Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 3:00 AM | Comments

Sometimes you just have to cast aside your personal preferences and go with the flow.

With that in mind, I put the last of the bags in the trunk and prepared for a long drive up north to a cottage owned by my wife’s grandmother.

I’m not fond of traveling on holiday weekends; I get irritated with normal traffic flows, let alone highways clogged with people seeking a temporary escape from their everyday lives. Gas prices, too, had forced another compromise—this was the first time that there was no reason for me to drive separately up to the cabin. Usually my job dictated that I had to leave later or return earlier than everyone else. Not this time.

The drive itself wasn’t too bad—Henry napped and I pretended to—and the high cost of gas actually did mean fewer people headed up to their northern retreats.

One of the first things I noticed up in the Houghton Lake area was a woeful sign of progress. Last year on my last trip up north I stopped at a bar called Bumpper’s—a cool old place with plenty of hickory—and basked in Kenny Rogers’ improbable domination of the New York Yankees during the post season. The mood was ebullient then; the locals and I shouted and toasted together. Tears ran down my cheeks as I watched my favorite team trounce my least favorite.

This year, Bumpper’s is gone and a Walgreen’s is in its place. It’s happening everywhere, I guess, the little colorful nooks and crannies that make our respective communities so dear to us are being replaced by anonymous corporations.

We missed the good weather, too, and had to take a few steps outside of our normal routine.

Friday night, the television blew out as we tried to get the first-generation Nintendo game system to work. This was inevitable; I’m surprised that old picture lasted as long as it did. The television itself was not too far removed from first generation technology; I think it was new when Millie bought the cottage in 1970. The wires needed to connect a relatively modern video game system to it and get it to work would probably give an electrical inspector a stroke; even then we had to tape the games in place to get it to work.

I pondered the now-silent television, thinking we’d probably need a crane to get it outside, and Henry’s disappointed face.

“Well, it’s no big deal, bud. We didn’t come up here to play video games, anyway.”

The power went out the next day. We at first thought it was the high winds, but later learned a couple of chuckleheads were cutting down a tree and they damaged a transformer. Silence spread from Prudenville to Wal-Mart.

That was no worry, either. Henry spent some time in the lake, even though he made me shiver just watching him—he has already learned that it’s sometimes better to ask forgiveness than permission. In the afternoon, after he tired himself out, we spent time playing Connect Four or an improvised shell game with three red plastic cups and a round rock.

It was only after a few hours of that, without the ever-present sound of the radio or the crackle of a fuzzy television channel, that I realized what a fine thing that silence could be. It might be important to remember this summer, with everything more expensive and the cost of gas keeping more and more of us around our houses, that you don’t need to go anywhere or even flip a switch to enjoy the things that are most important, and relaxing.

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