A Sign

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – It’s Monday night, about 9:30 p.m., and I’ve just finished my daily (or sometimes nightly) ritual of snow shoveling.

Snow slayer on Deck No. 1

My apologies about fixating on the snow.  But dealing with it has become a pleasant habit. Yes, pleasant, because it takes you outside, forces exertion, and leaves you with the satisfaction of a job done.  Well done, you hope, but at the least, done.

Up here, it’s an immense responsibility keeping the snow cleared.  Because if you don’t do it today, another 5 inches will arrive tomorrow, and then another 5 …  or 8 if the lake winds are just right. Just as the bills can mount, so can snow.  And it’s best to smite both sooner than later.

This is life in a northern town.  Neighbor Levi had his tractor and plow out today tackling the big stuff – our joined driveways.  Levi’s a veteran at this. A young Coast Guard guy, he moved here with Leslie from Alaska about the same day we arrived. They just brought daughter Bristol into the world.

Deck No. 2

“Nice snow today, Levi!” I called.

“Yeah, love it!” he responded. 

“Nice to see the sun!” I said.

“Yeah, love it!” he answered. 

Actually, we’ve had longer conversations, all pleasant.  But this one was short and sweet, because honestly there wasn’t much more to say.  Many inches of snow had fallen, shaping our shared hills into splendid banks of soft cotton.  The air was crisp, pure.  We both realized the joy of the day.

Life in a northern town.  There’s a song by that name, of course.  And I do enjoy it so.  I remember driving back to Traverse City a couple of months ago just after my high school reunion in St Louis.  I drove up Michigan 131 from Grand Rapids, then along Supply Line Road angling northwest, then took Hammond Road east, then a sharp left on our own Five Mile Road.

Five Mile has a reputation in town.  Some locals avoid it when snow abounds, because it’s a bit slick, especially on the steep hill down to the Traverse City valley below.

Snow along the Boardman River.

But then, that’s its beauty.  Because, as you hit the slight hilltop curve that starts your descent, you can see – for a few rich seconds – the beautiful blue of Traverse Bay.  And at that point, you know you’re home.  You also know the why of being home.

So on this day, returning home, I made sure to play “Life in a Northern Town” on my iPod as I crested that hill.

Heyya ma ma ma, hey-dee-da-naya

Heyya ma ma ma, heyya

Life in a northern town

Hey ma ma ma ma

That’s the chorus.  And if you don’t remember it, I left a link to the Sugarland version at the bottom of this post.  You’ll know the song when you hear it.

The song, in fact, has nothing to do with a North-American northern town.  It was written by an English pop group, The Dream Academy, in 1985.   It reached No. 7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart the next year.  It’s said to describe the visit of English songwriter Nick Drake to a northern English town.

Nick Drake

Drake was a depressed insomniac who also wrote some fantastic songs and, sadly, killed himself.  So this was The Dream Academy’s salute to Drake.

What’s interesting to me is how this song caught fire in the United States; to this day it reminds so many of life up north.  Just Google it online, look up the song, and view listeners’ recollections of it.

“As a person who returned home after 10 years to my snowy N.E. Ohio town,” reads one, “this song also hits me in the gut every time I hear it. It reminds me of my past and what this town used to be like when I was growing up in the 1970s.”

You can find similar comments … from New Yorkers to North and South Dakotans.

I think it’s the chorus that does it – a chant that sounds Native American but probably has more roots in African music.  But because Native Americans are so intrinsic to “up north” – for us, the Ottawa and Chippawa are just up the road – it all seems to fit.

Regardless, it captures for me the rough wildness of this place, its mystery and its joy.

The joy is more intellectual, and it seems equally shared around here.  While folks seem to love the roughness, they soften that impulse with an extraordinary commitment to be smart, progressive, imaginative and curious. 

Cindy and I briefly visited an art gallery Sunday showcasing work inspired by the Sleeping Bear Dunes near Glen Arbor.  The art, exhibited at Northern Michigan College, filled two gallery halls.  It was excellent … richly diverse in both subject and technique.

Christmas on Front Street.

You see that everywhere, though. Local authors abound, as do local restaurants, local arts shops, local craftsmen of all stripes – and then the sins … local wineries, distilleries, breweries. 

So during these days of gift-giving, we measure our buying not by how much, but by how much we spend locally vs. Amazon or the big retail chains.

Those big retailers have always been the easier choice.  (They’re smart that way.)  But no longer, up here.  There’s something special to be preserved by buying local.  And it seems to be working. 

Sure, there’s a Sam’s Club on the southeast corner of town.  But there it sits, distant.  You don’t hear folks talk about it much, really. 

But there’s a continual buzz about what’s happening on Front Street in Downtown Traverse City.  I made the mistake of dodging traffic there during Ladies’ Night last Thursday, when local shops offer all sorts of incentives to get the city’s women to stop in.  It was nuts.

I hear Men’s Night, this Thursday, is twice as dangerous.

But ‘tis the spirit.  After all, this is the town that selected the city’s official Christmas tree based in part on how much its huge branches were dangerously encroaching on the TART Trail – the cross-metro hike-bike-ski path that’ll take you from Acme on the east clear up to Sutton’s Bay on the west.

Lose a tree?  Sure, but only if it means we’ll all be the healthier for it. 

The official tree, by the way, is traditionally stabilized in a manhole at the corner of Cass and Front Streets, next to the Mackinaw Brewing Co.  And sure enough, we checked it out; city engineers had wedged it into the hole with a half-dozen 2 x 4s. 

Although we’ll soon be heading to Houston for Christmas – can’t wait! – we’re also looking forward to being back at Cass and Front on New Year’s Eve, to watch a giant cherry descend like Times Square’s pulsating ball. 

Giant cherry?  Yeah, you go with it. 

All of this got me to thinking … Cindy and I loved an early ‘90s show called Northern Exposure.  It took place in Cicely, Alaska, and included a ragtag bunch of characters, from a former astronaut-turned land developer named Maurice Minnifield, to Holling Vincoeur, the Canadian-born owner of the bar The Brick, to ex-con Chris Stevens, who offered daily philosophical commentary on the local radio station and also, occasionally, performed weddings as a non-denominational pastor. 

Joel meets a moose.

The main star was Joel Fleischman, a Jewish doc who was forced to locate to Cicely to pay off a med-school loan. 

We loved Northern Exposure for its quirkiness and humor.  But more than anything, I think, we loved it for its embrace of love, intellect and grace amid extraordinary natural, northern beauty.

It’s too much of a stretch to say we’re living our own Northern Exposure.  Sure, quirks abound.  But I think that’s symptomatic of any smaller town.   We saw the same thing in Springfield, Illinois.  It’s always easier to step into the limelight of the odd when the stage is smaller.

And yet … there’s something very good and special going on here.

I’ve mentioned before a place called Roy’s, the general store at Three Mile and Hammond.  That’s where I got my snow blower repaired.  It’s about a three-minute drive.  It’s the antithesis of Sam’s Club.

A woman named Deb works at Roy’s.  We think Deb is Roy’s wife, though we’re not sure.  Anyway, Deb is also the Sign Lady.  She’s charged with posting civic as well as promotional commentary on the store’s big lit-up sign outside, at the corner of Three Mile and Hammond.

Nothing’s off base for her.  She took a jab at the mayor’s drunkenness, scolded Obama for the health-care roll-out, somehow came up with a store special tied to the new kids’ water park on the lake front that was spewing sewage instead of clean H2O.

Well, Deb fell ill recently, so she couldn’t post her daily message.

And so, presumably, Roy stepped in.

“Deb is sick,” said the sign, and Roy added ….

“This is a sign.”

And so you drive through the intersection, notice the words, and think wildly divergent thoughts.

At first, you assume Roy’s just being funny.  Deb is sick.  And for you dummies out there, if you didn’t know it, this lit-up thing is a sign.

But then the brain really engages …. maybe Roy was commenting on the seriousness of Deb’s sickness, and maybe it was extremely contagious like in Steven King’s “The Stand,” and so it was “A Sign” of the Big Man’s eventual retribution, and so we all better get right with the Almighty because time’s running short. 

Or at the least, I thought, maybe Roy just wanted us to get flu shots.

Hard to know what he intended, really.  We think we met Roy the other day when we were shopping for pails for our birdseed.   He’s a long-bearded guy, heavy set, and seemed plenty smart.  He pointed us right to the pails.   I could see him stepping up to a formal, philosophical, yet-so-simple postulate, like Chris might in Northern Exposure.

Then again, maybe not.  While filling the car with gas, I saw the backside of the same sign. 

There, the sign said simply:

“Ummm ….”

It appears that after noodling over the seven words on the sign’s flip side, Roy had run out of things to say.

Life in a northern town.

For a YouTube listen to “Life in a Northern Town” by Sugarland, click here.