An American Map

By Anne-Marie Oomen

Meditative travel essays by Michigan author Anne-Marie Oomen that explore new landscapes across America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780814335291

Anne-Marie Oomen

ANNE-MARIE OOMEN is the author of The Lake Michigan Mermaid (coauthored with Linda Nemec Foster), Pulling Down the Barn, House of Fields, An American Map: Essays, Uncoded Woman, and Love, Sex, and 4-H. She has written seven plays, including the award-winning The Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern. She is a poetry and nonfiction instructor at Solstice MFA at Lasell University and Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She and her husband, David Early, live in their handmade house near Traverse City, Michigan. Visit her at www.anne-marieoomen.com.

Book preview

An American Map

Made in Michigan Writers Series

General Editors

Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

Advisory Editors

Melba Joyce Boyd

Wayne State University

Stuart Dybek

Western Michigan University

Kathleen Glynn

Jerry Herron

Wayne State University

Laura Kasischke

University of Michigan

Frank Rashid

Marygrove College

Doug Stanton

Author of In Harm’s Way

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu/mmws

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

An American Map

Essays by Anne-Marie Oomen

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

14 13 12 11 10            5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oomen, Anne-Marie.

An American map : essays / by Anne-Marie Oomen.

p. cm. — (Made in Michigan writers series) ISBN 978-0-8143-3420-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Oomen, Anne-Marie. 2. Oomen, Anne-Marie—Travel—United States.

3. Oomen, Anne-Marie—Homes and haunts. 4. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

PS3615.O57Z465 2010

818'.603—dc22

[B]

2009030806

Designed and typeset by Maya Rhodes

Composed in Dante MT and Myriad Pro

To David, partner in the travels

Contents

Acknowledgments

Warming the Flue: The Think House, Empire, Michigan

Stone Wounds: Mount Cardigan, New Hampshire

Wild Poem: Mount Rainier, Washington

Finding Cochise: Cochise Stronghold, Arizona

The Underpass: Washington DC

Where Angels Are: Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee and North Carolina

The Blue Bead: El Yunque, Puerto Rico

Edge of Possibility: Santa Monica, California

An Elongated Tear: Culebra, Puerto Rico

Squall: Eleven Mile Canyon, Colorado

An American Map: New York City

The River Inside (A Prose Poem): Huzzah River, Missouri

An Essay of Supposition: Harpswell, Maine

Finding (My) America: Library Tour, Michigan

Heart of Sand: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan

Acknowledgments

"Stone Wounds" was first printed in Workshop 5: the Writing Process Revisited, Thomas Newkirk, ed. (Heineman, 1994).

An earlier version of "Heart of Sand was published as Winter Dune" in Traverse: Northern Michigan’s Magazine 22.9 (2003)

"The River Inside" was first published in Dunes Review 15.1 (2009).

"The Underpass" was published in A River & Sound Review no.1 (2009), http://www.riverandsoundreview.org.

"Where Angels Are" was first published in F Magazine no. 8 (2009), http://f-magazine.org.

SOURCES:

Emily Dickinson’s quote in "Wild Poem" is from Final Harvest, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Back Bay Books, 1964).

The information about the Apache story is taken from American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (Pantheon, 1985), and from The Way of the Earth by T. C. McLuhan (Touchstone, 1995).

Gary Snyder quotes taken from The Gary Snyder Reader (1999, Counterpoint Press).

Jim Harrison quote taken from "Modern Times," in Saving Daylight (2007, Copper Canyon Press).

John Steinbeck quotes taken from Travels With Charley (Viking, 1962).

James R. Akerman quotes taken from Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr. (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

James Wright quote taken from "The Blessing," in Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).

Stephen Vincent Benét quote taken from John Brown’s Body (Rinehart Press, 1928).

DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO:

David Early for believing in me so completely, for supporting the hours I have to spend away to do this work. Without you, pen doesn’t touch paper.

Annie Martin, editor, and the Wayne State University Press staff for their assistance and support; the WSUP anonymous reviewers for their truly helpful suggestions on the final draft of this manuscript; Carrie Downes Teefey for her editing assistance; and Heidi Bell for copyediting.

Betsy Eaton for her abiding friendship and for Flying Leap, the cottage in Maine where the first draft of this manuscript came together, and for the quiet support of her Mainer friends.

Moonie and Chic Early, and to Justin Early, young Jake and Maddy Ruwitch, and the Early family for allowing the long mornings in Fred’s House on the shore of the Huzzah River in Missouri to begin the first major revision of this manuscript.

Gilbert Sellers and family for the tour of the Gilbert cemetery.

Jackie McClure for the Mount Rainier hike and for her friendship.

Natalie Bakapoulis for an astute reading of "Finding (My) America."

Marijo and John Bakker for the New York Trip.

Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly, filmmakers of Asparagus:Stalking the American Life.

Marijo Bakker and Patti and Ian Harpe for the trip to Eleven Mile River Canyon.

Keith Taylor and Richard Tillinghast for inspiration for this book, particularly the essay, "Finding Cochise," and for the amazing Bear River Writers’ Conference

Joe VanderMeulen for advice on the alvar.

The Michigan Library Association, especially Judith Moore and Kim Laird, for the means to make the library tour. And to the librarians.

My colleagues at Interlochen Arts Academy and most especially Michael Delp, Jack Driscoll, Lesley Tye, Mika Perrine, Teresa Scollon, Therese Zielinski; and to the administration, especially President Jeffrey Kimpton and Vice President for Education Tim Wade, for supporting my travel for the school, particularly for the trip to Santa Monica.

Writers at Solstice Conference at Pine Manor College, especially Meg Kearney and Tanya Whiton.

The circle of friends, near and far, who give me courage: Norm and Mimi Wheeler, Bronwyn Jones and Joe Vander-Muelen, Jeanette Mason, Pauline Tyer, Judy Reinhardt and Jim Schwantes, Cre Woodard and Mark Ringlever, Carlene and Geoff Peregrine, Ruthie Nathan, David and Sharon Hendricks, Jack Gyr and Dianne Navarro, Patty McNair and Phillip Hartigan, Dana McConnell and Walter Elder, and my young friends who set an example for me every day in their activism: Jacob Wheeler and Sarah Eichberger, Julia Wheeler and Martin Ludden, Annie Oberschulte and Emerson Hilton.

Members of Michigan Writers, particularly Aaron and Mary Kay Stander, Michael Callahan, Ann Bardens, Heather Shaw, Bill Corbett, Marcy Branski, Denise Baker, Fleda Brown, Todd Mercer, Mardi Link, Michael Sheehan, Duncan Sprat-tmoran, Anne Noble, Holly Spaulding, Leigh Fairey and many others in that essential circle.

All of my students who continue to teach me.

American muse, whose strong and diverse heart 

So many men have tried to understand

But only made it smaller with their art,

Because you are as various as your land. . . .

I only bring a cup of silver air,

Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Warming the Flue

The Think House, Empire, Michigan

Tucked as it is in a Michigan woods thick with tall maple and ash, the Think House eddies with chill in winter, and remains too-cool and shaded in the summer.

So I build a fire in the woodstove.

A decade ago in Leelanau County, my David and I built by hand this sixteen-by-twenty cabin out of mostly recycled, damaged, or deeply discounted goods.  As a result, each autumn we seal leaky windows with plastic and stuff insulation strips around the eternally peeling though still partly brilliant red door. The small black Jotel perches in the corner—inadequate against drafts—and dusty pine bookcases filled to bending line the walls—doing double duty as insulation when the cold comes on. A butcher-block table faces the insect-spotted window; a second-hand desk holds a newer computer; a school chair leans toward the woodstove. Here are a Depression-era rocker; three dictionaries—two unabridged, one belonging to my grandmother; and more books—revealing an obsession with having them as much as with reading.

I wad newspaper into rough coils and place them side by side in the chamber. I pile shards of pine and scrap walnut on the wasted news, crisscrossing them like highways on a map.

Then I realize it’s so cold that I have to warm the flue before I start the fire. I roll a full sheet of newspaper into a long crinkled tube. I light one end with a wooden match, hold it into the firebox, seeking that small invisible place where a hint of draft should pull. I sit back on my heels.

In this room, wild turkey feathers tuck into cracks, lake stones rest on sills, Petoskey fossils serve as doorstops. The place is rough on all its edges, messy with piles, and it lacks plumbing—though the electricity works most of the time. It is too quiet—except for wind, the voice that always enters this place.

Still.

Here is the place where the stories and poems take root.

But even before that, where does the process begin? At what point is the imagination sparked? Just as there must be fuel to warm the cold stove’s firebox, there must be inspiration for the imagination to warm.

Will the fire take? I wait in the cold. Sometimes when the chimney is too cold, the warm smoke is trapped and backpuffs, filling the cluttered room. Then there is only coughing and ugly haze.

I’ve worked in this room for years, fired this stove every cold day that needed warming. I know the ways of this stove I bend to; I also know how my thinking goes. It doesn’t always work, this attempted combustion of air and tinder—or its parallel of imagination and language. The writing doesn’t come from nowhere. Other routes, like a tube of flaming paper to channel fire and warm the flue, must warm the mind. The fuel of travel, the experience of other places and their people inspire me.

For me, this desire to seek out new places is not simple; despite an innate curiosity, I love home and isolation. Solitude.

The chill of the Think House, the wind against it. In contrast, the intensity of New York City unnerves me, the Mexican border disturbs me, Culebra’s wild surf shakes me. Always I feel uncertain and often lonely opening the door on fresh territory, following new routes away from old roots. It feels blank and anxiety-ridden, and, yes, I thrive on it. I pack.

The tube of old news flutters, unwilling. I bend to it. Fire grows from fire, small to large. But nothing happens without the air, the oxygen drawing across it to feed it. I blow a little.

Lately I have been thinking about how discrete places, and perhaps an entire country, might become placeless. No, not placeless, for that is more or less impossible, but how places might lose their individuality, and in turn lose their meaning. I sense the disquiet, the loss of place that may be happening in my America. Will we one day alter Pete Seeger’s melancholy anthem: where have all the places gone?

Are they still out there—places where meaning and geography and people are linked so closely they make the stories that give us identity, that make us a people? We can still find them, can’t we?

I imagine the inside of the chimney, the clash of the warm air I have created against the cold air still holding in the upper regions of the pipe. Fire, too, has this restlessness in its nature, the built-in imperative to move into unexplored space, to taste new air.

The tubed flame, held into the firebox like food for a shy pet, suddenly shifts, lifts, is accepted at last. With sudden decision, the flame plumes up, and its drifting smoke is routed all at once, a poof into the flue and the pipe, to the open, its heat warming the cold chimney, warming interior chambers with its draw, preparing it for fire.

Metaphor arrives, its small miracle puffing.

I am rooted in place in my Think House with its warming stove. I follow routes of place out into the open. But I also root out places—as the farmer pulls plants to understand growth—and I root as a baby does, paradoxically seeking the nourishment from not a mother but from places all over the country, the mother country.

Through the writing, I enter still another form of rooting out, of making and remaking these places in language, in words that seek to fire the imagination of others. Place-making. And in reimagining the faraway places here at home, I root out, through my own mother tongue, what place might mean, not simply a specific place, but the idea and meaning of place.

Place-meaning. And in this process, discovering, thinking, and writing, rooting out place and places in my America, feeding the fire, my anxiety eases. A kind of compassion comes.

My country ’tis of thee. . .

Stone Wounds

Mount Cardigan, New Hampshire

When I break the tree line and look up to the crest, I am suddenly dizzy. I stop, resting against the slabs of granite that grace New Hampshire’s Mount Cardigan. That is when I notice the quartz for the first time. The dark granite runs with veins of lighter quartz, long lines crossing and crisscrossing this rock like a child’s script, teasing some words or a story just to the edge of recognition—a mystery, almost a meaning.

I hear in the abrupt wind some question I do not understand.

Then I remember.

The stone stories slip back to me. Stones are threaded in me as this mountain is threaded with quartz, but like the shadow that lace casts, the pattern is dark, the holes filled with light. I begin to climb again, turning my mind away from my anxiety, making an odd preparation to reach the crest: I remember that stones have marked graves for a long time. That, and Isaac.

Of the huge tract of fields, swamp, and pasture that graced the Michigan farm where I grew up, my siblings and I were forbidden from playing on only one acre of untilled hillside north of our asparagus fields. An odd Eden. Chief Isaac Battice, the man who would later tell me the story, spoke to my father, explained that two generations before my father’s father bought the farm, it had been part of treaty land. On the southwest slope of this hill lay a tribal cemetery, probably the first one established in Oceana County after the mission and settlement era. My father agreed to Isaac’s request that the cemetery be left alone. Even we who roamed everywhere over the hills were told not play there. Thus, as defiance overcomes any rule, it became one of our favorite haunts. If ever wooden crosses marked anything, we made them buttresses for our forts; we ransacked the remnants of a fence to make toy guns.

On some level, my father understood the ramifications that his farm, and the entire county, had likely been part of one of the many betrayed treaties, but we children missed entirely the contract of reverence and guilt my father held with Isaac regarding this heritage. It shames me to say our childhood invasion of the place was what we did simply because it was banned, and my father was too caught in the turning gears of farming to pay notice past his initial agreement. And if Isaac saw, he said nothing further.

Isaac was one of the few members of the local Pottawattamie tribe who had not scattered but who still inhabited what we called Shanty Town, a few small, battered shacks down by the big spring. My father kept an eye out for him hitchhiking, and my mother drove down after bad winter storms to see that he was still alive. That was the extent of it. I used to stare at the way he walked, an odd gait that must have covered terrible arthritis. I didn’t understand what it meant that he was Indian.

Years later, during the growing consciousness of the sixties, I sat in Isaac’s shack, intent on an interview with him.

Through my youth, I had developed an association with the man. Whether he sensed my interest in him or if he was friendly to me simply because I was the oldest of my father’s children, he always smiled broadly at me and made a point of offering conversation when he came to the house, or when our family had cause to visit the spring. I liked him, and while I did not seek him out particularly, these accidental encounters seemed to please both of us. Over time, my childhood interest in American Indian lore grew, and that interest, coupled with the national attention caused by Wounded Knee in 1973, spurred an interest in cultural anthropology. My final paper for one of my college courses was to be about Isaac.

My so-called raised consciousness didn’t reveal my own unexamined ethnocentrism. From a more developed perspective, this interview would be yet another version of co-opting the culture of native people. But I merely felt proud of this connection to him, and when I asked to interview him about his childhood and his time in the boarding schools where so many Indians were orphaned, he seemed happy to speak to me. He shared his life easily, a born storyteller. Ironically, in that long past time, he made me feel that speaking to me was an honor. Too late, I know the honor was mine.

We sat on run-down straight-backed chairs in the single front room that served as bedroom and living room. We shared a bottle of cheap wine. He stood near the smoking oil furnace, picking out old church hymns on a three-stringed fiddle in a room that became suffocatingly warm. Weather was blowing up from the lake. Thunder entered the room, nourishing the atmosphere of hazy air with the drum of storm.

Distant heat lightning flashed through dirty windows. From any other view, the scene might have been ominous, but I felt only a passionate interest in his words. I bent to my notebook and pencil, my questions and follow-up. I did not see the harm or loss; I merely heard the man’s voice, warm and resonant.

He gave me a gift I knew was important but not exactly how.

He told me the stone story. I have no tape recording of it, and the rough notes have long since been lost, but I remember the story like this:

Before time began, the People fought a great battle. The battle raged over the whole world, and the greatest warriors, warriors with the best skills, finest weapons, and fastest bodies fought in this battle. The battle raged on and on over land and time. The warriors fought to the death. And at last, after much time had passed, they all killed each other. But their battle was so great that when they died, these warriors turned to great dark stones marked by lines of lighter horizontal color, like layers between a cake. Isaac told me how to know the warrior stones.

Later, I was to learn that the legend held such strength that the first missionaries who came to Michigan’s coast allowed the Pottawattamie to place these striated rocks in the first Christian cemeteries, where the mythic warriors could be honored with the newly dead. But after the second wave, when the missionaries built the Saint Joseph Mission with its new Indian cemetery, the priests placed the rocks outside the boundaries of the cemetery

Reviews for An American Map

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ever since reading with great enjoyment and admiration Anne-Marie Oomen's first memoir, PULLING DOWN THE BARN, I have kept a sharp eye out for any new prose pieces from her. Her second memoir, HOUSE OF FIELDS, was another small treasure. I came away from both of those books with that feeling of having "gone to different schools together," probably because of a shared background of small towns, farming country and a Catholic upbringing. And yet I have also always felt just a little bit intimidated by Oomen's writing, which invariably shows a richly poetic, deeply feminine and a subtly nuanced sensibility and imagination which I despair of ever completely understanding. I guess you could say she got a whole lot more out those "different schools" than I did. Or maybe she's just smarter than I am. But I keep on trying to learn.In any case, I was pleased to learn of her latest offering, a book of essays called AN AMERICAN MAP. Glancing at the contents and the far-flung settings for each piece, I think I almost hollered, "Hot dog!" Because I have always loved to travel through books. In fact I'm pretty sure I enjoy book-travel a lot more than the real thing. It's so much more comfortable, ya know? The essays here were prompted by Oomen's travels over the past several years, and she has certainly covered ground: from Maine and D.C. in the east to Washington and California in the west, and as far south as Arizona and Puerto Rico with several stops in those middle places too, particularly her beloved home state of Michigan.Oomen admits early on in the collection that at least some of these trips were spurred by a sense of restlessness and wintertime "cabin fever." But she also speaks of a vague feeling of melancholia, sadness even, which she can't fully explain, but which had caused in her a dismaying case of writer's block. That sadness, that "weight of the world" comes through in several of these pieces, as she visits places as different as Mount Cardigan, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C. in the essays, "Stone Wounds" and "The Underpass." Climbing that mountain in New Hampshire, making her way up steep slopes of granite striated with shiny streaks of quartz, she remembers a story told by Isaac, an old Native American she knew as a girl in her native Oceana County in Michigan. Isaac told her of a battle between the People before time began in which all were killed, but the battle was so great that the warriors, when they died, "turned to great dark stones, marked by lines of lighter horizontal color." Recalling this years later on a mountain side in New Hampshire, she writes, "... with my hands I touch a wide line of running quartz ... the lines identified the stones as warriors."In D.C. that same underlying sadness rises again to the surface when she is suddenly "undone" at her first glimpse of the Vietnam Memorial Wall."All along that slick and momentous length are names that, from a step back, become human texture in stone ... I come close, touch the dark surface ... run my fingers down a row." Once again, lines in stone identifying warriors, but this time from a not-so-distant past, and part of the source of that ineffable sadness and "weight of the world" that sometimes threatens to overwhelm her. But not all here is sadness and woe. There were also "voila" moments of recognition which caused me to chuckle and add my own associations, as in her essay about a trip to southeast Arizona called "Finding Cochise." I'm not sure how many people today, aside from American history buffs and front-row kids like me, would immediately recognize the name Cochise, but it struck an immediate chord with me, and for the same reason it did with Oomen, because apparently even some girls from that era loved the western movies that proliferated in the fifties. She explains -"As a child my male heroes were Roy Rogers, because he sang 'Happy Trails,' the Lone Ranger and Tonto, for reasons I can't remember, and my secret hero, Cochise, because I saw a movie in which he appeared in all the ways we would now perceive as politically incorrect ..." This single line dropped me back into the air-conditioned darkness of the Reed Theater nearly sixty years ago, munching my popcorn as I followed the Technicolor saga of Indian agent Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) and his uneasy alliance with the war chief, Cochise, played by dusky-skinned actor, Jeff Chandler, in the film, Broken Arrow. And then my mind skipped ahead to the later TV series of the same name where Cochise was played by an actor of Syrian heritage, Michael Ansara. And speaking of Tonto, Anne-Marie, Jay Silverheels had a featured role in both Broken Arrow and its film sequel, Battle at Apache Pass. And while we're talking cowboys and Indians, if you and David had continued just a few more miles NE from Cochise, you would have come to Willcox, the home of "the last of the silver-screen cowboys," Rex Allen, where you could have visited The Rex Allen Museum. Okay, I know I'm pushing the parameters of what constitutes a review here, but I had my raggedy old Rand McNally out, as I always do when reading about far-away places, and there was Willcox staring me in the face. How could I not mention this? There might be some other old buckaroos and cowgirls out there reading this.And just to keep the record straight, I DO recognize that "Finding Cochise" is about more serious things than cowboys and Indians. I will, however, let other readers discover that for themselves. But while I'm at it, here's one other mostly irrelevant comment about another essay, "Squall," which might serve to embarrass Anne-Marie at least a little. In this piece about fly-fishing, Oomen is visiting her two adult sisters in Colorado, and, in a most uncharacteristic manner, she manages to use that four-letter word for manure at least four times in less than a dozen pages. It must have been something about being with family again that took her back to her farming roots. Her always practical mother, she tells us in a later piece, used to tell her children matter of factly that the smell of manure shouldn't ever bother anyone; that it simply "meant everything was working." A piece called "The River Inside (A Prose Poem)," with its ruminative stroll through an old church graveyard along the Huzzah River in Missouri, struck sparks of memory within me of a classic prose poem I studied eons ago in college, Edgar Lee Masters' SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY.Perhaps my favorite piece of the whole collection is the one called "Finding (My) America," in which Oomen travels to four different small-town libraries in northern Michigan as part of a book tour. She identifies herself as "a nerd for valuing books, for reading them, for loving to hold them, smell them and turn their pages, for revering the places they take me, as well as the places they are housed." Me too, Anne-Marie - book nerd extraordinaire. It occurred to me as I was holding this particular book, smelling the ink and the glue, turning the pages and examining the cover, that the author's name forms an interesting acronymn - AMO. In Latin, "amo" means "I love." And, if you look closely in this collection of essays, you will find, tucked here and there, a continuing and intimate love letter to Oomen's husband of many years. In the end, for me AN AMERICAN MAP is a book that is dense with associations and filled with impeccably beautiful prose. In case you haven't guessed it yet, "I love" this book.