Wandering Wilbo

Muskegon Museum of Art 85th Regional Exhibition – All-State Edition
Entry Registration: May 2, 3, and 4, 2013

The MMA’s Regional Exhibition holds a respected position within Michigan’s
art tradition, representing the best in our artistic community. This year,
for the second year in a row, the invitation to enter artwork is extended
to artists throughout our state. Registration is open to all artists 18
years and older who reside in Michigan.

Up to two artworks may be submitted for juror selection. Artworks must be
physically brought to the Museum from Thursday, May 2, through Saturday,
May 4, or be shipped, pre-paid, to arrive by May 1. Digital entries are not
accepted. Complete information and entry forms are available at
www.muskegonartmuseum.org. The 85th Regional Exhibition opens on May 23 and
will be on display through August 21, 2013. The public is invited to join
the artists at an opening reception on Thursday, May 23, from 5:30 to 8:00
pm. Awards will be announced and given to the artist during the event at
7:00 pm.

This year’s juror is Doug Stapleton, an artist, curator, and educator. He
is an Assistant Curator of Art with the Illinois State Museum, Chicago
Gallery, and a former Artistic Associate with the Chicago-based
contemporary dance company The Seldoms. He is an adjunct faculty member in
the Interdisciplinary Arts graduate program at Columbia College, Chicago,
and his art has been exhibited recently at the Chicago Cultural Center and
at the Loyola University Museum of Art. More information on the juror can
be found at www. dougstapleton.com.

The 85th Regional Exhibition is underwritten by Shape Corporation and
Contemporary Art Ally Alcoa Foundation. Awards are underwritten by
Huntington Bank with additional support from the Muskegon Museum of Art
Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Michigan Council for Arts
and Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, and media
sponsor is Mlive/Muskegon Chronicle.

Mar 04

Our train has blasted through Chelsea, where it would make a great stop if
one were going to the Purple Rose Theater. We are on our way to Jackson. I
am on my way to Kalamazoo for the day before my 3:30 PM bus takes me to
Grand Rapids. I have been on the move since 4:30 AM and that’s three hours
and twenty four minutes. I am recalling a dream. I had placed a mattress on
the floor of the living room of a big open floor plan house. I covered it
with bed clothing from Bed, Bath and Beyond, and it looked all right.
Although a mattress on box springs not on a bed frame looks tragically
tacky. There is that choice to see the keys or to see the countryside. We
have a widow in the dining car. We have two friends returning from Ann
Arbor whom I have asked if they were painting students from ARTIC. I am
glad I am still a bit of a touch typist. The concession counter is being
run by a man with a genuine comic talent. “Hello Business Class!” “He was
here first?” “He’s an old friend, we go way back”. He, of course, reminds
me of a character from The Green Mile, the man who passed away last year
and was honored at the Oscars. Was it the Oscars? I am having a nice time,
except we didn’t get one of those cars that provides the Internet. I can
just fully tap into what I am thinking at the moment. I see a deer blind on
stilts, among dead snags of trees in a wet land rank with dead, brown
cattails. I don’t want to think how much money I have spent so far on this
stupid, compulsive trip. I am no closer than I was before. She had fun. “We
had fun, with a purpose”, I answered. It is of course parenting time. I
have at least an hour to Kalamazoo, and I have no idea what I will be doing
in Kalamazoo. How that single Greyhound line back to Muskegon drives my
life. I would be so much better off if I could have taken the Megabus back
at 1:00 AM Monday morning. I could have avoided a premium cab drive. I woke
up this morning, a fact that the soulful man behind the counter celebrated.
“I know who you are. We go way back”. Three odd bars as we pull into
Jackson, all of them serving plenty of Budweiser. Krista up sold me to a
Black Crown, which reminded me of a Michelob. Allegiance Health has a cure
for the sickness that spoils noon time. Our concession stand man is
breaking down boxes and talking about the Lake Effect snow in southwest
Michigan and northern Indiana, but it is not going to stop us from going
110 miles and hour. Amtrak didn’t spend 23 million to upgrade the tracks to
be defeated by Lake Effect snow. We have 21 people boarding at Jackson.
What does it mean when your mother waves to you from the platform in
Jackson. What does it mean when that woman walks away from the platform
with a yellow rag covering her mouth, held in place tightly as she walks
away, bent over slightly. Looking into the complex of buildings that make
up downtown Jackson. The glass of the Jackson station has started to slowly
flow to its bottom, making all those wavy glass imperfections that are the
sign of age. “If that changes, I will keep you abreast of that situation”.
He has been on this job for 38 years, so he might be sixty years old. A red
head from business class chased him down the aisle as he went to make his
pitch to the newly arriving passengers from the Jackson stop. That is the
second red head from this weekend’s trip that has accentuated her red hair
with dye. Pizza Hot Line by the gas station with a Buddy’s, a reefer has a
series of holes worn between its reinforcements. I chose the long way home,
I chose the long way home. I can already feel the joints in my right hand
begin to swell. I must hit the keys lighter. The red stick grows amongst
the cattails and marsh grass, and it has grown reddish with the longer days
of light. I could get my aspirins out and my blood pressure meds out and
that one medication that makes blood pressure work in all the right places.
So far, we haven’t been forced to wait on any rail sidings. Sleeping from 9
until 4 AM hasn’t quite reset my sleep clock. I might make Sunday an early
night to turn in too. I want to compartmentalize my dating in Muskegon,
leaving Hennessy’s for myself alone. Marsh and woodlot, marsh and woodlot,
pile of stones with an old tree grown from the center of it. A veteran of
Iraq has medically retired, and he’s chatting up Henry in the lounge.
Pontiac to Dearborn, where the club car concession opened, makes how long
of a nap. Today the conductor scanned the UPC square of my ticket,
presented by the Amtrak application. He didn’t ask for no id. The
passageway between this car and the following has been accumulating leaking
snow from a gap in the door sealing.
Thinking about Rand and Stuart, and being glad I didn’t answer, “I’ve been
fixing Stuart’s errors and handling problems he couldn’t for five years. I
asked a question of Rand who didn’t have the answer and asked the same
question of Kara who did”. I probably got an extra two weeks of pay out of
that reserve. Is it Adrian or Albion that we are how encountering, passing
through the beautiful campus of brick? Let’s see if that one med makes my
head hurt or makes me dizzy when it takes effect. I doubt it was needed to
today. I have five or six left, a twenty five dollar value. We made no stop
at the Albion station. The young retiree is a handsome, lanky ginger with a
ginger beard and an earring. She looks like the woman from the office but
three decades younger. The woman in the office has had two or maybe three
husbands. I am not wild about my options. Our red haired passenger has a
beautiful voice, which has a bit of purr in her tone. We are north of some
river and south of Interstate 94. I regret I will not be continuing on this
trip to Chicago. I can’t be the odd man out every time. Tengo Cansada. This
morning, all I have is jealousy and lowered expectations for my time in
Kalamazoo. Maybe I find someone to drive me the ninety miles home. I
assisted myself chemically, but I didn’t seem to need it during the
previous, self test. Erase. Erase. Erase. Ada, why don’t we take your
mother to lunch at Root, which I have wanted to enjoy for a while too.
What’s amazing is my mother fed her children farm to table every day for
twelve years, although she bought her meat from the Spartan store in town.
I see the open water of a river, and we have been following it for how
long? Yes, it is a river and we are south of Marshall. But the river peters
out west of Marshall? I am just trying to read the land as we pass through
it. Here, it is dammed for electricity. I didn’t know we passed through the
south end of Marshall. I am doing well with my touch typing. There is a
center less wind turbine on a post. There is the Marshall water tower.
Winston Park. Oh, that’s that rest stop? Text Lynn. For all the good it
does. Or was it the north end of Marshall? Maybe it’s the nail holes in the
corners. Doh! She’s the young woman from Hillsdale? Why does it matter?
Let’s face it. Trains have carried this country. Bar codes were invented
for the train industry, a fact that edifies the conductors. He’s got a Yale
hoodie. I have forty five minutes to type before my train arrives in
Kalamazoo. My daughter opened the mailbox, and the invitation has filled
her mailbox with the reek of cigarette smoke. I don’t think we’ll be
catching that daughter smoking anything. The man drinking a bottle of
Starbuck Frappucino knew that this was the 351 train, and announced it to
the club car before the conductors could. It’s a QR code, right. And here
we have the cereal factories of Kellogg’s. I tried to read a sign on a post
near the Third Base Lounge, and I couldn’t make out the blue lettering on a
blue field. White lettering. Good Times Lounge in a building that had to be
a church who once had banked on a weird architect. Strange drinking going
on it that bar. I got off in Battle Creek, could I make it home tonight? It
was Thursday when I took the last dose. Battle Creek has a train depot that
needs much recovery work. The one they use is a marvel. The rail road
people get special treatment on Amtrak. I got my blood pressure up over the
charge for a ride to the train station and the lack of support for train
passengers, getting us around by shuttle. Usually, we can get off for a few
minutes here. Don’t be left behind. 1950, not 63.
We have a changing of the guard in Battle Creek. This crew has been on the
job since 4:30 this morning, which still makes for a short day. If the door
is open, maybe it is intentional. A genuine eeeeek of OMG! Cropped hair
stared at me. I just kept walking. It shows green if not properly latched.
Problem is, the light goes on without the lock being set. I didn’t see that
club from the tracks. What creek is channelized there? I am remembering the
woman I bought a beer after talking with her on the platform in LA. Maybe I
could do something for you? She got off in Carlsbad, and a man met her on
the tracks. She made a business doing some kind of document scanning. It
was the widow. Twenty minutes. My, that perfume is much stronger than I
remember it. Hello is indicated. We are moving up to 110 miles an hour are
we? I will need my time in the metal closet. I have placed everything where
a guest would sit. Remove it. Open up a perch for the fragrant one. I have
the past in my future in the form of clutter. A nice little creek ….

Sep 02

On September 2, 2012, I remembered a host of horse stories. On the day of the horse, ride the 17 days of summer remaining as if they were a horse.

She rides her hips as if they were a horse. I read that as an example of simile in the manual of poetry writing, Western Wind. I haven’t a copy of the book. I should be able to Google that phrase and find the poem and the poet, as I could find the song, “City of New Orleans” by googling, “Hello, America, How Are You?” One summer afternoon in 1995, I saw a woman run east on Kercheval in Grosse Point Park, and she ran swiftly and with great form. She rode her hips as if she was riding a horse. I haven’t forgotten that line of verse and I haven’t forgotten my brief glimpse as she ran through a moment of my life. I was running then, and I was about to run in the Detroit Free Press Marathon, which I barely completed. I performed better at the half-marathon distance. I once ran in a weight category for men nearing two hundred pounds, the Clydesdale division. I posted pretty good times for a Clydesdale, running miles in less than eight minutes an hour. I can make that time on a bicycle now.

Girls take to horses quite dearly, and luckily, my daughter and I had a huge horse show to visit at the exhibition center at Novi Road and US-96, south of Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan. One of the exhibitors, a young woman, declared to me, “Girls who love horses don’t get into trouble”. I bought my daughter a flute and I hope it has the same effect. She’s been out riding the horses on girl scout adventures, so she has had brief moments of an equestrian girlhood. I have heard many stories of families who have given their daughter a horse to love, either to raise at home or to board at a neighboring horse farm. I was talking to a photographer who had taken a series of beautiful photographs of a young woman and her horse. She was departing for graduate school in the later part of the month of August, and she had found a good home for the horse. If she wasn’t home, the horse wouldn’t receive the right, personal care. He had gotten the text message early in the morning, and he had come out to take pictures before dawn. One picture had the mists of a small Michigan lake in the background.

I met a woman who had won championships and a professional income as a hay bale racer. When I met her, she wore a silver seahorse around her neck. She had divorced, and the horses were lost as part of the financial shock that divorce evokes upon a person’s life. She had a child whom she wanted to teach to ride, so she was saving to buy her girl a horse. She had moved home to run the family farm, so there was plenty of room on the Newaygo spread to feed and exercise the new family member. In the same place where I had met the woman with the seahorse, I met a woman who had acquired a pygmy horse from a rescue operation, and she added it to her stable of two paints. Her father wanted her to acquire an iron horse, a Harley Davidson to ride in the Rolling thunder parades. She was preparing for the day her daughter departed for Florida to study marine biology by uploading all of her horse riding pictures from a laptop to Facebook folders. I certainly hope Facebook plans of allowing people to use their accounts forever for free. There’s too many albums of memories up on the Internet counting on the Facebook promise.

I have taken my daughter to see the ponies at the horse races, including the action at Sports Creek and Northville Downs. She has an idea of earning credentials as a veterinarian, and seeing animals at work, running in a sport that many think honorable, has to be a good experience. I bet on every race, and made ten dollars for my trouble, showing her how to pick horses from the racing digest. I thought of that as a mathematical experience. Many of her friends expressed dismay when she told them about our visits to the races. The sport is dying slowly, and Great Lakes Downs has fallen to the changing tide of the gambling industry. It’s no longer necessary to keep horses and run a clean race to have a horse race. It’s easier to simulate a horse race on a computer system, and I’ve seen one of these at Firekeepers in Battle Creek. You can’t smell the scent of the horse hair on the wind.
Photography Credit
Two young Nokota mares

2010-02-11
François Marchal

On September 1, 2012, we enjoyed a hot, sunny day followed by a warm night. On the day of the goat, the 18 days of summer remaining await on your plate, leftovers to enjoy.

The goat has long held a special place in the bestiary of my mind.
Hesse Hathaway Park stands on Williams Lake Road in Waterford
Township, Michigan, and a family of farmers donated the farm house,
barns, coops, fields and forests to the township. The manager
maintained a herd of goats and a coop full of chickens, just to give
the farm an authentic feel. He had success maintaining a hutch of
rabbits, and children loved to feed them. My daughter has gone to
visit Hesse Hathaway Park every year, in every season, since the
second year of her birth.

She was born in September of 1996, so that fall, she went to the apple
orchards of Western Wayne County and a working farm on the grounds of
Maybury State Park, which featured pigs and horses. As early as one,
she was transfixed by the squealing of pigs and the hen yard ballet of
the chickens at this working farm. The pigs could squeal all they want
behind their fence of two by sixes. The chickens could peck a child’s
hand through the chicken wire, and I would have to keep my daughter
out of range of their pecking. I think that November, her mother and I
took her to an art and garden show at the Washtenaw County Fair
Grounds, and the cold had started to arrive for the season. She was
born on a day in the end of summer, and enjoyed Fall 1996 as her first
full season.

As for Hesse Hathaway Park, that became her local working farm for all
the years of her childhood and her early adolescence. She’s about to
turn sixteen, and this summer she twice led young girls scouts through
a week of camping and nature studies on the grounds of Hesse Hathaway.
I remember a concert, with the band standing on top of a hay wagon,
singing the anthem, The City of New Orleans, and I remember explaining
to her why that song is special to me on the drive back to her
mother’s house. “I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is
done”. I explained how the tradition of folk song was all around us,
ubiquitous in a way I feel classical music or top forty never can be
ubiquitous. A man could stand up on a hay wagon and sing the City of
New Orleans imperfectly and still deliver its full emotional effect.
The song has lyrics that could be recited as a poem in a halting
voice, by a reader who sounds out words, and still deliver its full
emotional effect. There’s nothing to harmful from a chicken’s peck. The coop at Hesse
Hathaway allowed us to walk right into the coop amongst the chickens,
as if we were gathering eggs. We never got pecked. The roosters didn’t
aggress against us. Near the farm house, the billy goats milled around
in a pen with the barn forming one wall. The goats could poke their
muzzles through the squares in the wire and accept handfuls of grass.
Key was, knowing when to let go of the bundles of grass, the second
when the munching goat had the grass securely in his mouth. I was
allowing my daughter to hold out a bundle of grass for the goats, and
I watched her hand and pulled it back when the grass was held by the
teeth. I pulled back my hand a little to abruptly, and I think that
made her cry. At the moment, I had thought the goat had nipped her
fingers with his chomp.

I freaked out, and I carried her to the car, and she cried. And that
made me all the more certain the goat had nipped her fingers. I was
freaked out by everything in those days because I had just separated
from her mother in July of that year, and the divorce proceedings had
kept me out of the office enough to make my consulting position at a
local health insurance company precarious. I had a new position with a
manufacturer by spring of that following year. So I took her to the
urgent care where she has been treated every year of her life except
the first, and an intern carefully checked her left and right fingers
and found nothing. They put her on my lap, set a lead blanket over her
waist and legs to protect her from the radiation, and took several
X-Rays of her fingers. And the intern found nothing. I don’t believe
it to this day, but her mother’s mother had said it was impossible for
a billy goat to bite because ungulates only have teeth on the bottom
of their mouths. My daughter plays a fairly good flute and piccolo,
which would be impossible if a goat had maimed her developing fingers. A few months later, she explained to me as we got out of the car,
“Billy goats don’t bite. No, don’t bite”.

I have taken my daughter on an August vacation for a few days before
school started, and that has failed this August and last August. The
August vacation last year became a week of bereavement, so I suppose
we did observe an August trip that past summer, an unplanned trip to
say farewell to my father and to greet the family as it would remain
until the next sadness took one of us away. This year, we had a fairly
nice train trip on the Wolverine from Pontiac to Niles, Michigan, and
we took a taxi down to South Bend. We haven’t taken a trip this year
for August because money has been absurdly tight this year. I have two
more Augusts until she goes away for college. In August of 2010, we found ourselves on the road to Madison,
Wisconsin, looking to visit State Street and just soak in the ambiance
of the college town. A temporary road side sign had invited us to stop
for apples, self serve, and we saw that the apple stand stood inside
an open barn. Outside, the yard had a pen of billy goats that lived
under a scrub apple tree. We stopped and bought a peck of apples to
take home and we fed the scrub apples that had fallen outside the
reach of goat muzzles to the goats. We didn’t hold them in our hands.
We threw them into the air and tried to see if the goats could catch
them. They could. The goats could play shortstop with their mouths in
baseball tasted as good as an apple.

I think we can make up for the missing of the August trip by a good
trip for her birthday rapidly approaching in September’s third week. I
have seen goats this summer, but only from a passing motor vehicle.
Last Sunday, I was driving south of Grand Rapids towards the town of
Middleville, driving a friend’s late model Monarch with no rust and
only 60,000 miles upon its odometer. She spotted the pigmy goats in a
field to the right of M-37, and we didn’t stop to feed them. She
teased me I could get out of buying her dinner by picking up some road
kill and roasting it over an open fire. I should have stopped the car
at the deer kill just to see if she laughed. I am thinking of renting the movie, “The Men Who Stare At Goats”, just
to see if I can learn more about keeping the darlings from munching
children’s fingers. I expect to have grandchildren within the next
decade, and I can imagine my daughter, her child or children, up close
and personal with those hungry ungulates again.

Apples for the goat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat I don’t want to kill goats by staring at them. I just want to back
them off a few inches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats

Photography Credit

Hausziege im Wallis (Schweiz) bei Fiesch.
Goat, located in Fiesch, Valais (Switzerland).
Date 13 July 2010
Armin Kübelbeck
http://galerie.best4sports.de
http://galerie.hbz-da.de

Sep 01

Internet Cafes dedicated to online gambling games have established a following in Muskegon Michigan , including the Snooty Fox.

Mia & Grace, the farm to table restaurant in Muskegon @PureMichigan, takes a much needed vacation over Labor Day 2012.

On August 31, 2012, I saw a mouse scatter into ground cover along the Lake Muskegon bike trail. On the day of the mouse and a blue moon, think about enjoy the 19 remaining days of summer as a rare occurrence.

I saw a mouse taken by the talons of a red tail hawk earlier this
season. The hawk had awaited in a tree top for my car to drive by,
making road noise that the field mouse had been grown tired of
hearing. He sailed downward on his extended wings and nabbed the
mouse, catching the furry body on his second try. The red tail had to
fall left a few inches to make the second grab in the corn stubble. It
was like watching a good short stop bobble and then secure a line
drive. That action unfolded before my eyes in the spring, when the
season was fresh and trees were unfolding leaves from buds.

At least, that’s the way it plays out in my mind as I review the
story. I have often, unintentionally, invented story elements. I had
invented a tree on the edge of Glenside, south of Sherman, that had
plenty of dead limbs which would rot into holes where wood ducks could
live. I see now that tree has no dead limbs at all. My mind played a
trick on me so I could write my image. I can admit this as an example
where I go back to see again, trying to improve my vision. I should
just put an HD Pro on a helmet. That will make me wear a helmet as I
bicycle.

I was riding on the Lake Muskegon bike trail and a pair of young boys
just stopped in front of me. I hit my brakes and, riding on a new
bike, toppled off my frame. I rolled on my back but I did not hit my
head. A woman in a helmet and a racing jersey and lycra pants stopped
to inquire after my condition. She might have been fifty, sixty or
even seventy and she had the figure of twenty-year old model. Sorry if
that’s the way I remember her. I could have just said that she was
exceptionally fit. She had taken a tumble with a helmet on her head,
and she had hit her head. Diagnostic imaging at Mercy Hospital
revealed the slightest leak of blood on her brain. Apparently, it
didn’t require surgery. She told me she doesn’t ride with anyone who
doesn’t ride wearing a helmet, and her cycling entourage includes two
young men just entering college. I’ve been warned. Every cycling season, a number of tragic crashes take good men away
from us, men who lately haven’t been wearing helmets. In a miracle, a
man who rides with the Moose Lodge in Fremont, Michigan has returned
from a month long coma. He has expressed frustration as he searches
his mind for his faculties. But he’s back among the conscious. I heard
this story outside a poker room in Muskegon, Michigan. The cyclist’s
mother had been furious. She had learned that he only wore his helmet
when he rode over to see her. Many of the people from the poker room
had plans to see a drag show at Moz’s, Muskegon’s home of gender free
sexuality. The drag show was organized to raise funds to assist with
his medical bills by his boss, who has lived with a partner for twelve
happy years.

Lately, I have progressed in my summer bestiary by telling about
animals I have heard or animals related to me in story. I was
desperately scanning the lakeshore trail of south Lake Muskegon and
was relieved when a mouse ducked into the weedy margin. Nature is rich
on the West Michigan shore of Lake Michigan. However, I am often faced
with a day when I don’t see a new animal. In the past week, I had to
make due with three taxidermy bears. I had even searched the lily pads
of a shallow marl bottomed lake, walking along a shoreline promenade.
I saw the rock nests of blue gills, but since I hadn’t spotted visible
fish at all, I didn’t declare a day of the blue gill. I might order it
off the menu tomorrow, but blue gill has as high a price as yellow
belly perch! I have used the picture of the day old mice for illustration because I
took apart a nest once and showed it to my mother, who explained that
they were baby mice. I had probably doomed the infants by tainting
them with my human smell. We are talking 1969 to 1972, when I was
lower to the ground and could see these kinds of objects in the weeds.
I have noticed these pink infants used as ice fishing bait before, but
not recently and never in bait shops.

Photo credit to John Bessa, who was probably was studying empathy as a
neurological phenomena
http://www.JohnBessa.com

Aug 31

On August 30th, 2012, I was singing, “The Other Day, I Saw A Bear. Out in the Woods. Away Out There!”. On the day of the bear, roam like a hungry grizzly looking for what is needed, necessary and transcendent. 20 days and summer is gone!

Look, read Galway Kinnell’s poem, “The Bear”, before you read Wilbo. That’s a poem in the key of Dylan Thomas and his “Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Light”. Do not go gentle into the dying of the summer. Do not.

http://staff.psc.edu/schneide/Kinnell-TheBear.html

I am happy to say in my hunting after the world of men and women, I have heard Galway Kinnell read several times at the University of Michigan. I heard him read, “When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone” when it was a fresh poem, and I felt embarrassment as he read it. He meant it. I have no idea if I were feeling embarrassment for him or for myself because I was traveling alone to Ann Arbor for literature and poetry almost every night I could get away from Northville. The two car family has to be a divorce ridden demographic. I was making a mess of my first and only marriage when I was cruising to Ann Arbor for poetry and literature and finding sex. Kinnell published a collection of verse by that title in 1990. I was introduced to Kinnell’s “The Bear” by a woman named Nadine, Nadine the Dream, who wouldn’t let me fuck her without conditions. Her pussy I could eat without conditions of any kind. I have never heard a woman scream with that intensity, as intensely as she screamed during her multiple orgasms that began almost with the first lick. She had a favorite poem and I read it. When I read it a second time, I wasn’t pandering. She also made me walk out of a poetry reading with Donald Hall, Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon before Donald Hall had read. Hall might understand why. He had written in one of his long works of personal mythology, and I paraphrase, “They took off their clothes, and laid back”.

I saw three mounted bear the other day at a hunting lodge in Hesperia, Michigan: one black, one brown and one bearing the white fur of the polar bear. All had been taken under in a sportsman’s manner, slain quickly with a bolt from a bow and arrow. All had reached an age when it was assured that the bear had passed his genetics on freely and fully to the next generation. All had been taken in a way that allowed the local authorities to collect fees to maintain habitat and prevent poaching. I was amazed by the sight of the three, especially the polar bear. I have only seen a polar bear family at the Detroit Zoo, where the swimming bears pass overhead, swimming over an acrylic tube passing beneath a refrigerated lake. I have a picture of my daughter I downloaded from Facebook; she was hugging a polar bear plush in the gift shop. I haven’t bought it for her because she took ten shopping bags of plushes last week to the Goodwill. For what is she giving up the gifts of childhood? She saved the dolls and the hand puppets I gave her. Thank goodness. I think of the poem “The Bear” and I have insight into mammalian effort. It took a lot of effort to conceive that child. The deer rut is not big dance party either.

I am acquainted with an artist called Patricia Dee, and she loves the Grand River. She kayaks there. She paints there. She organized a show named “Seasons on the Grand” with forty beautiful works of art celebrating the Grand River flowing through Ottawa County. The riparian corridor of the Grand River has been declared a greenway, and we celebrated this ecological, cultural and economic wonder for a month straight. There’s a kayak outfitter called Felix Pytlinski who has lived on the bayous of the River Grand most of his life, more than 75 years. He once had 76 guns stolen from his store in the 77th year of his life, 2008. The Pytlinski family had the good sense to collect paintings by Lewis Lumen Cross, who painted in a castle on the neighboring Deremo Bayou.

Dee and her boyfriend, a retired naval officer decorated with many honors, and they set off kayaking in the bayous, lined with cattails and grasses. The landing of Felix Pytlinski makes a great place to access the water. The pair reported finding a bear camp in the grasses, smelling the scent of freshly bent grass and noticing fresh scat. Felix’s on Green Street stands only six miles southeast of the Theater Bar in downtown Grand Haven, where I often sip a glass of wine with Dee and discuss art. The bears chose to be our neighbors. I am excited by this fact. I can imitate their spirit.

I am setting off on a long journey north that will not complete until after sunset.

Bear

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear

Patricia Dee

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/patricia-dee/14/290/154

More Galway Kinnell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Kinnell

http://galwaykinnell.com/

Photography Credit

Animal species: Asiatic Black Bear (Wroclaw zoo)

30 November 2007

Nicolas Guérin

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gu%C3%A9rin_Nicolas

http://www.nicolasguerin.com/