BIG BAY CHRONICLES: Local Color & Oxys in Covington

TRAVER, HEMINGWAY and the TELL TALE FOX

I found Robert Traver’s “Trout Magic,”(1974) among the old books on Bill Bystrom’s shelves. Being a signed first edition (w/both Robert Traver’s and John Voelker’s signatures), and given my literary respect for “Anatomy of a Murder,” and “Small Town D. A.,” I thought a light throne perusal might yield some useful intellectual data. Chapter 2 immediately caught my eye for 2 reasons. I had often heard the Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”(1925) was really about the Fox, which runs through Seney, and because I had the occasion to stay at the Seney Motel and dip my toes in the Fox after a vehicle malfunction just short of there on M28.

With Traver, writing and angling are fairly inseparable: “many seem to think that we literary types who prefer splitting our infinitives to tying our flies are, piscatorially speaking, faintly treasonable….taking my own case, I only turned to writing books when it became all too comically evident that nature had never endowed me for tying flies but rather had left me so manually inept that, far from being able to tie a fly, I am barely able to unzip one”(20). Any of you, like myself, who might wonder why the adjective “big” is often applied to a river, need look no further than “Trout Magic”: “As any fisherman knows, it is sound fisherman’s idiom to call that portion of the river ‘big’ beyond where its principal branches come together. Such a stretch of river in my own bailiwick, for example, is the Escanaba River below the village of Gwinn which, all unimaginative cartographers to the contrary, most local fishermen continue to call the ‘big’ Escanaba”(20). He recalls a time when every U.P. river was such that one’s limit could be reached whether one fished the Billy Butcher or Little Garlic: “I can still remember—to my undying shame—bicycling out after school to a stream today that yields mostly beer cans, and getting home in time for supper sagging under the weight of my father’s big wicker creel full of trout”(20).

His point is that although the Two Hearted River, because of its literary renown, is now thought of much like the river Kwai”(21). Leery of wading through the scholarly essays surrounding Hemingway’s work and its geographical references, Traver writes: “I quickly learned that when scholars get hot under the collar mere fishermen had better not get caught in the crossfire of their footnotes”(21). Disputing the idea that Nick Adams had to have fished the Two Hearted because the title assumes it, he contends that these academic hounds are “Barking up the wrong river”(22).

Making the point that “nowhere in the story does Hemingway name the water Nick Adams fished; [and] that [the] sole authorial clue comes only from the title,” Traver notes that Hemingway’s description of where Nick departs the train is undoubtedly Seney: “Seney is not only in a different county from the Two Heart but many miles west of where any faintly savvy fisherman would leave his train were he hiking there”(24-25). He rightly points out that the closest railhead to the Two Heart is Newberry, and that, ”while no stream of consequence flows through or near Newberry (remember Nick watching the darting shadows of those lovely trout in a nearby river soon after leaving his train?), the imposing West Branch of the Fox River still flows through the Seney loop”(25).

Arguing that Hemingway himself, as an avid fisherman unwilling to reveal his private honey holes, is the source of the narrative ambiguity surrounding the whereabouts of Nick’s success, Traver suggests that since this story had its inception in Paris in the early 1920s, before the “twin lightning bolts of fame and fortune” drove Hemingway to deep-sea fishing, he was simply concealing his favorite fishing haunts. He concludes the chapter with this: “If brother-fisherman Hemingway ever fished the Two Hearted River the only thing he found memorable about it was its romantic-sounding name”(28). So there you have it, before Hemingway’s move from the relaxed anonymity of nature to the unrelenting torment of the public eye, he consciously sought to flummox his later critics by a narrative sleight of hand whereby a Fox lay concealed in his heart of Two Hearts.


THE AQUATIC TINHORN: A POETIC CRITIQUE

A man from South Honolulu,
Combed Squaw Beach in a tatersall tutu.
While he wasn’t a local,
On beer he got vocal,
Before donning a polka dot mumu.

It was said that he hailed from Wisconsin,
Claiming he was the kin of Chas Bronson,
He could often be seen
Swimming laps down the beach,
In a wetsuit protecting his Johnson.

Said a jealous old troll from East Venus,
“Cease your swimming betwixt and between us.
With your wetsuit and fins,
Who could tell where you’ve been?
There’s no truth in an unshrivelled penis.”

VI “SHIFTY” DAGENAIS

Morels tremble at the sound of her voice,
Blueberries and pastys her gentle game.
Beer and Chardonnay her beverage of choice,
Vi, “Shifty” Dagenais her name.

She still roams the plains
Where the Yellowdogs play.
Where the deer and porcupine
She would deign not to slay.

She left that task
To a man named Trewhella,
A natural born fish killer
And very nice fella.

Someday she’ll look back
And fondly relate,
The idylls of a wee lass
Who was once 98.


OXYS COME TO COVINGTON

Not long ago I made a case for the growing threat of a wide-scale prescription drug epidemic. In a post titled “Pink Pills for Pale People,” I wrote, “The recent ‘Florida Medical Examiners Commission’ 2007 report offers a snapshot of what’s going on across the culture. Damien Cave’s New York Times gloss on the report notes the commission (6/14/08) ‘found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.’ Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office notes that prescription drug abuse has reached ‘epidemic’ proportions,’ adding, ‘It’s just explosive.’ According to Cave, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration reports that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. These aren’t skid row bums, these are our friends, relatives, and coworkers.”

Now comes yesterday’s front-page story by Marquette Mining Journal staff writer, Kim Hoyum, “Prescription Drug Probe Nets 57 Arrests,” (7/31/08). “According to Charles Gross, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, the arrests span Menominee, Delta, Chippewa, Mackinac, Luce and Marquette counties.” Hoyum writes, “Robert Corso of Detroit, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge of the case, said the effort began after a 2007 DEA assessment showed prescription drugs were becoming the biggest drug problem locally.” As Corso points out, and as the company that first made Oxycontin knew when it first manufactured Oxys, this synthetic opiate is highly addictive, and offers a high that only the purest heroin can touch. So it was no accident when places like Kentucky and Tennessee began to encounter an epidemic drug problem where the term “Hillbilly Heroin” was first coined. And recall that the pharmaceutical company that makes Oxys was sued and subsequently paid out a massive settlement for falsely claiming that Oxycontin was NON-ADDICTIVE!

As an aside, allow me to reiterate my position that substance abuse is a medical rather than criminal problem, which is the reason for the U.S. having the largest prison population in the world, at both the national and local level. Consider Marquette County Sheriff Michael Lovelace’s editorial in the same Journal edition, which reveals that “Since 1986 several studies have been done on the Marquette County Jail regarding capacity and overcrowding,” and that “every study has concluded that there is a ‘need for increased prisoner capacity in Marquette County and that alternatives to incarceration are considered saturated.’” Lovelace goes on to say that, “No inmate that is considered dangerous will be released from the Marquette County Jail due to overcrowding.” Considering that substance abuse is by and large a victimless crime--and yes, I know that families and loved ones suffer the peripheral consequences of addiction--clinical “alternatives to incarceration” rather than criminal prosecution, education rather than punishment, seems a better way to go. In fact, as most of you know, I ‘m for, at least, the decriminalization of all drugs, and at best, their total legalization. I’ll come back to this at a later date.

What I do agree with Special Agent Corso on is this: the old paradigm (the Gateway Theory) whereby potential addicts start with marijuana and proceed toward harder drugs no longer holds. If everyone who smokes pot moved to coke and smack we’d just about have to build a wall around the whole nation with Mexicans and Canadians as guards.

Where Corso gets it right is in pointing out that Oxy abuse represents a reversal in the dynamics of drug addiction: “’Oxycontin is really a pet peeve of mine in the drug world, in the sense of it sort of works backward,’ he said, explaining agents usually see illegal drug users turning to prescription drugs as an alternative, but Oxycontin users often do the opposite. ‘People are getting addicted to the stuff, and when their supplies dry up, they’re turning to heroin and sticking a needle in their vein,’ Corso said. ‘And the Upper Peninsula does not need a heroin problem, trust me.’”

I do trust you, Agent Corso, I would only add that our nation, from the Florida Keys to the Keweenaw Peninsula, needs to rethink its approach to the war on drugs. It’s no longer the Colombian gangster or Afghanistan warlord we need to fear, but the American pharmaceutical companies that reap the profits of our children’s addictions.