Post # 12

Monday, January 15, 2018








Quote of the Day: "If all the lumber cut in Michigan during the white pine lumbering era (1860-1900) would provide enough boards for a solid row of out-houses around the world, as some writers stated, then the amount of whiskey consumed by lumberjacks, tough guys, drummers, and plain drunks during the same period would have made another set of Great Lakes bubbling over with pure whiskey."  Roy L. Dodge, Ticket to Hell: A Saga of Michigan's Bad Men. 1975.


REVIEWS



Bloodstoppers & Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, 3rd ed.
by Richard Dorson



I dislike admitting it, but I have rarely, if ever, found a university press book to be sheer, unadulterated fun. Yes, I've found many that were very good reading, eye-opening, and  engrossing but until this book, I've never cracked a university press book that is just such a delight to read. Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers is all of that and much more. When it was first published in 1952 it was hailed as "extraordinarily interesting, rich and bizarre," and was recognized as an instant classic of American folklore. What initially grabbed me by the collar, had me turning pages, and randomly dipping into the book was its fantastic collection of UP folklore, stories, and jokes.

In 1946, the author received a fellowship from the Library of Congress for the study of American civilization. In April of that year, Dorson set off for five months to study American civilization in of all places -- Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He came to the UP to listen, collect, and record tall tales, superstitions, local stories, jokes, and customs that were brought to the rugged peninsula by Native Americans, loggers, and a veritable melting pot of immigrants. Here in the iron, fish, and timber rich peninsula the ethnic stories, folklore, and customs were warped, moulded, and mutated by the UP experience until a new culture and folklore emerged. Dorson called the Upper Peninsula, "one of the richest storytelling regions in the United States."

The strange bouillabaisse of Finns, French Canadians, Ojibwas, Cornish, Poles, Italians, and Slovenians mixing their local customs, love of stories, bawdy wit, and extravagant tales are here enshrined in 300-plus pages. This 3rd edition of Dorson's original work is graced by a new introduction and the addition of newly collected gems.  I didn't read the book cover to cover because I had more fun dipping into it here and there as if panning for gold. I found it in abundance, from cunningly mischievous characters, and weird tales of shape changers, to ghost ships, sly and cunning tricksters, and a huge helping of simply laugh-out-loud jokes and stories.  

Here's a sampling, bits and pieces in a few cases, of some of  my favorites. When a lumber camp ran low on food a committee was selected to make for the nearest town to buy supplies. When the committee returned the resupply consisted of "several cases of whiskey and a couple of loaves of bread. After staring silently at this exhibit, one jack dourly remarked, "What are we gonna do with all the bread?"

"A Swede goes back to the Old Country and is asked how he liked America. "Py Yesus, it take me twenty year to learn to say yelly and den dey call it yam."

And my favorite is told in a Finnish dialect. A Finnish tavern owner by the name of Frank Uotila from Mass, Michigan visited Hancock. On his return home he had a small sign reading "Nineteen-F-U-twenty-eight" placed on his tavern. When asked why he put those letters and numbers on his building he replied, "Well, I peing up py dat Hancock blace, I seen pilding up dere, it saying nineteen-oh-von-A-D. I asking someone what dat meaning and dey tellin me dat meaning Anno Domini. I saying tis: If dat dem Dago, he putting his 'nitials on his pilding, I put my 'nitials on my pilding."

A truly unique book about a unique corner of our world.



Bloodstoppers & Bearwalkers: Folk traditions of Michigan's Upper Peninsula by Richard Dorson, 3rd ed. University of Wisconsin Press, c2008, 371p. $24.95 pb.





Great Lakes Island Escapes: Ferries and Bridges to Adventure
by Maureen Dunphy.

There is no better time to plan an exotic getaway to an enchanted island than during, or when enduring, a long, cold, bitter, Michigan winter. And we’re not talking about a long flight to a Caribbean Island but planning a summer retreat to one of the 30,000 islands found within the Great Lakes. Every island has its own magic and singular ambience, and with Dunphy’s book in hand it is easy to match your perfect island getaway to one of the nearly 50 islands described in Great Lakes Island Escapes.

This very thorough and authoritative book gives readers all the information they need to choose the island that fits their dream vacation. The author tells the reader how to get there, and how to get around on the island whether by car, bike, foot, or even canoe. Also included in each entry is the availability of overnight accommodations, food, whether a day trip is possible or you need to plan on a longer stay, and the cultural and historical aspects of the island. The author also highlights special events that take place on the island, such as an Indian Pow Wow or a Blue Grass Festival. Often the best part of each descriptive write up is the author’s personal take on the island and what she experienced during her visit.

The breadth and diversity of the islands is staggering. From Isle Royale in the western end of Lake Superior to the islands in the St. Lawrence River is a distance over 600 miles as the crow flies, if the crow so desires, or about 900 miles by car if the bird has a valid driver’s license. The islands vary from being overrun by tourists, to pastoral working farms, municipal parks, true wilderness experiences, or just out-of-the-way, uncrowded getaways.

There’s Mackinac Island with its hordes of tourists, fudge shops, full service high-end hotels, art and souvenir shops that will drain the pocket book, historical treasures to experience, and stunning natural beauty.  Mackinac Island receives 900,000 visitors a year. But if you want to experience the Straits area sans fudge, tourists, and endless souvenir shops try Bois Blanc Island. It receives about 200 annual visitors a year, has miles of flat gravel roads for biking, great views of Lake Huron and the Straits, and boasts a heavily wooded, quiet, pristine beauty. There is a small, rustic campground, a B & B, a few cabin rentals, a small grocery store, all of 47-year-round residents, and the state’s smallest one-room school. The island shelters 200-foot tall white pines, a lighthouse, a Coast Guard Life Saving Station, and a museum. The only thing you might have to stand in line for is the ferry from Cheboygan.

Dunphy introduces readers to the Great Lakes largest and only delta. It’s found where the St. Clair River decants into Lake St. Clair and the “Flats,” as they’re called, is home to some fascinating island destinations. Harsen’s Island has been called the Venice of America because of its profusion of canals. The island’s flat roads make for fine biking with great close-up views of freighters plying the river that carries more freighter traffic than the Panama and Suez Canals combined. There are a few tourist type boutiques in a quaint village to browse through if one lives to shop. Next to Harsen’s Island lies Russell Island. The latter is open to the public one day a year for six hours.  And across the river is Walpole Island which does not belong to either Canada or the U.S. The island is unceded land that has never been included in any treaty with the original setters of the continent, making Walpole Island, First Nation Land. The island contains the greatest biologically diverse habitat in the area, and includes a remnant tall grass prairie. The author was told the famous war chief Tecumseh is buried on the island. There is a museum, unique Native American craft shops, rare plants and a strong sense of community. Two of the best times to visit are during the spring Pow Wow or the Fall Fair. A trip to Walpole Island is a ferry ride to a whole new world.

The writing of this book demanded a staggering amount of research and deserves to be called THE guide for planning a trip to any Great Lakes island reachable by bridge or ferry. The book tells the reader everything they need to know for planning a one-of-a-kind vacation, and I’ll let the author speak for herself as a writer who can put together memorable sentences. She writes, “Isle Royale is simply where you go to return the wilderness to your soul.”

This is the definitive guide and travel companion to Great Lakes island hopping.



Great Lakes Island Escapes: Ferries and Bridges to Adventure by Maureen Dunphy. Wayne State University Press, 2016, $29.95



Unnatural Causes: A Dr. Katie LeClair Mystery
by Dawn Eastman

I knew doing this blog would challenge my long-held reading habits, and introduce me to genres and subjects I had either avoided over the decades, or simply not encountered in my years of reading. So here I find myself reading and reviewing for the first time, what I believe is called, a "cozy mystery."It was not an altogether unpleasant experience, but definitely new and different compared to the likes of Elmore Leonard, Chandler, Tom Franklin, Steve Hamilton, Joseph Heywood, Estleman, and any gritty Irish mystery writer I can lay my hands on.

Dr. Katie LeClair has finished her medical degree and joined a family practice in the small town of Baxter, MI some thirty miles west of Ann Arbor. The work load is enormous and learning the ins and out of a family practice, the diversity of health problems faced by her patients, and finding a way into the tight knit little community of Baxter are all a challenge. Her life and job is totally disrupted when one of  her patients apparently commits suicide. She is shocked to learn the victim used a prescription of sleeping pills with Dr. LeClair's name on the bottle to do the deed, yet Katie is sure she never wrote the prescription. 

Kati decides to look into how her name got on the prescription, and if somebody in her office set her up. It is then discovered the woman didn't die from the sleeping pills but an overdose of Demerol administered by injection, and the suicide is relabeled a homicide. Of course, this just spurs Dr. Katie to undertake her own investigation which leads to some long held secrets in the small town and a number of possible suspects.

Dr. Katie is a strong lead character in what appears to be the first in a series built around the doctor. The author is a former family practitioner and the depiction of a young doctor's introduction to life in a small town, family practice seems very authentic. The book is smoothly written, Eastman is in tight control of her plot, and introduces a host of characters who could all be potential suspects. The author keeps all  the suspects in play like a gifted juggler --  I just had trouble keeping them all sorted out as one left her hands and was tossed in the air while another came to hand.

I was struck by how low key the mystery felt. It was virtually free of real menace until the last few pages, and it would be wrong to call this a thriller. There is very little violence on the page, and you won't find a four-letter word in the book. Neither will you find a sex scene. There is one chaste kiss and and a somewhat more heated hug later in the book. In many ways the book reminded me of an Agatha Christie puzzle. If the Grand Dame of Mysteries is your cup of tea this mystery might be just be a perfect pot of orange pekoe.


Unnatural Causes by Dawn Eastman. Crooked Lane Books, 2017, $26.99

If you are considering the purchase of any of the reviewed books the easiest way is to click on the cover which will take you to Amazon where the price is probably cheaper than the price quoted by the publisher.








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Post # 11

Monday, January 1, 2018









Happy New Year! May 2018 be a good year for readers of this blog, Michigan authors, & books about this great state.



Quote for the day: "... there's still a fine line between Michigan and misery --winter." Sonny Eliot,                                       Michigan Living, September 1988.


Reviews

The Salvager: The Life of Captain Tom Reid on the Great Lakes
by Mary Francis Doner

Originally published in 1958, and long out of print, the University of Minnesota Press has done historians and those interested in Great Lakes maritime history a major service by reprinting  this book. In my fifty-plus years of reading Michigan and maritime histories of our great inland seas the salvaging of shipwrecks seems to have been all but ignored, except for Mary Doner's book. What makes this detailed biography of  Tom Reid so important is that Reid was the first salvage operator on the Great Lakes who made salvaging a science. It's a revelatory account of a chapter of Great Lakes maritime history that seldom makes it into print. 

Tom Reid was born in Alpena in 1870, and at age six moved to St. Ignace where his father started a small salvage business. For young Tom, school was a complete waste of time and effort because the freshwater seas became his obsession. He was working on his father's tugs by his teens, and captained a tug by his early twenties. He started out by towing vast rafts of white pine across and down Lake Huron to sawmills, but he jumped at any chance to do salvage work. He designed his own tools and equipment, and created new methods for raising Great Lake bulk carriers.
   
Tom Reid earned a reputation for raising wrecks other experts thought couldn't be salvaged, and by his mid twenties became a partner in his father's firm. The author was given access to  the company records, and the book's biggest surprise is the salvage business seems to be all risk. Every salvage operation holds danger and can be life threatening. Captain Reid narrowly escaped death on several jobs. Some of his crew were not so lucky.

Every salvage job is also a financial risk. Salvage operators contact the wreck's owner or the  insurer and make a bid on raising the vessel. Low bid wins and a low bid, even the the Depression, could often exceed $25,000. Doner's careful examination of the company's books show that on several occasions  Reid's company spent thousands of dollars trying to raise a ship only have  the wreck break up, leaving the salvage company holding the bag for its expenses. They are only paid if they raise the wreck. Or, if the shipping company feels the the wreck is a total loss, Reid might offer to buy the hulk for a few thousand dollars. If he is able to raise it, tow it to a dry dock for repair, and then sell it he's in for a big payday. If he can't, he's out the purchase price and the money he invested in trying to raise the wreck.

Obviously, it's a pretty stressful life and made more so by long absences from his family. Reid was married to a devoted wife who was left to raise the kids, and endure months of worry and loneliness. Reid missed the births of his children, graduations, wedding anniversaries, and other important family events. It put a terrible strain on his wife who always found a way to manage the stress and her family. The author's inclusion of the story of those left on shore is an important addition to the maritime history of the Great Lakes.

My only complaint with the book is the author's almost obsessive inclusiveness in listing every wreck Captain Reid ever salvaged. Some pages read like an accountants brief notation of the date, place, fees charged, and a very short description of how the wreck was raised. I would have wished for a more detailed explanation of the more difficult and dangerous jobs and an appendix listing every salvage job.

In spite of the above minor complaint, this book is a valuable look into the rarely written about world of the Great Lakes salvage business.


The Salvager: The Life of Captain Tom Reid on the Great Lakes by Mary Francis Doner. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, $21.95



Lost in the Woods: Building a Life Up North
by Richard Hill

A quarter century ago the author and his wife decided to sell their profitable kiosk in the Cherryland Mall in Traverse City, and build a log home on Lake Superior, just west of their hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. If this book starts out as a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of building your own log home, it also becomes a rumination on life and living in the U.P. The book succeeds on both counts.

The idea of a log house appealed to the author and his wife because the couple wanted a home that was distinctly and artfully different in this "age of massed-produced sameness." The author did his due diligence in researching log homes. He became familiar with the laundry list of problems inherent in building a log house, but nothing he read, or asked log home companies prepared him for the reality of building one. When Hill discovered the final cost of the house would be much higher than the couple had budgeted, he committed his first major mistake. To save money, he became his own general contractor.

Readers who have their hearts set on a log home may not be deterred by this cautionary tale, but they will have been warned of the many special problems that  occur in building them. Hill admits that he made many mistakes being his own general contractor, the worst of which was not writing detailed contracts for his sub-contractors. Hill quickly found out carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and most sub-contractors don't like working on log homes, and they either failed to live up to their contracts, or didn't fulfill verbal promises Hill failed to write into the contracts. He also discovered the log home company failed to mention, or glossed over inconvenient truths about building a log home. He was told by the company that the logs were hand peeled, but when delivered he found the logs had been peeled by machines which left them very rough. It took the author over two weeks of manhandling a 20-pound grinder to smooth all the logs.

The old home-repair saying is equally applicable to building a log home. The "simple stuff" is never simple and the "easy, little jobs" take forever. The two to three years Hill thought it would take to finish the house turned into 25. The author finally shed the pressure and his frustration by learning to simply enjoy the process.

Woven within the account of a house that took longer to build that one of  Egypt's great pyramids the author recalls his childhood in the Soo, reflects on his Finnish fore bearers who settled the U.P., and how living in Michigan's northern peninsula tests and tempers a person.  The hard winters, a rugged environment, and great swatches of near wilderness made for tough, fiercely independent, and proud people. 

The lesson any reader will learn from this enjoyable and thought provoking book is that building any home is part and parcel of building a life.



Lost in the Woods: Building a Life UP North by Richard Hill. Gale Force Press, 2017, $19.95.



The Great Lakes at Ten Miles an Hour: One Cyclist’s Journey Along the Shores of the Inland Seas
By Thomas Shevory

I’ve had a love affair with the Great Lakes from my first trip across the Straits of Mackinac on a car ferry and spied the towers of the great span that would tie the state’s two peninsulas together rising out of the water. That said, you couldn’t pay me enough to ride a bicycle around the shores of all five Great Lakes. But you also wouldn’t have to pay me to reread this informative and always interesting narrative by a professor of politics at Ithaca College who, over the course of four summers, pedaled from 40 to 100 miles a day as he made his way around all five lakes.

The author is a perceptive and keen observer of culture, nature, history, and geology and reading the book is like riding on his handle bars and listening to a running commentary of whatever might appear around the next bend in the road.  Shevory is very good at finding the little things that define a place, so for this reader even the familiar is looked at from a fresh prospective.

The author found a striking difference between the Canadian and American sides of the Great Lakes. Except for Superior, the American side of the four other Great Lakes are much more heavily populated than the Canadian side. On the lower lakes big cities huge the shores and as one travels north the coast is lined with cottages. On the Ontario side the coastline, of the lower lakes, is heavily devoted to agriculture. If there are stretches where cottages and cabins replace farms it is highly likely the vacation homes have to be built across the road from the beach. This leaves the beach open for every ones enjoyment.

The author finds it hard to account for the night and day difference between Canadian and American cities that are virtually twin cities. Traveling from Port Huron to Sarnia, the Canadian Soo to the American Soo, or from Detroit to Windsor, Shevory unfailingly found the Canadian city cleaner, had significantly less vacant buildings, and in nearly every aspect, were in better shape. The author concludes Canadians put more “stock in its cities and supports the infrastructure that makes them work,”

Shevory was even more disturbed after biking through the Michigan twin cities of Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, Michigan. Benton Harbor is 90% African American, has 26% unemployment, and a 40% poverty rate. Just across the river, St. Joseph is 90% white, has only 2% unemployment, and the poverty rate is too small to count. Shevory writes: “A starker contrast between two Americas, one poor and black, the other comfortable and white, would have been hard to find.”

All is not bleakness here though. The book is a painless geography lesson on the Great Lakes area and the book captures the inspiring beauty of the coastline, its geological and human history, and the physical demands and rewards found in long-distance bike touring. The author has an eye for the curious whether man or municipality. He meets a man in Alpena who has nine very literary cats. One can only assume they’re literary from the fact that the man read them the entire works of William Faulkner and had begun reading Dostoyevsky to them every night.

In 1963 when Sputnik IV lost orbital speed and fell to earth, a large chunk of it landed in a Wisconsin city street. A brass ring is embedded in the street where the junk from outer space landed, and every September since 2011, the city holds a Sputnikfest which includes the “crowning of Miss Space Debris.”

This is a very good armchair-travel book and the author is a great travel companion. You almost get to know him and his moods well enough to tease him. It seems he can unerringly sniff out a Tim Horton’s in any city that has one, where he is certain to order two toasted raisin bagels, orange juice, and coffee for breakfast. He also seems to have a weakness for Chinese buffet dinners, and after eating in one the author invariably complains about its poor quality. Yet Shevory never thinks twice about hitting the next Chinese buffet he runs across.

I’m ready for another trip as long as the pedaling is left to Shevory.


The Great Lakes at Ten Miles an Hour by Thomas Shevory. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, $16.95.


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