Nearly 154 years to the day, I am driving wing on wing ahead of a freakish warm October southwind and the air smells of straw and dust. Late afternoon October and particulate haze, the world is turning itself yellow and weathered.

The same day Chicago burned, Mrs O’Leary’s cow and all that, but more people died in the Peshtigo fire. Over a million acres of cutover, logging towns, and farms. Two thousand-ish people gone, maybe more – some neck-deep in the bay. We’ll never know – even records of their existence burned. I could probably find fire legacies in the forest if I pulled over and looked, but that’s my schtick.

I doubt most of the other drivers know. I wonder if they care beyond the tourist impulse to ponder a bit and move on. It looks normal now – at least superficially. But Smokey Bear’s fire-watchers must be on hair-trigger with the summer’s vegetation as dry as it is. Some memories are like pine needle ash — curled and whirling turbulence, free of gravity, on the boundary and lost with a touch.

Highway 41 runs right up the gut of the old burn, right along the western shore. Green Bay first shows herself over my right shoulder, there over the eight lanes or so of newly constructed freeway just north of Title Town. I’ll follow it up, rapidly peeling away lanes and traffic until it’s a two-lane leaving Menomonee, pushing through ridge and swale cedars and wetlands.

With Green Bay sparkling on the right through the trees. Chambers Island on the hazy horizon. Tonight, I’ll have my dinner at the northern terminus, at Jack’s, a diner at the head of Little Bay De Noc just off route 2, where the Whitefish River empties. I have intimacy here. I’ve walked much of the swampy floodplain. Recommend the whitefish sandwich with fries. Skip the salad.

I planned it that way, my weekend business is in Marquette but the hotels in Marquette are a hundred bucks more expensive than in Escanaba. Likely, some second-banana reasoning on the part of the tourist trade. But I love it here and I deliberately found a hotel in Gladstone — Escanaba’s “bedroom community” (Ha!), but half-way to Jack’s in Rapid River. I could drive the rest of the way to Marquette in the morning.

You see, I lived here for three winters, in a fish-camp cabin which sounds more romantic than it should. A humble tiny drafty old house near the boat ramp. It rented to walleye fishers during summer and a greenhorn grad student during winter. Someday I’ll tell you my story of tipping a five-gallon vat of home-brew in the tiny kitchen one polar-cold night.

Thirty-some years on, I know what I’m doing, seeking refuge in nostalgia. I anticipated the road trip all week. I walked the waterfront at Van Cleve park and checked that the Gladstone Covenant Church still looked active (it did). I made myself go, back then. They welcomed me despite me oozing outsider awkwardness from every pore. The church was essentially two extended families. One manufactured Swedish Pimples (a fishing lure) at a tiny factory nearby.

Back then, every conversation intersected the topical triumvirate of deer, forests, or fishing. Back then, I dead-reckoned my way.

Back then, an old man invited me into his basement. He lived here in a tidy house though I can’t remember where exactly and I’m ashamed I don’t remember his name. We talked fly fishing and I knew from the deer-hunter group, that he had fished with Robert Travers (a pen name), the UP’s fly-fishing literary star. The light in his basement was harsh and the walls were the color of lime jello mixed with cool whip. He had a fly-tying vise on his basement desk but it was surprisingly sterile. None of the mix of tools and materials a fly-tier might have at hand. 

He told me he used to tie but he couldn’t see well enough anymore and his fingers weren’t as nimble. When he learned that I tied as well, he gave me a box – all of his fly-tying supplies, hackles and fur patches, hooks and hair and thread.

An extravagant gift. I learned to tie as a grad student as economic self-defense. Fly-tying materials were expensive but professionally tied flies even more so – and I only earned a grad-student stipend. I used to whip out delicate mayfly patterns as small as #18 hooks and fished enough to enjoy the economy of scale. Not sure I could now, now I need my Walgreens cheaters for pretty much everything. 

He’d be disappointed in me. Not long after, my first job moved us to central Illinois and after that our kids were born. Lacking time and access to trout streams, I stopped flyfishing for the most part.

Nostalgia is a cheap drug but I’ll take it since the other postures of cynicism, anger, and anxiety are probably more damaging in the long run. Every unseasonably warm day is an omen and the clock keeps ticking. This summer, the haze was from Canadian wildfires. Again.

My soul hurts from absorbing the daily assaults of grift, lawlessness, and performative cruelty and my threadbare faith seems less and less able to hold it together. Pine needle ash — curled and whirling turbulence, free of gravity, on the boundary and lost with a touch. It’s self-indulgent. And I know that. Sometimes writing for the blog is a clumsy slog through the residues and it’s all I got.

I didn’t sleep well. The window-mounted air conditioner was unreasonably loud and the open window faced the nighttime truck traffic on 41 and the railroad pinched parallel to it by the escarpment.

I dressed before dawn and walked to the gas station for a coffee and a muffin before heading to the beach to watch the sun rise over the Stonington peninsula. Not sure why, other than to force something to feel, or reluctance to leave the experience. Raccoon tracks in the sand and the fine scum from the south wind pushing for days the organics caught in the surface tension. In the mud, a flag-printed boat cushion abandoned to the flotsam. 

Try to describe sunrises and fall color without fire metaphors and you begin to appreciate the tension between beauty and destruction. Does it help to revisit that when it seems that everything is on fire?

I was on the cusp of my professional identity when I knew this place. I am back now at this late stage. I have business in Marquette this morning with, as it turns out, another old man. But the parallels seem too forced. 

I keep returning to the thought that generosity is first among human virtues. That it persists improbably. Guess I’ll hold that for a bit. 

Back at it on Monday.