The Cow Town Itself

Return to the West, IV: The Cow Town Itself

Our cabin in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas was fourteen miles from the town of Willcox, an almost daily destination because all the amenities of life were there: post office, library, laundromat, restaurants, a small bookshop run by the local Friends of the Library (the bookshop also sold local honey and jam), and a handful of little museums -- the Sulphur Valley Historical Museum, Chiricahua Regional Museum, a train museum at the old depot building (now City Hall), and two cowboy star museums, one for Rex Allen, the other Marty Robbins.

At the library I was able to send and receive e-mail daily, but the post office was equally important. I loved having our own p.o. box, our own keys, and since I sent nearly as much mail as we received, mailing letters to friends back in Michigan (and elsewhere) on a regular basis, the employees at the counter came to know me by name, as well as by sight. While our exchanges were never long or intimate, their friendly greetings gave me a sense of belonging to the area. Also, when I first arranged for the p.o. box I had to show our rental agreement, so the postal employees knew we were staying out in Dos Cabezas, not right in Willcox, and I liked that, too, especially the Mexican way they pronounced “Dos Cabezas.” Everywhere in town, it seemed, people flipped back and forth easily between English and Spanish, and that was another delight of the cow town for me.

So we visited library, post office, and bookstore every day but Sunday, when all were closed, and if we were returning to the cabin afterward, rather than setting off to explore farther afield, our last regular stop in town was Beverly’s. If we’d gone up to Safford or over to Benson, we might stop at Beverly’s on the way home, too. The business wasn’t called Beverly’s. A sign on the front of the building read “Motherlode Espresso,” and signs painted on the side seemed to call it something else -- maybe two somethings else -- it was always a little confusing, to tell the truth. But Beverly was in charge, it was her place, and if she didn’t get there (as happened once or twice), the place might not open at all. Beverly offered coffee, ice cream, magazines, books, and souvenirs. She had a cat named Sarah, and she always remembered that our dog’s name was Sarah, too. We usually took our coffee outside and sat at one of the shaded tables facing City Hall, with our Sarah at our feet.

It was exciting when a train came speeding through on the tracks the other side of City Hall (formerly the train depot), its whistle and rushing clatter deafening. Even better -- because this didn’t happen every day – was when a big pickup truck pulling a livestock trailer would park either directly in front of the shaded porch or across the street. Sometimes the trailer held cattle, sometimes saddled horses. On the best day there would be both cows and horses and a couple of cow dogs, to boot. I considered every inhaled breath a gift from the gods.

Even the obituaries in the weekly newspaper were different from those at home. Of one Arizona man it was written, tenderly, that he had “ridden trains all over the country” and “worked wherever he was needed.” Read between the lines on that one! A woman who had lived to a ripe old age had loved “quilting and working cows.”

Willcox boasts a weekly livestock auction, and it’s no small affair. Hour after hour, cowboys and cowgirls on horseback move cattle through pens and chutes into the auction ring to be bid up and sold by the hundredweight. It’s a serious, workaday scene. Big business. Ranchers and cowboys and families with little children cluster around the doorways or take seats on wooden bleachers that rise up from the auction floor so everyone has a good sight line. And the livestock pours through, in one side, out the other.

We were looking over the calf pens one morning, David in originally expensive but somewhat dusty and slightly scuffed old boots he’d found at a thrift store in Benson. He was wearing one of his most handsome cowboy hats. An older man holding a little grandson by the hand asked us, “You folks buyin’ today?” We were happy to feel we didn’t stand out conspicuously in the crowd as the outsiders we were.

Had my life been different, I could have loved running cattle (“working cows”). As it is, I have loved horses since babyhood. Two or three horses in roomy, shaded pens, saddled and ready for their turn to work, called me to them with their irresistible perfume. If a horse is shy, the trick is not to approach it, so I turned away and leaned my back against the fence. Sure enough, the horse stepped curiously over to nibble my shoulder. I was in heaven.

But even laundry days were pleasantly different in Arizona. The woman who ran the laundromat had grown up in Willcox, gone to live in either Tucson or Phoenix, and came back to raise her kids in her hometown. She was friendly and helpful. The place was clean and well run and never crowded. Out front next to a giant pot of cactus was a bench in the sun, and off to the side, between parking lot and sidewalk, was a food truck selling Sonoran hot dogs – not a Mexican thing but a border thing – piled high with beans and peppers.

A Michigan friend who works in real estate came to visit us in the high desert but remained immune to the allure of the cow town and the ghost town. I tried to impress her with what bargains were to be had, how many houses and other buildings were for sale. “But people would have to want to be here,” she objected, as if there were no attraction whatsoever. We experienced, she and I, mutual incomprehension. In town, I saw all the necessities of life: library, post office, restaurants (not a wide variety, it’s true), school, churches, community center, medical offices, museums, hardware store, feed store, and two large grocery stores. Outside town, not faraway at all, there were horses, cows, rangeland, open spaces, and mountains. No crowds, no heavy traffic. “And it’s the gateway to the Chiricahuas!” I said to clinch my argument. She remained unconvinced, and once again I realized (why does this continue to surprise me, after a lifetime of similar experiences?) that many of the things and places I love seem to lack appeal for most of my fellow Americans, who want what they see as “more.”

It’s true, no one would come to Willcox to shop for clothes or furniture. Most of the various wine-tasting rooms were not open during the time we were there. The old movie theatre only pulled in half a dozen audience members for a showing of a Paris opera, although it pretty nearly filled the house for a concert by the high school jazz band, and we had a fine time at both events. A huge, expansive feed store, the kind of thing I find wonderfully gratifying, is not high on most tourists’ lists of what they’re looking for in a winter getaway.

“It’s just a little cow town,” David would say with a shrug, when I sang the praises of Willcox. He understood how our visiting friend was seeing it.

But that – the “little cow town” -- was what I loved. Willcox is itself, not trying to be a center of fashion or high culture. There are plenty of cities and towns across the U.S. with upscale pretensions, and I would not trade the Willcox Livestock Auction for a Dior showroom or the Junior Rodeo for a dozen Starbucks or sushi restaurants.

Another friend of ours, years before and in another context altogether, commented that in the U.S. today, every place is like every other place. I disagreed then, and I disagree now. Willcox isn’t even like Benson, the next town west on the expressway. Benson doesn’t have a livestock auction or junior rodeo! Benson doesn’t have KT’s Market! Sure, Benson’s library is bigger, as is their library bookstore, but the library and bookstore in Willcox were plenty big enough for me. One day on the porch at Beverly’s we met a woman from Portal, Arizona, over the other side of the Chiricahuas, who bragged of the number of doctorate degrees clustered in that little mountain town in the winter. What do I care? I’ve lived in university towns and have plenty of degreed friends --and I love my friends! -- but do I need that everywhere I go? I don’t.

For the people of Willcox, I could wish for improvement in their local economy, but for myself I would hate to see its essential nature changed. “Cattle Capital of the World” is not a title to trade in for something easily found elsewhere.

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.

“Honey, We’re Shrinking Our Brains!”

A New Device

A telephone company representative – a very helpful, pleasant young man, and I’m not blaming him one bit – convinced me recently to go for a new plan on my business phone line. Under the new plan, I would receive for ninety-nine cents a “tablet” that would let me do do everything but make phone calls. Hell, why not?

The tablet came, and it was cute. The rep thought it would arrive charged up so I could use it immediately, but such was not the case. The dark screen remained dark that first afternoon. I plugged it in and turned back to my bound and printed books, leaving the device to take on energy enough to be useful.

I won’t go into all the reasons for my disenchantment, because only one is pertinent to my point today: There is no keyboard. Oh, there is a tiny representation of a keyboard, but one cannot type on it. Not the way I learned to type, using all my fingers and whaling away at 120 words a minute. Impossible. Not enough room for hands. One is limited to poking at letters with a forefinger and hitting the wrong “key” as often as the one aimed at.

“This device,” I announced, “is not going to be my new best friend!” At this stage of the game, in fact, I don’t see myself using it at all.

Portability vs. Literacy

“But it’s so portable!” a friend urged in its defense, and I know that people love their small devices. The tablet, smaller than a pad and larger than a phone, fits nicely into a little leather zippered notebook carrier that can also hold all manner of cards and papers. It’s lightweight. Cute. Small.

But it is no use whatsoever for the things I do routinely on my Macbook, such as writing this blog post.

The tiny representation of a keyboard, limiting the user to forefinger poking or the two-thumbs method I see many people employing, discourages complex development of thought or imagery. It is ideally matched with the character limitation of certain kinds of social media, granted -- and we are told those limitations can produce a new kind of “poetic” expression. But how often, really, are word-limited blasts carefully composed and rewritten and distilled into anything memorable? There is more to a haiku, after all, than the prescribed limit of its syllables.

Real writing is real work. James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” writing was not the author spewing out whatever passed through his own mind. It was his careful, line-by-line, imaginative construction of a created character’s thought process. Huge difference, kids.

The more difficult the mechanical composition process, the shorter the productions. The more instantaneous the forms produced, the greater the temptation to spew. To bypass reflection. To throw a rose or give the finger and move on, eschewing reason.

The debate over attention span continues: Is our attention span shrinking the more we read online, jumping from one screen to another like cats on a series of hot tin roofs? I submit that not only our reading habits but also our writing habits should be examined. Thinking, like sleep, can be shallow or deep. Lightweight devices, I’m thinking, encourage lightweight thought.

And no, not every communication needs to be a philosophical treatise. Of course not! But we don’t want to eliminate deep thought, do we? Make it obsolete?

A Shrinking Population?

When I began writing my first blog, Books in Northport, back in 2007, not everyone in the world was uploading photos and exchanging links on social media twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; instead, most of us who wrote blogs and followed those of other people dedicated a certain portion of each day to these pursuits. We composed our posts thoughtfully, and comments sections encouraged substantive exchange.

It’s different now. People around the world live every waking moment in the virtual world but “don’t have time” to read blogs (especially, I’m guessing, the wordy ones like this). It’s like asking people to leave a cocktail party for a public affairs lecture. Ugh! Where’s the fun?

The online audience in general is not shrinking, but what about the audience for serious discourse? Cat videos are ever popular. Super Bowl commercials are viewed over and over. T-shirt and bumper sticking sayings, ready-made, fly around Facebook. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun! Best part is, there’s no take-away, nothing to pack out and carry home.

This probably sounds like hectoring. I sound like a scold, saying other people should be more like me. I know how it sounds, but what I’m really saying is that it’s getting lonely on my virtual island. The cruise ships pass by, and tourists along the rail wave hankies and call out greetings, and that’s all very nice, but I am starving for deeper engagement. I am ready to listen to you, to read your words and reflect on them, and if you are willing to listen to me in turn, read my words, reflect on them, and respond in kind, you are a godsend! “We few, we happy few!” I want to shout on the rare occasion this occurs.

But I exaggerate. After all, I am blessed with a life partner whose active, nimble mind continues to engage with mine and with the world, and we have dear friends of whom the same can be said, whether or not they can navigate my blogging platform easily enough to leave comments. And anyway, I am what I am and have no real desire to become essentially different.

And so I go on, writing these long posts and corking them up in metaphorical bottles to be thrown out onto Lake Michigan. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cocktail parties. Some of us are just better in quieter contexts.

One Step Back

Let frustration get the upper hand, and you could soon be up to your eyebrows in regret.

It could have been much worse for me this week, however, which goes to show once more that many decisions are better for having been postponed. My last post here on this blog was an expression of frustration – frustration widely shared, apparently, because more than one person suggested, even requested, that I edit that piece down for publication in our county’s weekly newspaper or the daily paper in Traverse City. One request was especially fervent. What to do?

I was reluctant. I’d said what I had to say and was not looking for a wider audience. Would anything be gained?

“At least think about it! And would you call me back and let me know what you’ve decided?”

I spent the remainder of the evening paring down an original thousand words plus to a manageable three hundred. (I recommend this exercise, by the way. For a real wake-up call, edit yourself ruthlessly to a word limit. Can you say it in 800 words? 600? 400? Whole paragraphs reveal themselves as self-indulgent, unnecessary and/or redundant, while sentences purged of clutter emerge taut and clear.)

Finally more or less satisfied with the result, I pulled up an old letter I’d had published in a Traverse City weekly last year for comparison. The subject of the earlier letter was affordable housing, and I’d expressed myself to my satisfaction in 300 words.

But I was struck by the glaring contrast between the two pieces.

My older letter, a response to a previously published opinion article, focused on one particular issue and analyzed problems with the opinion writer’s statements. Our differences had to do with a situation and how to deal with it, and while he was clearly conservative and I obviously liberal on this issue, the disagreement was pragmatic rather than blindly partisan. The tone of my letter was – and not by accident -- reasoned, calm, and dispassionate.

The newer 300 words were entirely different. They contained no analysis and no new facts. The whole thing was nothing but finger-pointing.

Important question: What is the point of writing a letter to an editor or, if you’re the editor, writing an editorial? What is the point of writing an opinion piece? Why wade into those shark-infested waters at all unless you hope to open a few eyes and minds to a new way of seeing shared terrain?

Partisan finger-pointing, even absent name-calling (which I always try to avoid), will never change anyone’s mind. It is not reasoned argument and not presentation of new facts. Those who already agree with you will nod and cheer, while those on the other side turn away in self-righteous anger. Everything, unless made worse, remains as it was.

Many people in our country today do see politics as a war. True believers raise their voices ever louder in a kind of locker room hysteria – finger-jabbing, shouting, name-calling, metaphorically shoving and trampling their opponents. But to join in that fray, on that level, if this is what we oppose, is to become the enemy, to give up principles, to hand over victory.

I’m not saying I don’t still believe what I wrote about party politics at the county, state, and national level. What I’m saying is that saying it did no one any good. Putting my words “out there” temporarily relieved my unhappiness and gave a few others a brief sensation of solidarity. I expressed my frustration. But really, who cares? I gave in to basically useless self-expression. That’s all. Everything remains as it was. Not a single mind was changed or opened to change.

Instead of becoming more and more partisan, what we have to do in our county is to focus calmly on issues. Where facts are distorted, those distortions must be cleared away in a workmanlike manner. Where facts are absent, they must be brought forth. And as much as we talk, we all need to listen, especially where we disagree, because no one’s mind will be opened by being hectored or lectured or treated like an ignorant, willful child. Wouldn’t your blood pressure shoot through the roof if someone treated you like that?

So now, in the aftermath of my online outburst, I want to say that I think all the more highly of those in politics who can remain undistracted by frustration, who do not give in to it but keep their focus instead on the work at hand. You know who you are. Thank you for the work you do!

There is no way toward a civil discourse other than by adhering to civility. The next ten months will be a trying time, but that can be a good thing. Rising to challenges can be good for us all. I know all this. But how easily what we know can be forgotten in the heat of the moment!

Postscript: I was tempted to take down the previous post but am leaving it up, my moment of weakness exposed, as an example to others and reminder to myself of what is not worth doing.

Mom Reviews the Political Scene

Leelanau County, Michigan, is not the place it used to be.

There are fewer children in the county and fewer schools than were here a century ago, while at the same time there is a larger (and growing) population of older people in comfortable financial circumstances. Ironically, other than in the building trades, the rising number of retired “transplants” has not resulted in a matching increase of opportunities for full-time, year-round employment. It’s possible now, after all, to live in a specific geographic area almost anywhere in the world without being forced to support the local economy. Also, many officially “fulltime” retired residents spend several months a year traveling or in second homes elsewhere.

There have been other changes, as has been true in the United States at large.

Leelanau County these days has a different kind of Republican party from what was here even thirty years ago, and the local change mirrors that of the present Republican party across the United States. The county always had a conservative flavor, but old-time Republicans represented a wide spectrum of views. Recall that Governor Milliken was a Republican. Someone with Milliken’s moderate views could never even be nominated by the Republican Party these days, in Michigan or anywhere else in the country.

The current Leelanau County Board of Commissioners is a microcosm of broader American politics, with all the gridlock, hostility, and rejection of “working together” – at least on the part of the Republican commissioners -- implied by the comparison. I do not lay the blame on one party with any kind of partisan glee. Look through the glass sides of the fishbowl. Watch the fish. See what they do, and listen to what they say.

Party politics used to be close to irrelevant at the village, township, even the county level, and that was a good thing. Local politics was about getting things done, not about party allegiance. We are seeing the death throes of those good old ways.

Until quite recently, composition of the board was four Republicans and three Democrats. Then one of the Republicans stepped down. Known as “the swing vote” on the board, that member had earned the ire of many of her Republican constituents for whom bipartisanship is anathema. She occasionally voted “with” Democrats! Clearly, she was a traitor and a turncoat! There were efforts within her party to lead her to the light, but she tired of the wrangling and resigned rather than cave in to orthodoxy and right-wing political correctness.

From all appearances, there are only two “principles” at work today in the ideology of the Republican party. One is that whatever or whomever Democrats are for, Republicans must be against. This principle is not limited to matters of fiscal responsibility: even a measure that would cost nothing must be opposed by Republicans if brought forth by a Democrat. And a candidate with lifelong Republican credentials, should he or she stoop to bipartisanship on that or any other measure, must be drummed out of office and purged from the Party.

The other principle, the primary principle, the one that is the reason that adherence to other is demanded, is that government should not do anything – other than, of course, make war and police borders. But nothing else! And even that border policing, like policing in general, like schools, like prisons, would be done better, most Republicans are coming to believe, by private enterprise. Government is always the problem, never the solution!

One Republican member of the county board is pleased with the current 3:3 deadlock because it ensures that the board will be unable to do anything.

Stop and think about this for a moment. The phrase “do-nothing government” used to be harsh criticism. Today, from hard line Republicans, it is the highest praise. The right wing aspires to the establishment of do-nothing government.

A naive question may arise: If you think government is evil, why would you want to be part of government? Sadly, the question is easily answered: If the do-nothings were to give up control, government might once again be empowered to act! Hark back to an irony from the days of the Vietnam conflict: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”  Do-nothings must at all costs keep control of the paralyzed “village” (government) in order to ensure its power will not revive.

Can county and national politics be enjoyed simply as a clown show, as some suggest? Should we expect it to be and accept it as nothing but “sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

Our country has long proclaimed itself the leader of the free world. We promote our political system as an example to other countries, to peoples around the globe. Look what we can do! You could do it, too! That has been the lesson of our history, from 1776 onward.

What example, what lessons, do we hold forth to the world today? You, too, can make lethal weapons! You, too, can make war! You, too, can elect “leaders” determined to let nothing be done to improve your lives, and you can sell off government functions to the highest for-profit bidders! This is democracy, the best in the world!

Is it, really? Is this the best we can do?

NOW PLEASE GO READ THIS.