A poet comes in from the cold to the warmth of a bakery in Grayling

By GERRY LaFEMINA

When I first moved to Grayling, I joked that it was just like Manhattan – but without the subways. People laughed. People always laughed.

I went from the Lower East Side to Grayling, and the adjustment was often difficult and sometimes pleasant. You can get a lot of house in Grayling for less than a studio apartment in the city costs, and I spent nine years there writing poems and stories, teaching college students, learning to love the winter and enjoying the company of the people in town.

In Grayling, you know your neighbors. Mine was George. He retired Up North the year I was born, and at 90 he was still loading his pickup truck with pipes and hot water heaters and tools to help out the widows and the indigent and people like me who don’t know a pipe wrench from a pipe cleaner.

Sometimes, before his errands began, I’d see him at Goodale’s Bakery, having a doughnut and coffee with the regulars – men in their 70s and 80s, whose number decreased by one or two each year. They were vets. They loved Grayling and their neighbors, and I enjoyed how they razzed the local police and each other.

I’d sit and drink coffee, eat my blueberry-filled doughnut.

I’d sit and watch and listen. Scribble notes for poems.

Joe Murphy – “Murph” as he was known – was the town poet, writing of the joys of fly fishing the Manistee, the joys of canoeing the Au Sable, the joys of Spike’s Keg o’ Nails, the joys of snow.

There are many ways in which Grayling is not like New York City – particularly in regards to snow. First off, the first snow almost always happens in October. Sometimes it surprises everyone, even the local forecasters and the fall-color tourists, by coming before Columbus Day. The snow and ice freeze the sap in trees; branches crack and twist, then plummet downward. Other times the snow holds off until the last days of the month, teasing the kids that they might be able to go out without coats over their Halloween costumes.

In New York, snow is a nuisance. It’s ugly, turning gunmetal gray almost before it touches the ground, but in Grayling, I learned the beauty of snow. I never cross-country skied, I never snowmobiled. I’d stand outside, though, and listen to it fall in the silence of dusk in small-town America. Each flake lit up in the street lamps – some brilliant in that aura, others dimmer on the outskirts of the glow. Sometimes snow makes a sound, if you listen closely, each heavy flake touching down. And sometimes little piles of snow fall off the branches with a mild thud. Those early snows, before the hunters were up – I relished experiences I could only have Up North.

Those first snows I’d lace up my boots and walk the two blocks to the Au Sable River. I’d watch snow land in the river, melt, return to liquid. It’s a lesson in transcendence. Occasionally a car would pass in the distance, or I’d hear the scrape of a shovel being worked by someone hoping to get a jump on the task, but more often there was an almost mindful silence – as if everything was awed by the weather. I’d stand there until I became aware of how cold I was, the icy water on my ears running down my neck, and then I’d walk back toward my corner, which I’d pass and walk into town.

Grayling, like most small American towns, is a place of churches. Down Michigan Avenue, I’d pass the Burning Bush Tabernacle, which would have its door open so the hymns could be heard outside. And I’d pass the Michelson Methodist Church, the predecessor of which my friend Dan accidentally burned down when he was 6. The minister might be there, changing the letters on the sign out front, snow on his wool coat.

Some say the waters of the Au Sable are holy. And the snow – it can be sacred, too.

There’s something about snow that makes people friendlier, as if the only way to combat the cold is to be warmer to one another. Those of us out and about comprised a fraternal order of snow walkers. We’d nod to each other, sometimes stop and talk – “Great weather we’re having,” one of us might say, and mean it.

Come March, after months of shoveling and rough drives on black ice, we’d feel differently.

But those early snows of October and November are special. Kids begin praying for a snow day from school, for a snowball fight, for action. The men who make their living plowing hope for some extra early cash, and people like me allow themselves to be amazed by how different their hometown, the small town they know so well, seems – each house and tree, even the railing in front of the post office, frosted with snow, glowing in passing headlights and street lamps so that it’s as if things are haloed briefly.

I’d walk to the train tracks and then turn left to where a dam, up until a few years ago, made a small pond of the Au Sable.

I’m not a fisherman. I’m surely not an ice fisherman. But standing on that steel trestle bridge above the Au Sable, I’d do my own kind of fishing.

Writing poems is about working in lines, and I’d cast my line and wait for something to happen. There were always images – from the bridge, I’d watch the snow, the brown earth and autumnal grass still visible in the deepening dark, the water icy cold and silver on the rock edges, the infrequent bird coming down, and the train tracks, surely, stretched southeastward to Detroit and north to Mackinaw.

I like the nexus of disparate things – the river and the freight trains. It’s in such places where the possibilities generate sparks.

Grayling, 90 miles south of the Mackinaw Bridge. Grayling, named after a fish now extinct in local waters. Grayling, where the town fathers sold the large lumberjack sculpture that once watched over the business loop off I-75, and thus sold a memory of the town’s lumberjack past – a past kept alive by the gray plumes rising from the Weyerhauser plant and by the DNR workers at Hartwick Pines.

The sparks might fly.

And so I’d stand by the Au Sable again and throw out a line: Thin film of snow on the roads / Again a squad car cruises the miles between somewhere / and town right past my window, / pasting up lace curtains of flakes in its wake.

I didn’t know if it would catch another line … but I hoped so.

I don’t remember any of the poems Murph wrote about snow in Grayling, but I do remember a bit of one about ice-fishing, and another about going to the outhouse in deep snow. People read Murph’s poems at his funeral (held at St. Mary’s Catholic Church), and for months after his death you could still buy his small collections at Goodale’s. He wanted to tell stories, he said one of the few times we spoke; he wanted to entertain. He didn’t write poems the way I do it – and that’s okay. He was a regular fisherman, casting his lines even on snowy days. Me? I needed to cast my lines and silence my mind and capture the life of this town in my own way.

My reverie through the snow usually ended in the bakery – for the warmth of baked goods and coffee, and of the talk of those regulars who’d convened there to discuss the weather and justify their second pastries of the day by saying they needed the insulation. It always seemed that the blueberry-filled doughnuts were covered more heavily with powdered sugar, as if Loren Goodale had taken a lesson from what he saw outside. I’d bite in and send the powder wafting, and I almost expected it would make a sound as it hit the table.

And if I was too cold to walk back home, George would always offer to drive me there.
– Gerry LaFemina is the author of several chapbooks, four full-length collections of poetry, a collection of prose poems and numerous published stories, essays and poems.For more information, visit his Web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~glafemina/ .