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A Sentimental Post About Michigan

 My friends think I'm crazy for liking my home state. Michigan is not, how you say, "glamorous" - in the middle of the rust belt; gray, undifferentiated towns; swampy, mosquito-infested summers and cold, sloppy winters; even the big tourist pull, the Great Lakes, are pretty unappetizing once you get into them (seriously, they really are just very large, fish-smelling lakes). Michigan seems to have just a little bit of everything all the other states have to offer, and doesn't do it half as well. You want sparkling snowscapes? Try Minnesota. Acres of picturesque farmland? Ohio's got that in spades. Gorgeous coastline? Try any other coast. Incredible rock formations? Arizona. In terms of sheer natural aesthetics, you might try the Porcupine Mountains, but that's about the one spot you can find it - if you don't mind driving for hours, and either wading through 5-foot snowdrifts or enduring barrages of biting insects.

I'm not sure why I'm so attached to this place. Part of it is certainly my own stubbornness - of being proud of my own toughness and endurance, of being able to stand the gloom of not seeing the sun for a month straight; or enduring bitter cold and unbearable heat. I've always loved the outdoors anyway. There's a part of me that wants to make my home in the wilderness, to experience that roaring quiet and clang of loneliness, to live under the trees in deep drifts of snow. I'm sure that's something I can find literally anywhere else - but "anywhere else" is not my home. This is where I grew up, where I've put down roots. Where I struggle to make my living, strive for my dreams, and toil to grow my garden. If that sounds corny, that's because it is corny, and that corniness is a part of who I am.

You see, I don't just look for beauty in this place - I look for the ugliness too. The aesthetic of bleakness. Michigan has that in spades. Trudging down a potholed country road in November, past a field of dead grass the color of a wet dog, the gnarled trunks of boxelder trees (a junk tree if there ever was one) erupting through the broken back of a hollow barn under a gunmetal sky while the wind acid-etches your chicks, whispering that you'll never go home again...something in that speaks to me just as truly as the beautiful things: the morning sun spearing through a grove of white pines onto a December snowfield as the breeze stirs a windchime in the house next door, or laying under an elm watching the June sun glint and play through the translucent leaves. In the middle of January, for no reason, I'll smell Spring faintly on the wind and be overwhelmed by longing, so bad I want to weep. I want to walk down a dusty dirt road in September, and pause under a scraggly old maple growing inexplicably next to a broad field of rattling, fragrant cornstalks. I want to flyfish in the South Branch of the Au Sable, water blinking in the sun as I approach the most majestic white pine I've ever seen, towering 80 feet up from a promontory sticking out into the river. I want to get lost in the spooky, twisted jackpines of the northern highlands, feet cushioned by tussocks of deep gray moss as ravens croak high above me.

If all this sounds like some kind of "Pure Michigan" commercial, I deeply apologize. We Michiganders sneer at that kind of shit, of dressing things up for the tourists. And every time I try to include Michigan in my writing or art, I imagine a member of the Municipal Board sidling up to me and being like, "Hey buddy, how would you like to represent us?" I'm not here to pen some empty love letter to a prettified, whitewashed version of this place. I know Michigan is an ugly place in many ways. I don't want to attract tourists; in fact, I'd rather that people stopped coming here. I've seen too many wild parts - "empty lots", or "useless land" - swallowed up by subdivisions, the trees ripped out of the earth to build big, empty houses. I'd rather the earth lie fallow. I'd rather see it taken over by trees, by deep, forbidding forests, places where you can walk in peace. I really do want more land ceded to the public, so that we can walk around at our leisure and discover these new and beautiful subtleties, rather than ripping it up to put in more pointless shit for the affluent.

So I'm not going anywhere. I've rafted in West Virginia, hiked in New Mexico, even swam the warm lagoons in the Florida Keys; and while those places are magnificent, and I'd like to keep seeing other places, ultimately there is only one place I can call home. I'm a Michigan boy until the day I die (cue acoustic guitar and stock images of deer).

Rick Out. 

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