Michigan Day 1

Last night, my first night in Lee’s 1900 two-story frame house on Lake Leelanau, Michigan, we ate dinner on the front porch seated on his grandparent's wooden rocking chairs. The day had been pleasant, low 80’s, and the evening was calm and cooling. Lee’s house is on the lake. He even has a small wooden deck, supported by galvanized steel poles driven deep into the lake bed, jutting out into the water. That side of the house, the side facing the water, is the front of the house. The entrance from the county road, along his winding drive through his towering beech trees, is the back. Last night, we ate dinner on the front porch.

It’s August, which means its corn and vegetable season here in Northern Michigan. The corn here, at the right point in the season, is surprisingly juicy and plump. When you bite down on an ear, the kernels explode in your mouth with creamy sweetness. And the tomatoes, they are firm and fragrant and tasty.

Andy Rooney did a 60 Minutes segment on tomatoes. He told about the tomatoes he remembered growing up, how flavorful and colorful and real they were. Then he described the genetically engineered versions we have today. You know, the ones "designed" to be picked by machine, the ones that never really get ripe or even red. They look and feel … well, engineered, like plastic fruit in a bowl, only worse, because plastic fruit at least looks inviting. But these Northern Michigan tomatoes are real, they are firm, they are tasty, they are so very flavorful.

I told Lee last night that I have had a bounty of great tomatoes this year. My mom had a garden from spring to mid-summer. She and my Dad live in the Hill Country of Texas, a semi-aired 200 square miles of rolling hills, scrub oak and cedar. The soil is mostly caliche—a crushed limestone mixture that resembles chalk. Needless to say, coaxing vegetables from that soil takes time, attention, and determination. My mom expends all three in a loving, caring act of tending her garden every year. Most of what she grows, she gives away, to her children, her grand children and her neighbors. To her way of thinking, neighbor is an expansive term, including everyone she knows in her small town of Goldthwaite and all her friends in Austin. This year, she and Dad grew a wealth of tomatoes and green beans.

My Dad took a picture of the largest tomato of the harvest, a 1.8 pounder, sitting on a scale. The local paper printed it with a story about mom’s prolific plants, and she soon received phone calls and emails from town’s folk wanting to buy her produce. Nearly every meal during every visit we made while her garden was producing included tomatoes, even breakfast. But I never complained. They were so deep, dark-red, and juicy and sweet that I could not get enough of them. What I discovered, or maybe remembered, was that I love tomatoes, and when they are good tomatoes, meaning real tomatoes allowed to ripen, I actually crave them. What it tells me is this: what they pass off as tomatoes in the store are nothing but a cheap imitations of the real thing, a fabricated replica that we have grown so used to that we don’t even know what we are missing. Well, I know. And after this summer, after mom’s tomatoes and Upper Michigan tomatoes, I’m not likely to forget. That may not be a good thing considering I’m unlikely to find real tomatoes anywhere near Dallas.

As Lee and I sat on the front porch, sipping our wine and finishing the last of the meal, the sun was just setting across the lake. The two things I remember most vividly about my visits here are the sunsets and the thunderstorms, each are awe inspiring, powerful, even forceful reminders of the often overlooked majesty in nature. The sunset last night was no exception. It started as a bubble of deep, dark pink resting atop the westward hills. It hovered there, growing deeper and richer and more intense, and then it exhaled. From the tops of the hills it breathed itself toward us in pink and orange and red bands along the underside of the low clouds. The progression was slow, nearly imperceptible, and as the full length of narrow sky directly between the porch and the hills was filled with color, it inhaled again, pulling the colors back into itself, slowly, calmly, spreading out as it did to fill the horizon. Then it was gone, and the calm lake, silky and still, was alone as it stretched out before us into the darkness.

Today is cool, mid-70’s, and windy. There is a south westerly breeze raising whitecaps on the water. I slept soundly last night, perhaps for the first time in months. Maybe for the first time since my last visit here nearly a year ago. There is no air conditioning, so we are at the mercy of the night air to make it pleasant or unbearable. I cranked open the windows in my room and turned on a fan and read, but by the time I was ready to close my eyes I was already getting cold, so I turned off the fan and pulled the sheet up over my shoulders. At some point, the wind picked up and the house cooled down even more, and I must have awakened just long enough to unfold the blanket at the foot of the bed and drape it over me because I was swaddled in it this morning.

Lee is in town shopping and I am here, on the back … no, front porch, breeze in my face, waves lapping at the rocks of the break water, typing. Not bad for a cool, pleasant Sunday, huh? 4:15 The clouds lifted. Lee is inside working, and I’m back on the front porch enjoying the warm sun and the cool breeze. Lee says this lake, Lake Leelanau, is one the most underutilized lakes in Michigan. I can see how that could be true. For its size and its relative nearness to Traverse City, there are precious few boats on this lake. That’s of course one of its charms as far as retreats go. But what it does have are lots of wave runners, an inordinate number as compared to the boats. They aren’t obnoxious, just ubiquitous. Every time I look up I see one. And whereas for some reason the boats tend to hug the opposite shore, the wave runners seem to like this side of the lake. Of course today, as windy as it is, neither boat nor wave runner are that numerous.

When I visit Lee there tends to be a theme for the week. It’s not one we choose ahead of time, but our conversation start following a path and before long we’ve worn a rut that all other conversations tend slide into. When a conversation starts on its own trail, eventually it intersects with the one we’ve already cut and sort of tumbles in and rolls along the path of least resistance. It’s only Day 1, but even now I see the beginnings of the week’s theme, the bend to the grass where are conversation has trod several times already. It seems to be about the difference between what we do and who we are. Even the book I am reading, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, touches upon this theme. We have yet to flesh it out, the grass is still there, and the path not yet worn, but it seems to be heading in that direction.

7:30 I am starving. We are having salad, pasta, and bread. Just the thought of it makes my mouth water and my stomach growl. I used to eat whether I was truly hungry or not. Now I am hungry all the time. And it’s not due to a revved up metabolism. I only wish that were the case. No, it seems to be tied to the sugar levels in my blood. Whether I’ve exercise or not, whether I need it or not, my body is always craving food. It’s annoying and terribly inconvenient. I actually have to plan ahead and have protein bars in my back pack, protein shakes in the refrigerator, and snacks, usually healthy, sometimes not, laying about. Of course talking about this is just making me more hungry.