2015 Marks 25th Anniversary of Appalachian Trail Odyssey

Happy New Year from the shores of the wild and woolly Great Lakes, where I spent my childhood. This picture from landscape photographer Mark Graf pretty much says it all about that six month season from the end of October all the way through April that Michiganders call winter.

Move your cursor over the image and see what you think of it in black and white. Different worlds, aren’t they? Graf’s art and what WordPress makes of it: it’s a little like what being a novelist is like, I think. Those instant shifts of perspective that trigger indelible acts of the imagination, bleeding color in and out of the life you live in.

I saw Turner sunrises over the lake just like this every morning on the way to school in Grosse Pointe. The daily choice whether to walk or ride my bike along the lake always took the biting wind into account. The least exposed way to the Grosse Point Academy (formerly the convent school where I attended Montessori) was inland a few blocks. But if I took the Lake Shore route home, I could watch the pleasure craft trying to avoid the big, thousand-foot freighters and their escorts, the tug boats and ice-cutters, that seemed endlessly fascinating as they hauled taconite down from Duluth, heading out to sea on the St. Lawrence.

“The spot I made that photograph is one that I return to frequently,” says Mark Graf. “It has become my go-to place for winter landscape photography because it changes SO much from day to day. Winds, currents, temperatures and light all play together creating a landscape like a collaborative painting. It must have been nice to witness it every day where you grew up. I live about 25 minutes away from the lake, so I am often “guessing” what conditions may be like – and I really only photograph it in the winter time. It is more barren, isolated, and in a state of transformation then. No boats or human activity except for ice fisherman when the ice thickens.”

If you’ve never really listened to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the 1974 classic Great Lakes ballad by Gordon Lightfoot, this is the season, and now’s the time. Don’t waste another minute of your frozen life. Listen to it in good quality and read the lyrics here on YouTube.

The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound
when the wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the Captain did too,
twas the witch of November come stealing.

After fifth grade, when I left the Academy to spend the next seven years at University Liggett School, I carpooled until I could drive myself. In those days you spent half an hour scraping ice off the car in the morning, unless you were among the lucky few with a heated garage, and it took the whole half-hour trip to get 30 seconds of heat from vents. I remember one carpooling mother who smoked in the car. I was always waiting for her breath to freeze the smoke she blew through her nostrils. The pre-crystalline vapors hung midair like in zero-gravity, and I wasn’t sure what was worse, the stench form the cigarette or the frost-covered vinyl seat beneath my kilt.

I spent many weekends in the Metamora hunt country fifty miles away along rutted old plank roads, so ace driving skills were key. You spent a lot of time in the ditch. You learned how to get yourself out. Usually by the skin of your teeth. Nobody repaired a dented car til summer.

Today, living in the Virginia countryside, watching the whole state shut down under an inch of snow, I’m having a hard time convincing my daughter to spend Friday nights doing donuts in empty lots. I still change my tires every winter (that means I put snow tires on my car); I still keep “emergency blankets in the boot” (that means you can always find a thermos, parka, extra boots and a snow shovel in my car this time of year); I’ll load the car with water and a stove, skis & skins or snowshoes (or at least crampons) on long trips off the blacktop if I don’t know whether a storm is coming; and Virginians love to tease me about it, even here in horse country. But two years ago, Fair Spouse found herself stuck behind an I-81 winter pileup for 18 hours. Yep, she bundled up and walked to a hotel. That’s my girl.

2015 is an important anniversary year for me as a lover of wild places. It’s the 25th anniversary of the year I spent on the Appalachian Trail. You can get an idea of what that was all about here, in the documentary I made that has been resurrected from the dead and posted on YouTube by one of my thru hiking pals, trail name “weathercarrot.” It was the best surprise Christmas present ever.

Looking back beyond that spring day 25 years ago when I started my 2,184-mile trek along the Appalachian Trail in 1991, I can remember the call of the stark landscapes I grew up in. A friend’s New Year’s greetings recalled the upland game shooting I used to do with my family under slate grey skies in the bleak winter cornfields fringing Mid-Michigan woods. An old schoolmate’s Facebook post on the day it dawned cold here (and never got above 19 degrees F) reminded me what it felt like when your nose hairs froze on a shoveled path with snow piled high above your shoulders. Mike Leigh’s new film, MR TURNER, catches my eye for bloody sunrises and sunsets that suddenly turn into abstractions, like music, and then back into untamed landscapes. Mark Graf’s photograph fills me with the call of the wild across the lake ice.

Wondering what to read by the fireside until it’s time to hit the trail again? Michigan authors and a little Gordon Lightfoot will get you through the long nights. There’s just something about ’em. It’s hard to explain, like why the winter goes by faster with a cup of Caribou coffee, or why “Michigan” by the Milk Carton Kids always makes me cry. See a Coppola film, or something by Larry Kasdan. Or anything with Jeff Daniels in it. Try reading some Elmore Leonard. Some Kerouac. Some Joyce Carol Oates or some Jeff Eugenides, who taught my drama class in middle school. Some Caldecott-winning Chris Van Allsberg or some bitter stanzas by our former Poet Laureate Philip Levine. Howbout some Hemingway, Algren or Tom McGuane? They all go well with good whiskey. Still stumped? Here’s last year’s list of Michigan’s 20 Notable Books.

Has anybody seen this year’s list? It didn’t get used for tinder last night, did it?

Until you help me get caught up, I think I’ll start with the new collection by Jim Harrison, then move on to the natural history of the sturgeon edited by Nancy Auer and Dave Dempsey. And for a dessert that’s not too sweet, the poetry collection Birth Marks by Jim Daniels.

“I have been photographing in Michigan for close to 20 years now,” says Graf, “and it always surprises me with little known spots now and then.”