Hundred Highways Tour #44 – 47: M-25, I-75, I-23, M-14 to Bookbound

Posted on August 15, 2016 by marcbeaudin

When I was in college at a small school in a mid-Michigan cornfield, my best friend was at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was the poor kid who wanted to transfer there, but knew I could never afford it. It was my Christminster (if that’s not too obscure (hint-hint) of a reference).

Ann Arbor was where I got hipped to social and political activism in the form of the anti-apartheid movement, to the overwhelming amount of what there was to possibly learn in the form of the endless stacks at the graduate library, to the wonders of mind-expanding substances in the form of a little baggie of Pinconning Paralyzer in Mary Markley Hall. It was also where I discovered and fell in love with independent bookstores.

Places like Shaman Drum, West Side Bookshop, Wooden Spoon Books, Crazy Wisdom, David’s Books, and the original Borders — before they sold to K-Mart and the corporate suits did what they always do to a cultural institution. (Sadly, the stores I just listed that don’t have links are no longer with us).

On this visit, nearly 30 years after those days, I had the great pleasure to read at a new Ann Arbor bookstore, Bookbound. The owner’s Peter and Megan Blackshear were fantastically welcoming and friendly. The crowd was small, but a chance to reunite with some great old friends – one of whom, Monica Rico, was one of the Saginista poets of the Red Eye poetry scene back in Saginaw (read her work!), another was my friend Kevin from the pow-wow circuit days who was with me at the beginning and end of several of the road trips in Vagabond Song.

After the reading, there were drinks and more drinks with great friends (Good Ol’ Nats), new and old. The next day, I visited some of the other bookstores in town and kicked around the art fair, where I bought a new hat. Just in time to wear for my next reading, that night at Bemo’s Bar in Bay City (the subject of the next report from the Hundred Highways Tour).

newhat

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Hundred Highways Tour #42, #43: I-90 & US 2 to the GetLit! Festival

Posted on July 29, 2016 by marcbeaudin

DSCN1667A short jump from Coeur d’Alene to Spokane for the GetLit! Fest. Too much free wine, too nice of a hotel and a fantastic downtown/park. Mostly I walked around being surprised by how nice of a city this is. I’d only visited once before, and that was just to fill a U-Haul truck with boxes of my cousin Doug Peacock‘s book, Walking It Off. The press that published it was getting the axe, so we bought up all their stock. I was in town only long enough to load up.

So it was great to be able to spend a few days and realize how much this city has going on. After my reading at the festival, sharing a stage with a fantastic memoirist, Julie Riddle, who’s book The Solace of Stones is a powerfully honest look at childhood, wilderness and the endless paradox of Montana, someone asked me if I’d been to the waterfall yet. I had seen signs for it in the park and for some reason pictured a small run of whitewater cascading over rocks, maybe a couple dozens yards worth of drop — pretty, but not a huge priority.

Why that was my assumption, I have no idea. I’d forgotten the importance of remaining open to everything while on the road (0r anywhere for that matter). But, if someone says, “you should go see this,” it’s important to remember the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

DSCN1697[Read more reports from the Hundred Highways Tour here.]

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Hundred Highways Tour #37 – 41: US 93, MT 200, MT Secondary 471, NF 9, I-90 to The Well-Read Moose

Posted on July 15, 2016 by marcbeaudin
photo by Lisa Beaudin

photo by Lisa Beaudin

Since my reading the night before at Fact & Fiction was followed by some serious bar-hopping and it being pointed out to me that at midnight, it officially became my birthday, we ended up get a late start to head to Coeur d’Alene for a gig at The Well-Read Moose. But we still were able to take back roads. Cutting north on 93 passing near the Garden of One-thousand Buddhas at Arlee and passing numerous road signs in Salish and Kootenai languages. The languages use characters and symbols far beyond my word processing skills, but their English translations are fantastic: “Place Where You Surround Something” and “Little Valley Behind Hills.”

After a road drink in Thompson Falls, we crossed a mountain pass that threw us back into winter. The Midwesterner in me still has trouble fathoming severe snow and ice conditions in April, but we got lucky and were able to make it through, dropping into Idaho, and eventually into “Heart of the Awl.” Rather than try to tell you about the drive, here’s my birthday poem for this year that I finished a day later in a Spokane bar:

Birthday Poem, 2016

Let’s begin the day
listening to Brahms in a Missoula hotel room
then the drive
along the spring roiling of the Flathead River
with tongues of fog lolling up from mouths of fir trees
to taste the sky

Let’s stop at a bar in Thompson Falls
empty but for a daytime card game
of somebodies’ grandmothers
to have a pint & find out if the pass is open–
snow & rain & elk & a wild turkey
at the roadside like a desolate hitchhiker–
but drivable if we take it slow

& the confusion of west-flowing rivers
in place of my habitual eastbound ones

Yesterday, a coyote on the median
testing the limits of mortality
& the physics of steel,
Tomorrow, a dark corner bar in Spokane
with bad music & too many TVs
But today,
as soaring as the Brahms
as delicate as the fog,
to be here with the woman I love
with bellies full of sushi
& the lights of Coeur d’Alene seeping
through the blinds &
painting our bodies in joy

[Read more reports from the Hundred Highways Tour here.]

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