Blowing & Drifting

Note: I’m going to try to write at least one biographical essay each month this year. The Hunting Camp When my family lived in Ironwood, in the early 1980s, we owned (or, I think, shared, with my dad’s brother) a tiny cabin way out in the woods north of town, about halfway between the farm [...]

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Growing up in Houghton-Hancock, we kids talked a lot about the mythical “circus train crash,” in which a circus vehicle lost control and crashed into the canal, drowning – in various tellings – several people and a bunch of animals. The real story is pretty horrific: 3 Killed in Wreck Three men were killed early [...]

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Thanks to the web, I can keep up with news about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula pretty well via the newspaper websites and new media services like Upper Peninsula Second Wave, a business-oriented website. Today, my jaw dropped when Second Wave published a short piece on two tiny towns that I knew as a very little kid: [...]

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Getting dressed for skiing tonight, I accidentally tore the cuff off my favorite pair of ”baselayer bottoms,” Old Red. (Yes, I called them that – but only in my head.) Old Red was real “long underwear.” I got them in 1994, when my parents, in what must have been a huge splurge, gave them to me as [...]

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I’m having a surprisingly hard time writing up a post about my late grandfather. He was a complicated guy, and I have complicated feelings about him. So while I overthink and under-write that post, here’s another picture of him, this time with my grandma, Lenore, on what must have been one of her birthdays: she [...]

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Soon, I’ll finally get around to writing a post about my late Grandpa, but for now here’s a great picture of him with two of his workhorses. The man was a teamster in the original sense of the word, and his love for the animals is obvious. One of the best moments I ever had [...]

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While up in Hancock earlier this week, I passed by the house where I lived from 1988-1991, at the corner of two steep uphill streets. It is, I think, a nice little house – though the current owners could be taking better care of it. Apart from the view to the south (a view I [...]

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10:30 p.m. Vivi moans in her bed. “Woofy! I need Woofy!” She’s dropped the tiny plastic toy dog that she keeps clenched in her left hand (almost) all night. This happened just a few minutes ago, so I run upstairs and go into the nursery, hoping to get to her before the moaning wakes up [...]

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Maybe the recent trip to Iowa has activated my travel jones, but I’m dying to get up to the U.P., even though such a trip is pretty much impossible this summer. I particularly want to see the great New Deal-era suspension bridge over the Black River, north of Ironwood at the far western tip of [...]

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Thursday morning, I headed out to the garage to get on my bike for the ride to work. As the garage door opened, I could hear someone outside, talking pretty loudly. This doesn’t happen in our neighborhood: (Rosewood Estates: Passersby Free Since 2001™), so I glanced out: two young reversed-cap bros, strolling down the sidewalk across [...]

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A while ago, I waxed nostalgic for the woods, and specifically, for the evergreen swamps of the Upper Michigan, forests that made my hometowns – Daggett, Ironwood, and Hancock – into tiny islands in a sea of taiga. Right next to those forests, and no more than a few miles away from any of my [...]

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Packing our traditional Memorial Day haul of flowers into the car this morning, I looked up at the wide-open sky, a dome of blues that ranged from the pale robin’s-egg along the horizons to a deep navy straight above. The only break in the blue was a single cloud, a rectangular mass with lateral corrugations. [...]

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Julia’s fascination with the Magic Tree House books has reminded me of treehouses I have known. Growing up, lots of my friends had tree houses that ranged, in later elementary school, from a wooden pallet temporarily nailed to some low pine-tree branches to, in early elementary school, an elaborate room permanently fixed high in a [...]

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