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- Canoe Trip
- An Ode to Mio
- North!
- The Moon We Left Behind, by Charles Krauthammer
- Day of Days
- More Recent Articles
- Search Faded Photographs
Had a great time Up North last weekend, as did all who were able to make it. The clean air and sheer beauty of nature is difficult to beat, and there just aren't many stress relievers that equal a day on the Au Sable. I definitely need to make that trip more than once every year or so.
As the saying goes, what happens there stays there. That said, I thought I'd share some pictures.
An Ode to Mio
by Joe Leaser
I sit here working and dreaming of Mio
Staring at this quite impossible pile
Of projects and to-do's that clutter my space
With deadlines and hassles I'd rather not face
But in nine more hours and one more day
Of too much work for too little pay
I can turn off my brain and begin to think
Of stogies and rivers, and chili and drink
Of kingfishers, brown trout and a wild turkey's gobble
Of Rte 33 leading us to the Au Sable
Of sleeping bags, camp fires, and plenty of trees
Of fresh air and friendship, and Rick losing his keys
So with just one more day to deal with the hell
Of computers and faxes and calls on the cell
I turn an eye upward and give thanks to the Source
who created the wonderland known as Up North
When I was a young whipper-snapper growing up in the late 70's, my Dad, my Grandpa Fred, and some of their friends used to spend a week "Up North" every autumn, salmon fishing in Manistee. Sure, some of the faces changed throughout the years for whatever reason, but their trip was a firm tradition. Each year they returned home with terrific photos of the massive salmon they had caught, as well as plenty of fillets for us to enjoy. In fact, it seemed like we had Ziploc bags full of smoked salmon in our fridge for months afterward. I haven't had smoked salmon in decades, but I remember the smell and taste like it was yesterday.
At the time, I was far too young to understand the psychological importance of a "guys trip" like that, and what it must have meant to my Dad and Grandpa. But I knew they enjoyed their week in the wild, staying in a cabin, wading in the river, enjoying nature, eating manly food, and simply getting away from it all. I've heard a few funny stories trickle out through years, but most of what happened in Manistee stayed in Manistee (exactly as it should be). A trip like that is one of those situations where you don't realize how badly you need it until you're in the middle of it. Then it hits you, and you say "...I'm so glad we pulled this off...this is so worth it...we need to do this more often...". I know I've said things like that when on trips with my buddies, and I'm willing to bet that those guys had that exact conversation every single year they went to Manistee.
My cousins Matt, Jeff and I couldn't wait until we were old enough to go salmon fishing with the "Men". Unfortunately for us, they stopped making their trip before we became old enough to tag along (which, in our minds would have been 15 or 16, but in theirs was more like 35). I believe there were some health issues involved with the decision to stop, but my guess is that "life stuff" simply piled up and got in the way. And when you're talking about coordinating the schedules of five or six dads with commitments to jobs, wives, kids, etc., excursions of this nature simply do not happen all by themselves. Rather, they take a great deal of planning, sincere "want-to" on everyone's part, and dogged intentionality by those doing the planning. That's just the way it is with the level of family and career obligations - even more so these days.
Fast-forward twenty-five years, and here I am in a similar life-stage to where my Dad was back then. Work demands, family demands, plenty of stress and not much time to relieve it. It recently dawned on me that the guys in my family don't have a tradition like the salmon trip my Dad and Grandpa used to take. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the only time most of us are together in one place is at a funeral. That had to change. And though my Grandpa has since passed and others are living in different parts of the country, someone needed to step up and pull the family guys together for an annual trip. It's too important to shrug it off as "impossible". Someone needed to begin a new tradition - one that we can hopefully pass along to our kids...when they turn 35, of course. My Obsessive Planning gene uniquely qualified me for the job of "someone", wouldn't you know.
After hours of research, dozens of phone calls, and countless inquiring email messages, I'm very excited to say that I was able to reserve a terrific northern lakefront cabin in the woods. I can't believe it, but me, my Dad, and a few other guys from my family will be heading Up North later this month for some much deserved R&R. It took a ton of work - some schedules still need to pan out - but it's officially a "go". We're planning to spend time canoeing down the Au Sable River, trout fishing, hanging out by the campfire with endless bowls of chili, and breathing the best fresh-air anywhere. No laptops, no deadlines, no traffic jams...
I simply cannot wait. In fact, I have already started packing, not to mention the five page spreadsheet I created to keep track of everything. I wasn't joking about the Obsessive Planning gene. Besides, three weeks can sneak up on you pretty darn quickly these days.
J.
Every so often I'll read something that grabs me. Krauthammer's latest offering did exactly that.
The Moon We Left Behind
By Charles Krauthammer Friday, July 17, 2009
Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.
Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama's Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy's enthusiasm for human space exploration.
So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless milenna of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing.
To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a Tinkertoy we call the international space station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.
The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive.
America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.
So what, you say? Don't we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we'd waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we'd still be living in caves.
Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one's asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that, unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.
Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.
The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to -- and symbol of -- environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?
Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.
But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.
How could we?
Saturday June 6 marks the 65th Anniversary of D-Day. If you know me or have been reading my blog for a while you know that my Grandpa Fred was one of several thousand U.S. soldiers who, as part of the largest invasion force in history, landed on Omaha Beach shortly after sunrise and began the fight to liberate Europe.
Grandpa talked about stomping on the fingers of his men in order to get them down the rope ladder into their landing craft - many were too afraid to let go. Many vomited due to sea-sickness and nerves. Can't say I blame them.
Upon approaching the beach, Grandpa was forced to throw his men over the sides of the landing craft and into the bloody, frothing surf as German gunfire was roaring straight into their boat from the cliffs above. Those fortunate enough to survive the beach landing raced through a wall of incoming German artillery and ammunition, all while stumbling over the dead bodies of their fellow soldiers. It was a miracle that any of them lived to fight on. The heroes who made it home will tell you that the real heroes are the men who didn't make it home. Hard to argue with that.
I have always wondered what thoughts went through my Grandpa's head as he sat on the porch of his beachfront retirement home every morning, watching the waves of Lake Erie break on his shoreline. Did he still hear the screams and explosions? Did he still smell the salty ocean air mixed with burning fuel and munitions? Most likely. I'll bet it took more than a hard blink and a deep breath to shake himself back to reality.
To each and every member of the Greatest Generation, on behalf of those of us whose lives are better because of your sacrifice, I say "thank you".
J.
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