"Looking for Hickories: The Forgotten Wildness of the Rural Midwest," by Tom Springer, is a book that requires a slow reading.
These are not essays written in haste. Rather, these are pieces written as good essays should be written, with the writer pulling us in with him on the pretext of giving one message then promptly delivering another.
With "In Nature, The Straight Line Leads To Perdition," Springer takes up the cause of Antoni Gaudi, the Spanish architect whose designs confuse the eye and demand whimsy of the viewer. Speaking of Gaudi's Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, Springer writes, "Its organic design reminds me of my kids' Lake Michigan sand castles, whose lumpy parapets are decorated with whatever stones, shells, and crayfish carcasses we find at hand."
From this piece of his own whimsy he digs deeper.
"In thought and deed," he writes, "we humans are always eager to impose our straightness on creation. We assume that a direct line is the best route between two points -- although the hand of nature usually chooses otherwise."
This lesson, it seems, came from hard-won experience.
"Our four-acre parcel is rectangular," he says. "So, in deference to the unyielding authority of the survey stakes, I planted ... trees in the most unimaginative way possible: exactly fifty feet apart, in a single-file row, ker-plop, ker-plop, ker-plop. Needless to say, I used a tape measure."
Proud of himself for the perfection of his plantings, he is soon brought down to earth by a neighbor.
"Hey, Tom, you got those trees planted real straight!" he said. "That must be how they grow in the forest, huh?"
In this same essay, he writes of another way he tried to make nature conform to his "own yardstick."
"A case in point has been my plan to establish a half-acre patch of prairie and savanna," he says.
Looking around his half-acre, he sees lead plant, butterfly weed and big bluestem. Growing among them is a melting pot of European and Asian immigrants that seem happy to call Michigan their home.
The irony, he found, was that if he was to be a purist and create a real prairie again, he needed to destroy all of the existing plants. Instead he sees, "The Queen Anne's lace flower heads have turned brown and are curled into little baskets that resemble a hummingbird's nest" and is moved to feel that "all that I can do is help sustain the world that I've inherited. Given ample time and space, I'm confident that something good will come of it. Nature is infinitely creative and adaptive. It will find ways to fit even the most aggressive exotic species ... into a cohesive new whole. Without this resilience, our world wouldn't have lasted for five billion years."
Then we are on to guinea hens and ticks. The first is supposed to devour the latter. The ticks were in the tall orchard grass and could only be killed by a commercial pesticide capable of killing not only the ticks, but birds and bees and butterflies. The guinea hens were Springer's alternative.
Calling them the "hardy foot soldiers of the fowl world," Springer set about buying a brood of guinea chicks. Of these, coyotes and raccoons got all but two. Of these two, one died and the other refused to roam the tall orchard grass and instead "she formed a bizarre, cross-species attachment to my Olds sedan." Even that hen came to a bad end.
And last comes a cautionary tale of a married couple who moved to the country to live out their last years in the midst of their dream: a farm of their own.
"In their private Eden they planted an orchard of fruit trees, a grove of chestnuts, and a tidy and respectable garden. They raised their own chickens and ate organic beef. There was a filing cabinet full of correspondence from nurseries and specialty farms across the country." But this rural dream was at an end. The husband was dead and the wife in a nursing home. Springer was there to help box up their belongings for sale. What he found was what he calls 'the first indication that something, or someone, had gone haywire."
In the basement was a mountain of gardening tools in their plastic packages, hundreds of planting pots, tubs and moldering magazines, what Springer calls "an embarrassment -- or more accurately a pathology -- of riches."
Opting for simplicity, he admonishes, "Appreciate your customized garden gloves -- the pair with a thumb chewed half off by a naughty puppy. Keep for summer-wear the old boots, now curled at the toes and speckled with barn paint, which help you hike the Lake Superior shore. Apply deck sealer to the wooden handles of your garden rakes so that they'll last twenty years or so ... May the treasures we have at hand -- in a world so filled with real need -- always be enough."
With deep exploration of what it is to be human and what it is to live in nature, Springer's thoughtful book examines the loss of a child, the loss of his historic barn and the building of a new barn by Amish craftsmen. He takes up the cause of the Osage Orange, the Sassafras and one of my favorites, the Serviceberry Tree.
And then there is his love of water and the Portage River he's considered his home since he was a child.
"On restless nights, when I couldn't sleep in Johannesburg, Shanghai, or Sao Paulo, I found that my mind and spirit always fled to here. To this gravel-bottomed stream, to this little woods on the riverbank where, on summer nights, ivory shafts of moonlight make the oak trunks glow like pillars in a temple."
"Looking for Hickories" is a book worth having.
Also worth a look are two more books by Michigan writers:
- Craig Holden's "Matala" is a mystery involving a bored woman conned into financing a trip to Venice for friends she's just met. It is a novel of "shocking betrayals, of sexual obsession and mercenary enterprise, and of conflicting passions and fateful choices."
"Superior Deception," by Matthew Williams, is a romp of a mystery set in Apostle Bay, -- "A quaint harbor town on the southern shore of Lake Superior." The investigator is a small-town reporter, Vince Marshall, who discovers the swinging body of a local judge and gets drawn into a story of "arson, vandalism, domestic violence" which ultimately leads to the solution of a 150-year-old mystery.
Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli will be teaching "Murder Most Foul," writing the mystery novel, on four Wednesdays in May. For more information or to register, call NMC at 995-2619.
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