Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice

Sorry for the long break between posts. I was in Michigan! I only went for a week, but every trip for me involves a week of gearing up and a week of winding down, plus a few days to worry about how the plane stays up in the air, and there you go, almost a month.

In Michigan I discovered I am a closet patriot, or a tourist of patriotism, or maybe I should say: my love of country surrounds my heart like a becalmed sea. A trip out of state whips up the water.

As a patriot I am literal + sentimental = dorky. Right this very moment I am listening to the Sufjan Stevens album about Michigan, and I loved the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, and I loved sticking my hand in the cold lake.  I also loved how when we were heading out with the dog the neighbors came over to find out how the bathroom renovation was going. They had some advice on how to stop new sink hardware from leaking. You could get this kind of advice in San Francisco, but you’d have to go across the hall and ask for it; it doesn’t wander over the property line with its hands shoved diffidently into the back pockets of its slacks.

At the Ford museum I sat down in the Vice President’s seat in the mock Cabinet Room and pounded my hands on the table as if in outrage over something the Secretary of State just said. The guard came running in with this look of wild hope on his face like maybe he could finally shush someone, or, joy of joys, escort them out. He was about 19 and wore a pair of handcuffs on his belt but no sap. He followed us all the way through the special exhibit on the Cold War. I wished I could have offered him something: magenta streaks in my hair? Platform boots? Star and sickle tattoo? Instead I just looked Dutch.

This was my first trip to Grand Rapids, which is, in fact, the land of my people — my father’s people, whom I never knew. So maybe my insistence on eating walleye and asparagus and homemade pear-pineapple jam and even a delicious terrible thing identified by the hand-written sign at the smokehouse as a ‘hunter stick’ wasn’t so much the tourist’s desire to eat a baguette in Paris as — what? The astronaut’s longing to taste something other than Tang? The amnesiac sampling cookies in hopes that one will restore his memory?

My family left a trace. My grandfather, by all accounts a wise and decent man, (my grandmother usually gets stuck with ‘severe,’ and ‘tight-fisted’) taught at Grand Valley and at Calvin College, and you can find his name there. It isn’t that they have disappeared from the place, it’s that they left me no special map or key by which to find them, no nicknames, no smells of pipe smoke or lavender sachets, no pile of old eyeglasses, not even one of the beige washcloths my grandmother was said to favor because they showed less dirt.

We went up to J’s land, near Montague, and took a survey of the trees. We looked at needle clusters and cones and leaf shapes. Eastern white oak, northern red oak, Hemlock, white pine, Norway pine, Norway maple, Sugar maple, red maple, American beech. The land doesn’t look the way it looked before people settled it and planted trees for timber, but it looks the way it looked when J’s grandfather tromped around hunting deer. Whatever direction you look, the view is the same, the trees replicating forever, the whole family history, the map of the world.