“We Want Tick Shots! We Want Tick Shots!”

Mine is no scientific hypothesis. I’m not a scientist. Maybe it’s nothing but a hare-brained notion? Bear with me. (Or don’t.)

Start with what seems to be a rising incidence of Alzheimer and Alzheimer-like dementia in the U.S. Add the fact that ticks are at work enlarging their continental territory. Now turn to an article on ticks and tick-borne diseases in the July 2018 issue of Consumer Reports, where we see that symptoms of Lyme disease can include mental confusion and memory problems. 

“Most of the time,” the article notes, “Lyme symptoms resolve after a short course of antibiotics.” 

Often, however, the tick victim is unaware of the bite — or perhaps aware of being bitten, but then no rash appears — and in either case, Lyme disease may occur but not be diagnosed, let alone treated. 

Now you see where I’m going with this. 

The article concludes with the terrifying statement that “we still haven’t even begun to grasp the extent of the [tick[ problem” (given that the tick’s ability to spread allergy has only recently been discovered). Far-from-simple-or-inexpensive measures may offer hope in the future by reducing deer and mouse populations, editing tick genes, etc. What made me exclaim out loud in disbelief and frustration, however, was this parenthetical (can you believe it?) paragraph: 

(A previous vaccine was discontinued because of a lack of demand and reports of side effects such as arthritis, though research showed that arthritis wasn’t in fact more common in people who had been vaccinated.) 

Did you read that paragraph carefully? You might, possibly, have developed arthritis after having had this vaccine, but you would have been just as likely to develop arthritis without the vaccine! Was it reports of arthritis that led to “lack of demand” (as specious claims linking autism to childhood immunizations kicked off a wave of childhood vaccination-avoidance among impressionable parents), or did the Lyme vaccine simply come out before the spread of disease-bearing ticks (and accompanying tick anxiety) reached levels high enough to generate demand? Because I ask you, who would not want a vaccine against Lyme disease?

I realize I’ve strayed from my original idea about a possible connection between ticks and dementia. Forgive me. Tick-phobia makes me a little crazy here in the “Upper Midwest,” one of the regions noted for spreading tick-borne diseases. But can we start a movement now? 

“We want tick shots! We want tick shots!” 

Let me through, please, to the head of the line!

Name This Plant -- Then Pull It Up!

This is an enormous colony of the dreaded garlic mustard, across from north Lake Leelanau between Leland and Northport, not too far north of the Clay Cliffs conservancy trail. Last year it looked to me as if herbicide had been applied to this area; if so, it failed in its purpose. The colony on M-22 looks to be flourishing this spring, and even expanding its territory. I noticed new clumps between this large colony and the drive to the Clay Cliffs parking lot.

In the same family as toothwort (and cabbage, Brussels sprouts, etc.), Alliaria petiolata is yet another member of the Brassicaceae family. “Especially invasive in forests,” says the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Wildflowers,

it can become so abundant as do dominate the ground layer, adversely affecting the native species.The garlic-flavored leaves are edible.

The most effective method I know of for discouraging this plant (and not killing anything else around it that has managed to survive) is to pull it up by the roots. It comes up easily (I pulled garlic mustard with a friend in her woods a couple years in a row, and there is very little there now), and if you want to make garlic mustard pesto with the leaves, go right ahead. Just don’t compost the plants you don’t eat, or they will take over your garden, and you’ll have nothing else!

The Road to the Cow Town

Return to the West, III: The Road to the Cow Town

No matter where else a day might take us, how far afield, morning in southeast Arizona in early 2015 always led first from Dos Cabezas, our little ghost town hideaway, to Willcox, the cow town fourteen miles up Highway 186, often with a stop on the way, maybe five miles from the cabin, where we had good cell phone reception (lacking in the ghost town). The first trips felt long, but as time went by the distance grew ever shorter.

Moving or standing still, there was a lot to see along the way, and all of it, every square inch, entirely different from Michigan. One of the first things I taught myself was how to distinguish yucca from agave from sotol. Gradually we accumulated subtle landmarks invisible to us on the first few trips – certain striking plants; traces of an old railroad bed; a dry wash here or a dirt road there; a death memorial near a barbed wire fence; finally, most notably, the edge of the playa. If there were clouds in the sky, they never held their shapes or formations for long but could be seen for miles and explored visually, like the mountains. Regarding mountains, as navigator and reader of maps it was up to me to learn the names of the ranges in our larger neighborhood -- Chiricahuas, Dos Cabezas, Pinalenos, Dragoons -- and to keep us oriented according to where we were in relation to the different ranges, the way we keep oriented here at home in Michigan by our relationship to lakes.

In the Arizona landscape, basically open to the sky and far from lush with vegetation, my vision became more acute once acclimated. I developed the ability to discern detail and movement over long distances and was gradually able to see horses far away before lifting binoculars to my eyes to verify the sighting. Other presences and movements were more obvious: a pickup truck speeding along a dirt road would raise a cloud of dust visible for miles; large livestock gates across private roads, usually closed and locked, drew our eyes if swung open. Without knowing our neighbors, we watched them and knew they were watching us, too. People left each other alone, but there was no place to hide. We kept a lookout for the clean, bright white trucks driven by Border Patrol officers, and after only a few days one officer, recognizing our car, started waving to us each morning as we went by. That’s the little, casual, Western lift-of-an-index-finger wave, of course.

There were certain points along the road where we could often expect to see livestock grazing. If they were not there, we wondered who had been moving cows, and why? One morning it was clear that cows and calves had been separated for the first time, a significant day on the ranching calendar. Mothers were on one side of the fence, bawling babies on the other. How many square miles of dry, inhospitable scrub must be needed to raise a single animal? One modest home place was noteworthy for its stacks of hay bales, a sizable investment with hay running as high that year as $21 a bale.

Roadrunner! Always droll and delightful....

(Another time, returning from a day trip down to Douglas and Agua Prieta, Sonora, with a visiting friend, she and I saw mule deer running parallel to the road, followed shortly afterward by coyote.)

Then, approaching Willcox, the vast, empty playa opened out in mystery. Always so tantalizingly near and yet so impossibly far from the road, the playa simultaneously called to us and denied us access. Every time we passed we strained to see farther, more than once teased by what appeared to be water in the distance, the old lake reasserting its identity in modern time. Mirage? Much later, on another road, on the other side of the playa, we found a bird-viewing area that showed, yes, water on the other side, a modern remnant of lake. But that is another story.

A great, white, dry, ancient lakebed, the playa seemed to have its own weather systems. Clouds over the playa were different from clouds over surrounding land. Once or twice winds whipped up a dust storm, turning the playa into a Saharan hell and then carrying that hell out past the lakebed, across the roads and into the town of Willcox. When that happened, the clouds of airborne dust could be seen from fifty miles away on the expressway. The playa had other aspects of hell, too, having been used for bombing practice and still containing unexploded ordnance. And yet it held fascination for us that was never dispelled.

On the edge of Willcox, past a straggling line of deserted buildings, others with only questionable signs of occupancy, and the first outlying businesses of the town, a road off the highway promised both golf course and bird viewing area. Turn left, and along the right side of the side road was high, strong, serious fence topped with razor wire. Inside the fenced compound stood modern buildings, surrounded by extensive parking lots and many shiny white vehicles. This was the U.S. Border Patrol’s very physical presence. (They might be the town’s largest employer.) Farther down the same road, on the other side, smaller, more meanly fenced areas guarded dilapidated rusty trucks and trailers and campers until finally the road ended in a large, open, dusty loop around Willcox Lake, a local paradise for birds and birders.

Cattle grazed nearby, the Dos Cabezas peaks rose in the distance, and regularly on winter afternoons platoons of sandhill cranes came in to land and feed and rest and socialize. The number of birds was not as overwhelming as at the much larger Whitewater Draw to the south but impressive nonetheless. First came their calls. Impatiently scanning the sky, one for a long time saw nothing, then at last small, dark shapes. Very high in the sky. It seemed to take forever for the birds to appear as themselves, circling and calling and wheeling gradually lower and lower and lower until they finally landed. There were other birds, too, varieties of ducks and grebes, my (as I thought of him) loggerhead shrike, and once, thrillingly, a vermilion flycatcher.

But we did not usually stop to view birds on our way into town. That was for later.

Houses. Certain favorites among them each of us had, chosen for a porch or roof style or trees in the yard, but all were modest in the extreme. The railroad tracks. Feed store to the left, wine-tasting rooms in attractive small bungalows to the right, and on the other side of the tracks, the depot, the park, and the old buildings of the original downtown. Whether or not we had to wait for a train, reaching the railroad tracks and seeing Willcox on the other side always made me smile.

How Long Is a Day?

Return to the West, II: How Long Is a Day?

Information on times for sunrise and sunset are readily available for any intersection of latitude and longitude, for any day of the year, but clock times given don’t take into account trees, hills, mountains, or canyons. Here in Michigan, someone living deep in the woods, west of a high, wooded ridge will experience sunrise much later than a Lake Huron shoreline dweller. Dark comes earlier in the woods, too. The beginning and end of a Michigan day are gradual, anyway, even along the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, often with subtle, soft edges and muted tints.

Desert and mountain sunrises and sunsets are more tropical – at least, from what I’ve read of the tropics. They are not, except on the occasional cloudy morning or evening, long drawn-out affairs. The sky grows light before the sun itself appears, but once up that sun is anything but subtle. So, too, when it drops below the western horizon at day’s end, dark is a sudden presence. (Absence of light = presence of dark.)

On this spring Sunday in northern Michigan, with cold, grey skies promising a gloomy day, precipitation probable, I remember very different mornings, those of our ghost town cabin in the high desert. In Dos Cabezas, if I woke when the sky was still dark, the lights of distant houses and ranches winked against the blackness, as they had the evening before. Slowly, then, gradually, unrelieved blackness would give way to indistinct, shadowy hills. At first the mountains were more suspicion than reality, themselves untrustworthy, but when at last the sun set fire to the mountain horizon the light would be instantly implacable, flat and white and pitiless, and the reality of the mountains revealed – falsely, of course, as we know from geology lessons -- as immutable.

After a night cold enough to make gas heat welcome in the cabin, morning remained cool enough that I habitually wore a heavy, rough suede jacket lined with wool fleece for the day’s initial sortie, a walk with my dog down into the dry wash. The Philadelphia Wash, one of the neighbors called it. Like rivers and creeks in Michigan, the washes in Arizona have names, though it is generally only the locals who know them. In summer storms dangerous torrents of water from the mountains rush through: in winter only patterns in the sand show where water sometimes flows. The wash was easier walking than the desert itself, because beyond the wash one must thread carefully through mesquite and catclaw (jacket and boots necessary protection), and the ground throughout our part of Dos Cabezas was littered with strands and pieces of rusty barbed wire, rusty old tin cans, and all kinds of broken glass, remnants of an old dump as well as the ghost town itself, with wire fences strung to keep cows out of various parcels of property.

Down in the dry wash, in midwinter, where frost inhabited shaded areas until they were reached by sunlight, morning’s bird was the pyruloxxia, Arizona’s “silver cardinal,” singing from bare branches of leafless winter scrub oaks. The color palette of the winter high desert was limited to dusty browns and greys and grey-greens, relieved only by the bright green of creosote bush. Day or night, the smell was of dust. Sometimes, also, if they were near the cabin, there was the living fragrance of cows. The creosote bush, if brushed against, had its own strong smell, of course, but the primary smells were, first dust, second cows.

(Later in the season, furry leaves of the little bajada lupine, a beautiful flower at close range but low and small enough to be easily overlooked, offered drops of dew, held carefully like transparent glass beads. Tiny, delicate toadflax and stands of frail desert leeks, both with heavenly light-blue flowers, cast slender shadows on the ground. Primrose opened wide to the morning, some yellow, others almost white but lightly tinted pink. None of the early spring blooms of the high desert are large or showy. All are shy and close to the ground, living, it seems, on the scant moisture from morning dew.)

The heat of midday brought with it the illusion that the afternoon sun stood unchanging for hours, but spending those hours around the cabin dispelled the illusion, demonstrating by movement of shade that the sun too was moving across the cloudless sky. The front steps, facing south, however, were always in full sun, the tiny back deck, under an extension of the roof, looking off to the Cabezas, always shaded.

Every morning my first self-appointed task was to make coffee. As soon as darkness began to leak away, I would begin opening venetian blinds -- those on the east opened last and never all the way, because David liked to stay in bed later, the two west windows and one north over the sink all the way as soon as the sun was up.

Windows and blinds facing south were most judiciously and gradually adjusted, slats tilted to let in light but guard privacy (although the road was some distance from the cabin), the tilt monitored and changed little by little until finally maximum light streamed in. Before we left for the day’s adventures, however, we closed those south blinds tight, for while morning’s warmth was comforting, a full afternoon of sunlight would have turned the small cabin into an oven by later in the day.

When we came home in late afternoon, we would slide a few windows open from the bottom and open the south blinds partway, on a slant, permitting evening air to circulate until sunset (which came on early in January and gradually later as the weeks went by), when I closed all windows and blinds tight again, this time to hold in whatever of the day’s heat remained. As the season advanced, we also took to leaving the heavy front and back doors of the cabin open in the evenings so that air might pass through the cabin by way of the screen doors, taking away the heat of the day.

During the day, a large mirror above the gas heater faced the front door, and the mirror would reflect and intensify the south light in the cabin’s interior. There was no excluding the sun. Even with the blinds fully closed, the days were awash in light. Meanwhile, monitoring and adjusting light and air through windows and blinds was an integral part of each desert day’s ritual, and I relished the task, set for me by the sun and mountains rather than by any capricious human mandate.

At night, against the endless black of the sky, the shining stars far outnumbered those even in our northern Michigan sky, while cows continued to shuffle around the cabin, grazing in the dark. Off in the distance rose a coyote chorus, sounding much farther from the cabin than our northern Michigan coyotes sound from our old farmhouse, where they seem to be serenading us from below our bedroom window, though it’s doubtful they are any closer than the willow-lined creek. 

Stars and coyotes in the high desert – so familiar, so like home, and yet reminding us constantly that we were somewhere else, very far from home.

Longings for Elsewhere

Return to the West I: Longings for Elsewhere

During my midlife graduate study of philosophy at the University of Illinois, from time to time I was invited to francophone dinner parties given by the bilingual secretary of the French Department, whom I knew through mutual friends. Besides Americans for whom French was a second language, guests were visitors to the Illinois prairie from Canada, Belgium, Algeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and other French-speaking African countries, as well as from France. Those international evenings granted all of us a most welcome temporary illusion – that of being in Paris, dream capital for all enamored of the French language and culture.

When I had first arrived in town, I’d been told that Champaign-Urbana was a wonderful place to “get work done” because there were “no distractions.” While scholars at the Chicago campus might be challenged by temptations of the city itself, no such danger existed downstate.

After one of her delightful dinner evenings, my French-speaking hostess remarked rhapsodically, intending neither irony nor humor, “Champaign-Urbana is such a wonderful place! There are so many people here who desire to be elsewhere!”

Desiring to be elsewhere....

What I remember of my birth state, South Dakota, comes from a later visit, a camping trip in my seventeenth summer. My memories of growing up center instead on Joliet, Illinois, and while the memories are far from being nightmares, for years there I longed to escape, and once escaped have never contemplated permanent return. As a child, I spent long, dreamy hours on the front porch, gazing west across the cornfields on the other side of the road (soybeans in alternate years), yearning for wild open spaces where I would not be hemmed in by suburban streets and land cultivated for agricultural crops. No one would have known it to look at me, but in my imagination I rode a galloping horse toward the setting sun.

But it is no fault intrinsic to Illinois that the Land of Lincoln felt like a prison for me. Illinois was cast in that thankless role in my personal story, I see now, because of the facts of childhood dependency, adolescent longing, and, later, the suffocating constrictions of graduate study. No doubt I would have had the same longings for escape in Albany or Phoenix, had circumstances other than place been the same.

For years, Michigan was the dream. From the time I was twelve years old, our family camping trips took place along the Lake Michigan shoreline from Indiana to the Straits of Mackinac. Camping – vacation -- escapes from school and housework and all ordinary strictures of urban/suburban life. Sun or rain, regardless of temperature, in Michigan we lived the outdoor life that fueled my dreams, so it is little wonder I saw Michigan as embodying those dreams, that life. At the age of eighteen, I moved to Michigan at last.

Having a dream is one thing. Living it is another. Reality is always a mix of light and shadow. But I have not been disappointed living the dream. Michigan is home.

It took a while, but working year after year in jobs often experienced as miserable servitude I managed at last to find a way of being in the world that has remained with me, for the most part, ever since. That is, wherever I am, living or visiting, I try to be fully. After all, if I could afford to travel endlessly, would I not devour every strange sight and sound and make the most of every moment? So why not do that wherever my here is on any given day?

In Kalamazoo, then, on long walks or bus rides through the city, I came to see every building and alley and tree, in every detail, as unique and fascinating and delightfully foreign. The same was true for me of Cincinnati during two years I spent there. In the beautiful northern Michigan county where I have lived and worked now for over two decades, I am astonished at how many people will spend hours puffing away at indoor exercise rather than walking the roads and woods around them.

There is so much to see in the world, and the scenes are never the same two days in a row – they change from one hour to the next. For every one of us, life is too short to contain all possible experiences, and these are not limited to sight alone, either. I have imagined being without sight, without hearing, and how much delight would remain in the fragrance and touch of a June breeze here at home, sitting outdoors below the linden tree in bloom.

“We’re here now” has been my mantra for years. Being here is not something I want to miss.

And yet – and yet -- .

By December of 2014 we had been four years at home without any significant travel or time away when unexpectedly a possibility for adventure appeared. Someone we knew owned a cabin in southern Arizona, and we could rent it for the winter. The very modest price put it within our reach; the price was modest in keeping with the cabin and its location. We would know no one and have few neighbors -- all the better, as far as I was concerned, because as soon as the property owner casually tossed off the phrases “ghost town,” “high desert,” and “open range,” my heart throbbed with old cowgirl dreams.

I had not, as an adult, yearned for Arizona. If anything, to be honest, I was somewhat impatient with Michigan friends who jumped ship for the winter to head for the sunny warmth of the Southwest. Certainly, I had no desire to spend months quarantined in a trailer park or a condo, but a ghost town a mile above sea level with cattle roaming through the yard? Vivid images filled my imagination, and while negotiations were in abeyance it seemed that all my happiness depended on spending winter in the high desert.

We went. We saw. We explored. I fell in love. In the spring we came home again. That was then, and this is now.

Home happiness has never kept us from having travel dreams. Over the years we made actual travels, too,. One September we flew to France, a place we had each loved for a long time, finally joining our separate loves of Paris and discovering together new regions to the south. Another year, in the spring, we drove across the Canadian Shield to Montreal, an exciting and cosmopolitan North American City it had long been my dream to visit. The Florida Everglades were wildly different from northern Michigan, as was the fascinating Gulf Coast, where we spent a couple of winters (yes, it must be admitted – winters away from Michigan) in the tiny “Old Florida” settlement of Aripeka. Coming home one spring from Florida, we passed through the vibrant beauty of Savannah, Georgia, which featured youth as well as venerable age. And twice we followed the course of the Mississippi from Illinois to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, crossing back and forth from one bank to the other, hungrily devouring every sight along every bend of the river.

Back at home, we relived adventures and dreamed of returning to this or that place, of relocating somewhere else for part of the year, and of exploring new places not yet experienced. The imaginary lives we have lived are beyond number. How many times was it love, and how often mere infatuation? And how does one tell, except over time?

As teasing, reluctant northern Michigan spring advances and retreats following a blessedly mild winter, I look forward to the joys of the unfolding season. Still, I must confess my heart was not fully here in the cold and snow just past. Again and again it returned to the scruffy, hardworking, struggling, unglamorous scenes of southeast Arizona: the ghost town, the playa, the cow town, the isolation, the open spaces, the cows and horses and mountains.

I wonder how I will feel when spring has fully arrived, when the woods are full of the sweet, ephemeral blooms of wildflowers, when it is time to dig and turn the garden and inhale the fragrance of living soil. Will those long-beloved sights and perfumes banish my longing for the dry, dusty high desert?

If not, can I possibly write a travelogue while going nowhere? Can I transport not only myself but also anyone who cares to read my words to another place? Can I convey anything of what enchanted me in a part of the country not known for wide appeal to tourists or snowbirds?

“Be thinkin’ about it,” the announcer kept telling to the young rodeo riders waiting their turn in the arena.

I’m thinkin’ about it.

Arrival of Autumn, 2014

Back road, Leelanau, October

One day in August the eye catches a few leaves turned prematurely red on an otherwise green tree, and that red-bearing twig is an intimation, but it is still August, after all, until August slides seamlessly into September, but even then every day is still full of warmth and sun or, if rain comes along, the thunderstorms come like summer rain, passing quickly, with returning blue sky and warm light and every petal and leaf and edge in sharp, bright focus and lake waters still inviting swimmers free of school, and it seems that this year, at last, impossible wishes will be granted, and summer will never end. The solstice slips by, unremarked. And then one day it comes.

People sniff the air like dogs. Some shiver and reach for sweaters, while others breathe deeply and smile. The air is damp and carries a rich, earthy aroma of mold and decay. All around, warm life appears wrapped in a thin, transparent, crackling sheet of interstellar cold, the heat and the cold held in tension, equally powerful, the outcome of their struggle still in doubt, while underfoot the soil is breathing so slowly it almost seems to be holding its breath, and by the edge of the woods, where yesterday there was only grass and Queen Anne’s-lace and milkweed, today there is a silent ring of small brown mushrooms, and further down the hill a cluster of puffballs, and out in the meadow the deep rose and pale lavender and deep purple of asters have opened to the late-arriving dawn.

“Indian summer,” say the tourists, happy for the fall color, but there’s been no hard frost yet. This is simply fall. Summer is over at last.

Maybe there will be Indian summer after the frost this year, and maybe there won’t. For now, apples, pumpkins and squash jostle late sweet corn, tomatoes and zucchini at the busy farmstands, and while the time for elderberries and blueberries is past, ripe blackberries can yet be plucked from unruly canes. (It’s too soon to gather wild grapes, which need a frost to make them sweet.) Hay has been cut and baled. Here and there sowings of winter rye green the fields.

Hawks sightings are rarer now, although for weeks the hawks were everywhere, along the highways and high above the fields. The memory of monarch butterflies, single individuals and rare, sparse clouds, is prolonged by shared photographs and stories, as Canada geese, the last of the season’s migrants to depart, gather on the ground to debate flight schedules.

Wild turkeys are gathering, also, in larger and larger groups, but they, like the chickadees, will stay throughout the winter. They are not fair-weather residents. The deer will stay, too, as will coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and all species of mouse. 

Ah, the mice! Whenever there is a sudden change in the weather, mice can be expected to invade the house. Days and nights suddenly become cold, the first fall nights of furnace heat, triggering a rush of immigrants, but months later on a winter thaw will bring them in again. As long as the weather is settled, they seem to stay put. It’s different with the coyotes, abroad on every calm night and still day, signaling to each other with yips and howls, coming nearer the house or at least seeming too, their voices perhaps only sounding closer as the air grows colder.

What Should Men Be Doing?

Yet another man is upset that women are not staying home with the kids. That’s where women belong, he tells us, not working outside the home to contribute financial support to the family.

Why isn’t this man out in the forest with a spear, hunting game? What is he doing all dressed up in front of a television camera? Is that the place Nature or God intended for a man? Mouth, mouth, mouth – where’s the muscle work?