Part 1
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner; hint of mood.*
With all of a glorious autumn afternoon ahead of me, I decided on a whim to head north and west to the Lake Michigan coast. It was Saturday, the tenth of October, and one of those electric-crisp days that are a hallmark of the month. Flawless blue heavens stretched out over pied forests at the peak of color and fields gilded by the sun.
North out of Hastings on M-43 I drove, and west on M-6, and then north again on US-131, through and beyond Grand Rapids. The Rockford exit went by, and Cedar Springs . . . when was the last time I had been this way? A long time. Years. Maybe a decade.
Hills clad with oak and maple and white pine rolled past, and long reaches of field and farmland. Sand Lake was behind me before I was aware I had passed it . . . and now, where the highway angled toward Pierson, with Whitefish Lake a mile to my northwest, there was that bog, with leatherleaf and tamaracks and clusters of black spruce and bone-white birch, that had been a landmark for me in the days when I came this way more often. Cannonsville Road lay ahead. I veered onto the exit, then turned west at the top and crossed the highway into unfamiliar territory.
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
My first destination was Birds Music north of Muskegon. I’ve been reclaiming my chops on acoustic guitar–coming along well, I might add–and I needed to pick up a set of strings and a few picks. So I looked up the place on Google Maps, and in a trice, I had both my present location and my route.
My parents saw the rise of air travel and the development of the interstate highway system. My generation has witnessed the transition from hardcopy to computers in . . . well, in everything. Paper maps, while not utter anachronisms, have largely been replaced with smart phones and GPS. We acquire directions from here to there within seconds, faster than you can unfold an old Rand McNally’s (and much faster than you can fold it back the way it belongs). From my low-tech boyhood into my pre-PC early thirties, such wonders were undreamed-of. Now, for both better and worse, I’m immersed in them.
* * *
Around curves skirting wetlands and lakes, through arboreal archways gleaming with sunlight, across the Muskegon River and its feeder streams, down pavement dappled with slanting rays and leaf shadow . . . that’s the kind of road I like to take when I’m in no hurry. The kind that invites me to slow down, both externally and internally, and enjoy it. The kind that’s good for the soul, that makes me think, I will probably never travel this way again. But I am glad I am doing so this once.
(To be continued.)
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* All verses are from the poem “A Vagabond Song” by Bliss Carman (1861–1929).