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/ .

‘Michigan Magazine’ TV show goes national with neverending supply of great stories

Back in their salad days, when Del Vaughan and Barry Stutesman were picking up pop cans and beer bottles, scrounging for gas money to keep their fledgling TV show on the air, they got some sage advice from one of their guests.

They had managed to score an interview with the venerable Mort Neff, late host of “Michigan Outdoors,” who after the taping of the show told them, “Boys, as long as you keep your show focused on Michigan people, Michigan history and Michigan events, you will never run out of resources.”

“He told us it was one great big pool of stories out there and we could never reach the bottom,” Vaughan said. “And you know, he was right. There are so many stories we could never tell them all, no matter how hard we try.”
Not that the two aren’t giving it their best shot.

Vaughan and Stutesman criss-cross the state, covering stories to feature on “Michigan Magazine,” the television program the pair have co-hosted for the past 15 years. Most of the stories are about artisans of one sort or another. The duo has interviewed painters, furniture makers, cooks and bakers, authors and photographers, all willing to share their dreams, their inspirations and their talents.

Vaughan and Stutesman always seem to find a good story in these people beyond their art.

“These are people who through some circumstance or shift in their life, for whatever reason, have been forced to, or chose to, embrace their art,” said Vaughan.

Like Tom Christenson of Mio, who was featured on “Michigan Magazine” earlier this year.

When an injury sidelined Christenson from his construction job in 2001, he dabbled in an untapped interest – wood carving – as something to do while he recovered. Now an award-winning wood carver, with several world-champion fish decoys to his credit, Christenson makes what he calls a “decent living,” selling wildlife carvings and decoys.

Christenson gave the pair a lot of credit for what they do, and how they do it, noting their personal and inquisitive interview style.

“It was a blessing, really. The exposure I got from the show was very good,” he said. “I got a lot of good response.”

Shown on the Michigan Public Television Network since 1990, the half-hour program has grown to include a printed magazine – Michigan Magazine – as well as the Michigan Magazine Museum, located on M-33 about two miles south of Comins in Oscoda County.

The show’s audience recently became considerably larger. In January, the program was picked up by the RFD-TV Network and can now be viewed in nearly 26 million homes from coast to coast and in Canada.

The program airs Mondays and Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. on cable television throughout the United States, as well as on satellite television’s DirectTV, channel 379, and Dish Network, channel 9409.

To Vaughan, of Rose City, and Stutesman, of Prescott, it confirms the faith they have maintained that the stories they tell – including recent ones about a cranberry farm in Rogers City and the Ogemaw County Fair – deserve a wider audience.

But these guys are a pretty good story, too.

With their studio in the corner of a cluttered pole barn behind Vaughan’s Ogemaw County residence, amid video cassettes representing nearly 1,700 former episodes, the two meet each day to produce their show.

Both are amazed that from one corner of their little world they can create a show that generates fans as far away as Oregon, Florida and Maine, as well as every state in between. People are discovering what Vaughan and Stutesman – like Mort Neff before them – were saying all along: The one-of-a-kind stories found here have an appeal far beyond Michigan’s borders.

“People love the show. It is what our audience is looking for,” said Al Stein, program director for Nashville-based RFD, an acronym that stands for “rural free delivery.”

“It is a well-done program and it is just what we look for here, as well,” Stein added, noting the network’s programming focus is on rural living – “right down to the cattle auctions” that are frequently aired on the network.

To Vaughan and Stutesman, national exposure is the latest step in an already lengthy journey.

The duo’s first attempts to launch a program were on radio. That show – “Michigan Music Review” – was carried by the Michigan Farm Radio Network during the early 1980s. When TV interviews promoting their radio program prompted more viewer response than the program itself, they knew they were in the wrong medium.

“There were a whole lot more people watching TV than there were listening to the radio,” said Stutesman, noting television success came slowly, and with increased work and greater costs.

To buy a half-hour time slot for the program, it cost the pair $2,500, according to Vaughan, who said the only money they made came from commercials they sold and recorded themselves. And with no equipment, they were left to rent cameras, as well as lighting and sound systems.

“It would have cost us $28,000 for the whole month,” said Vaughan, of the commercial equipment the venture required.

“We rented it by the hour. But we had to rush down, pick it up, and then get it right back,” he said. “I would go in and sell commercials and Barry would come along right behind me, ready to shoot them.”

“We were pushed for time so hard we would do six and eight interviews a day,” added Stutesman.

And to hear them talk about it, they weren’t exactly making ends meet.

“We were picking up beer cans and pop bottles for gas money, trying to get this thing going. Our wives were the ones working to support us,” said Vaughan, still giving credit for the early support provided by Garneta Vaughan and Rhonda Stutesman.

Telling of the road-weary Chevrolet Cavalier the two had to drive during those early days, Stutesman recalls exiting an interview they conducted with a ranger at Wilderness State Park, west of Mackinaw City.

“Here was our car, chock-full of clothes and equipment, parked next to a nice, big Ford Expedition,” said Stutesman, recalling the looks and comments the car attracted.

“It is hard to tell what people thought of us back then,” he added.

But that was more than 10 years ago, when the two were viewed on PBS. Things have changed considerably since then, and their viewership has grown without even counting RFD-TV.

A few years ago, they were given an opportunity to see what people thought of them. In 1998, the Michigan Magazine Museum opened its doors along a desolate stretch of highway.

The following year, Vaughan and Stutesman held the first in a series of now-annual Expos, promoting the many guests they have had on their show, as well as other crafters, musicians and artists from throughout the state.

When someone asked Vaughan what kind of crowd he expected to attract to such an out-of-the-way location, he jokingly replied: “I don’t know. I’m just hoping my wife shows up.”

Garneta Vaughan was there, but she had plenty of company.

“Traffic was backed up for miles all the way to Fairview,” Vaughan recalled. “The sheriff came tearing down here and said, ‘What the heck are you guys doing?’”

They were just visiting with friends they didn’t know they had.

“We could not believe it,” Vaughan said. “We didn’t have any idea.”

Even after all this time, the thrill of conducting interviews with their guests remains. They love talking with the people they feature on their show. There have been thousands over the years, but all share one thing in common, according to Vaughan.

“Every time we do a show it is an inspiration,” he said. “The people we talk to are encouraging others to do what they want to do. …

“These people invite us into their lives. It is all very humbling, really, when you stop to realize they want us to tell their story.”

Viewers seem to be legion, loyal and friendly. It’s commonplace for Vaughan and Stutesman to be recognized wherever they go by total strangers.

But to Del Vaughan and Barry Stutesman there are no strangers, only friends they have not met yet – some of them with a story waiting to be told.

“Barry tells them, ‘Hey, don’t I recognize you?’” said Vaughan.

Yes, you do, Stutesman tells them, adding: “I visit with you every Saturday morning.”

As president of the Michigan Women’s Golf Association, governor of the Golf Association of Michigan and a panelist for Golf Digest, Sara Wold knows golf. Between rounds, the Ann Arbor resident put together this list of her favorite courses in Northeast Michigan.

Black Lake Golf Club
2800 Maxon Road, Onaway (517) 733-5413
www.blacklakegolf.com
Yardage: 5,058 to 7,030 yards
Greens fees: (all rates are for 18 holes with cart unless specified): $85; Tuesday special rate, $50.
Sara’s Favorite Hole: “No. 15, a short par 4 that traverses a natural ravine and has an elevated green.”