A brief interlude

 EMPIRE, Mich. -- Up here at the top of the bluff, the sun is warm and the breeze is cool and the views are pure Monet, or perhaps Winslow Homer. Lake Michigan is as blue as it has been in my dreams, as Red says at the end of "The Shawshank Redemption." This morning it's a looking glass giving back the color of the sky, and it stretches on forever.

So, yeah, I will sit here for awhile, gorging my senses. Straight west, beyond the horizon, is Wisconsin and Door County. Off to the north is the low rise of Manitou Island, and the bone-white incline of Sleeping Bear's mountainous dune, tumbling down to all that blue.

I'd say "Ahhh" if it wouldn't make me sound totally dorkazoid. So maybe I just say it to myself.

And also: I needed this. All of this.

I needed me some northern Michigan, my favorite place on earth and a thing of the blood, because my parents loved it first. Built a home on Lake Huron when they retired, and lived there for 25 years. My dad, a history nerd and master woodworker, even got a job with the Mackinac State Parks Commission at Old Mill Creek, site of an 18th century British sawmill.

Every day he'd drive into Mackinaw City and mess around with wood all day, using 18th-century tools. Getting a leg up on heaven, pure and simple.

But my dad is gone now and so is my mom, and their house on Huron is up for sale again. And I'm just sitting here filling my lungs with air that smells like pine and clean water, and which I can sometimes ... almost ... smell back at home when the wind's right.

This is the real thing, however. My wife and I fled the dryer-vent heat of Indiana a couple of days ago for a week in God's country, and already northern Michigan is working its magic. For a blessed while I can forget about the world and how utterly mad it's become.

I can forget, for instance, that the nation I love is in the hands of a pack of loony meatheads in thrall to a half-mad old man with delusions of emperorhood. Nero, you might say, without the violin lessons. 

His latest bright idea -- enthusiastically endorsed by his Homeland Security czar Magda Gerbils (aka, Kristi Noem) -- is to paint the Big Beautiful Border Wall black to heat it up and thwart climbers. This won't stop all the folks who choose to go under the Wall rather than over it, but never mind that. Magda thinks it's the latest swell idea from the mind of a genius.

Yeesh. Calgon, take me away.

Or rather, northern Michigan, take me away.

Take me to the top of this bluff on a glorious bluebird day, and then, after a time, back down the trail into the cool woods. Down there the sun is doing its dapple thing through the leaves, and you meet other trekkers and their dogs making the not-so-long slog up toward the bluff. They say hi to you and you say hi to them and their puppers, and then you're alone under the trees again and the quiet is bone deep.

Which is to say, unless something momentous happens, the Blob is checking out for a day or two. You may talk among yourselves, but no gum-chewing.

Me?

I'll just take another deep breath. Ahhh.