Yeah, I take shitty pictures and for the life of me, or you and a buck, I can’t remember my photobucket anything, I can’t even answer the oops try again questions. Doesn’t matter, I captured a beach with sand and rocks on it, and maybe some wildflowers in the weeds.
If I were in a resenting mood or gave a shit I might comment on the state of the UP. No, not exactly, on the state of the UP compared to where I’m from. Comparatively it’s thriving up here. The roads in the national park are actually maintained. I’m guessing that happened sometime during the Clinton years, the paving of at least.
Soo Sweet Mary is a border town, on the other side of the border is Soo Sweet Mary Canada (I wanna say Ontario). Even if I recognized it I wouldn’t. This fucking casino alone is an industry. Where I went today wasn’t even paved in the carter administration.
Now there’s a nice new ranger station aad gift shop that sells stuff and camping licenses and tells you dogs are not allowed. Herschel laughed at rules like that. He was easily amused. He never got caught misbehaving by anyone who would have frowned upon it. Though he did once pee in a kids day glo green bucket; it was me and Herschel and this family of three on the entire pacific coast as far as we could tell and he peed in the kids bucket. The wife said “Hey” the kid and the dad laughed.I pretended not to know the dog.
One of the bad photos I’m not uploading looks a bit like an empty beach in Hawaii, a very blue sky, if the colors work Lake Superior has that pale green to corn flower blue sort of motif, ice clear and the colors show the depth. Three less people and one less dog than the great peeing incident of double ought three.
Hmmm, I’m not capturing the day any better with words than I am with alleged photos. I’ve been all over this continent and half of Europe, Pictured rocks is in my top three places I’ve ever been. I had the great good fortune to live twenty minutes from one of the others, and I spent a very weird month near the third. There is no order to those three, I mean the only reason one is beloved above the others is because I know it so well. Here in the immediate present I know pictured rocks.
At the risk of sounding a bit like a crystal licking moon cow, it’s the way the air, water and earth move, it’s a quality of presence and time, it’s the feeling people get when looking at the stars except you feel it on your skin and in your belly and bones. Thats a shitty explanation, but I live in a place now where the air is like a fuzzy blanket, the earth is tired and sags and the water sits and grows stale.
A couple hundred years ago I took my girlfriend at the time to east lansing and then to macinac island. She was from Texas, grew up near the montrose district of houston, orphaned at twelve, and bit and fought and scratched for every inch should could to get away from being trailer trash. I mean that’s what she said I wasn’t there, I was here, we met in Portland sometime after seperating from my first wife and sowing a seco0nd harvest of wild oats.
Macinac Island was too me what I imagine Disneyland is to a native of Anaheim (if there is such a thing) dull as dirt and I got dragged there far too often. Hmmm, no, not exactly, I just went there a lot, I don’t think I ever went with my parents, not until their fiftieth wedding anniversary. There’s a fort on the island and they do tours and shoot off canons all during the tourist season. It’s not really the draw; fudge and the Grand hotel are what bring people there. You have to walk, rent a bike or a horse (or catch a carriage) no motor things allowed.
Elise was fascinated by the fort, hung on every word the tour guide said (dressed in some costume or another from french, to british to american, the fort predates the US by at least a hundred years). It’s in between the two pennisulas and Lake Huron and Lake Michigan surround it. What the hell american soldiers were defending is beyond me. Thoguh there were, for instance, a lot of michigan brigades in the civil war, they didn’t actually fight in Michigan. I’m not sure why anybody would want to attack the island or what they’d want on either side, it’s a whole lot easier to come from the north or the south. I bet Elise knows though, she was paying close attention.
I think there was a lot of indian fighting going on. I think the indians won most of the time. As beautiful as it is up here it’s harsh. This kind of retarded or just socially awkward guy in an employee uniform at this casino resort was telling me about things and stuff because I looked slow or something, I just mean it was unprovoked ” Yeah we got four seasons here, almost winter, winter, almost not winter and construction” I might have smiled, the way the wife could have if she wasn’t saying hey when herschel peed in the bucket. Truth is winter up here is amazing. It’s like the best time to go to the oregon coast is during a storm. Ma nature unstraps her girdle and flaps around all over the place. You don’t want to catch a stray tit, but boy it sure is cool to watch the dance.
So, if pictured rocks, palmer alaska and the columbia gorge are my three favorite places on account of their wild wooliness, if I had to add things up … summer in palmer and the UP has skeeter swarms and those suck. Put on your favorite bug jui9ce, it’s gravy, they might as well make that stuff in flavors to keep the skeeters from getting bored. Like blood flavor, maybe they’d lick you before going all vampire.
One of my favorite myths as a kid was the idea that if you caught a skeeter on a vein and made like a tourniquet just below so that the blood would rush to the skin you could make a skeeter ‘splode. I’m still not convinced that isn’t true, but neither I nor anybody I’ve witnessed has ever made it happen and it’s not for lack of skeeters.
I’ll probably have things to say when I’m back. This is silly, but it beats watching TV. Oh, I stopped at this gas station in Munising, there were posters all over the windows for a Cowboy Burger, you know a gas station burger made in a microwave and set under heat lamps for a week. I asked for one, I didn’t say “Are they made out of real cowboys?” I just said “May I have a cowboy burger please.” All the employees laughed. When one female who looked like shes had a few cowboy burgers got over her giggles she said “I might have sold the last one” the guy who was running for the heat lamps managed to find one. I’m positive they were covering for some other kind of joke, I’m pretty sure I was the punchline. There wasn’t anything about the burger you wouldn’t have expected. Maybe it’s a sex thing.
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