy eight pointer at eight-thirty in the morning. I relaxed as the day went on, thinking Grandpa had second thoughts.

That night around the campfire, as we toasted my uncle’s buck, Grandpa caught me staring at him. He sidled over to where I stood sipping my scotch. “You don’t think I’d spoil opening day, do you?” I just whispered, “I guess not.”

“Jesus,” he said, “Quit thinking about me. My time is past. Your time is now. Have fun. Remember the good times. Hug your dad, hug your uncle, hug me.” And I did.

The next few days passed quickly, as camp days do. Dad killed a fat spike. Grandpa said he saw some deer but nothing worth shooting. I can’t remember what I saw or when I saw it, if I did, but by the last morning I was convinced I’d hunt another year with Grandpa. Then I heard the pop of Grandpa’s reduced load. I lost my breakfast in the snow and fought back tears all the way to his blind.

He was dead. His rifle lay between his knees. I swear he was smiling. There was no blood. The snow was white, and the woods were quiet. No tears. Just feelings of infinite sadness and infinite joy, exploding in a heart expanding to hold them. I knelt on one knee and put my hand on his boot. Then I went for my dad.

Grandpa left a note. It was short with short sentences. It said: “Hemingway was a jerk. He lived a great life. But no better than mine. He really screwed up in the end. Who wants to clean up that kind of mess? Don’t cry. I’m feeling less pain than you. Carry me out, burn me up, bring my ashes back next November. Toast me when you spread me around these woods. Love, G.”

Edd Tury descended from Hungarian Gypsies. He is a Michigan native and lives in Charlevoix County. He is an electrical engineer and UM alumnus. Edd is an avid transcendentalist and enjoys forest bathing in unpeopled spaces. His writing has appeared in many venues including the Detroit Metro Times, Michigan Out of Doors, Michigan Woods ‘n Waters and the Ann Arbor News. He is a founding member of Charlevoices Writers Group.

Historical - Cambria arrives in Escanaba

Lucy and Maud

Tyler Tichelaar

When Evan Robinson asked Maud Goldman to go out for a drink at Lyla Hopewell’s funeral luncheon, Maud was a little shocked. Not that drinking in the middle of the afternoon was wrong, and not because he asked her at a funeral. It was just that no man had ever asked her out before. What would her mother think?

But then Maud remembered it was the twenty-first century, and her mother had been dead for several years, and it wasn’t like she was a teenager anymore. Cripes, she was seventy-eight.

“Well,” she told Evan, unsure how to answer, “I don’t have a car with me. My cousin Ellen brought me.”

“I can drive you home,” Evan replied.

Evan seemed so confident. And he was handsome—always had been—even being gray now only made him look distinguished, and he wasn’t as overweight as most men his age. But what could such a dapper gentleman possibly see in her?

“All right,” she agreed, and then she smiled to make him think she really did want to go.

And she did want to go. But what would Lucy think? She’d have to tell Lucy. In fact, if she went, her sister would wonder why she had taken so long to come home. And, not surprisingly, when Maud went to explain to her cousin Ellen why she wouldn’t be leaving with her, Ellen’s response was, “What will Lucy say?”

“Could you just call her when you get home and explain for me?” asked Maud. Maud couldn’t call—she didn’t own a cellphone; after all, she was always home. Lucy had bought a Jitterbug off QVC, but that was six months ago, and it was still unopened in the box.

Ellen sort of wrinkled up the edge of her lip as if considering whether she wanted to get involved.

“Please,” said Maud.

“Okay,” Ellen gave in.

“Thank you!” said Maud, almost wanting to hug her in front of the few stragglers still at the funeral home.

A few minutes later, Maud was walking across the street to Vango’s with Evan Robinson. Whoever would have thought that she, Maud Goldman, an old maid who had always lived with her mother until her mother had died and now lived with her old spinster sister, would be seen in public with the handsome Evan Robinson, son of Matilda Blackmore, whose father had been a wealthy, ne’er-do-well banker? But unlike his grandfather, Evan appeared to be a gentleman.