I have to tell you, the turn of the season in the Northland is something pretty remarkable. There were still pockets of snow in the shadows of the trees, here and there, and deep in the pines and second-growth scrub, but I didn’t wear a jacket and the strange ethereal nature of Hemmingway’s blue Michigan Sky was bottomless.
 
On a crisp sunny afternoon I took my parents for a drive as part of their daily “out of the house” experience. I was still tumbling the encounter with the Shamans over in my mind, like Petoskey stones in a rock polisher.
 
The Stones are common in this part of the Lower Peninsula, and are fragments of Devonian-era coral reefs that grew when the Northland was covered by a shallow sea. The particular species of coral is Hexagonaria percarinata, one of two main types (along with rugose “horn” corals common over in Arkona, Ontario) that made up the reefs of Paleozoic Era. That was 360 million years ago, long before the glaciers and the pines.
 
Modern coral doesn’t look much like it, and the Big Ice that scoured this landscape plucked up chunks of bedrock and carried them along, smoothing and rounding them like we do in a rock tumbler.
 
According to an Odawa legend, the little town was named for a wealthy fur trader who was the son of a chief. His only living granddaughter, Miss Ella Jane, was thoroughly Americanized, and was on present for the ceremony when Governor Crapo signed Public Act No. 89, designating the Petoskey Stone the official state stone.
 
We drove north on Mitchell Street from the downtown of the little city by the Bay, past the big houses of the old merchants on the top of the bluff and north into low sand hills and sweeping vistas to cross what passes for a mountain in Michigan. My goal was to simply drive to the next town and stimulate Dad, and the Caddie is as comfy as a living room couch at speed.
 
The road was wonderful; pavement smooth, no potholes. We drove into the trees, speeding past little homes and fallow fields.
 
Here is the deal: we drove for a half hour and saw nothing. No stores, no gas stations, no nothing. Eventually we arrived at a sweeping turn on the fine road, and a cluster of houses to the left on and a cluster of buildings near a crossroad. There was a large cemetery on the right hand side of the road, vast, considering the number of people who live here now, and it was the only work of man that presented any significance in the last twenty miles.
 
I swerved into the parking lot of a church- Baptist- which was the first semi-public building we had seen since the Springvale Township Hall ten miles behind and headed back. Having spent so much time in Virginia, I am unaccustomed to a landscape so unmarked by the hand of man. There was something that called out to me from long ago, when this was home and the pines led clear to the arctic circle. I didn’t know where we going, and turned around.
 
Eddie the Shaman had concluded his remarks to me in his parlor with some queer imagery. “As you may know, some male shamans sometimes do shamanic work crossing over the divide between the male and female force, what the Chinese call ying and yang, blending in the great wheel.”
 
Shary nodded solemnly, adding that she sometimes was a warrior on the spirit path and sometimes not. In this one, there were real women and spirit ones, and part of the work that was done out there on the spirit trail involved dancing, and part was moving energy around. I allowed doubt to flicker and then considered that we are only energy, the microcurrents of brain activity being all that separate me from where Dad is traveling now in his dream world.
 
“So what does it mean to me? And why would it concern you?”
 
“The gift does not inform as to purpose, and the guides only point the way. They can intervene and they can change the texture of the road you must travel, even as those you love must do. You are on a journey whether you acknowledge it or not. It will be easier if the windings of thin colored cloth and removed, and you go forward with clear vision and acuity. We have worked with the Spirit Guide to remove the encumbrance, and enable that progress.”
 
That was it for the revelation, and I thanked them as I left. They did not ask for cash, and the tea was on the house. It occurred to me that the Shamans had a point about thin cloth and roads, and I wondered if the work they had done out there was successful.
 
Considered buying a lottery ticket, and looked for a likely gas station on the road.
 
There was nothing. The trees and fields have their own imperative, marking the beginning of the great vastness across the North that includes the blue waters of the great lake to the west, and eventually the end of the pines and the beginning of the sweeping prairie, population draining away and returning to a primordial slumber.
 
There is nothing here for the next generation, only for the aging and the holiday-makers and their second homes.
 
The drive back featured a look at the things that had passed un-noticed on the way out. The sun was bright, Dad dozed, and Mom commented happily from the back seat.
 
If we had kept going a bit longer we would have crossed I-75, which generally follows the course of the 1930s-era Dixie Highway, a route from the Better Highways Movement that t ran from the Straits down to the Keys. But we didn’t, the emptiness had its own imperative, the one of pines and a fine highway.
 
I looked at the map when we got home and were a few minutes before we were on to the next event of the day. We had been on the road to Wolverine, I discovered, and if only we had pressed forward a few more miles, we could have seen the Dairy Barn Food Mart and a handful of other businesses.
 
Wolverine had been a hub of logging, and the big straight pines are long gone.
 
It was a bustling village once and now it is not. I put the map away and thought about what Eddie said. Maybe the key to his advise was about finding a new road, one with asphalt smooth as a Petoskey Stone, and having the faith to keep driving on.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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