No Pulitzer
The Pulitzer prizes were awarded today. Darn, the Eagle Harbor Journal was not among the winners.

I was sure the committee would at long last recognize the cutting edge journalism represented by the likes of this foray in small town electronic "news, views and information", i.e. gossip and story telling. The champagne was iced and 2010 Pulitzer Champion shirts ready to don, but alas, it was not to be. A web site did earn a prize, but to no one’s surprise, the awardee was affiliated with old school, the New York Times. It apparently pays to have friends in high and traditional places.

I fretted for a while, wondering if the unfairness of this world might be overcome by hiring a high price NY agent or PR firm to argue my case. But then, I stumbled upon a report on BBC America, my only reliable news source, explaining that award winning journalism must be subjected to “vetting”, a standard totally foreign to me and a word that not even my Webster’s seems to recognize. I think it has something to do with upon being examined, what one says is factually correct. I’ve never burdened myself with such a limitation on making my rambling prose interesting to me, much less my reader.

Given this standard, I shouldn’t have been surprised with the committee’s failure to recognize the merit of my work. In fact, just yesterday, a neighbor “vetted’ me for claims made in my last journal, Riding It Out. “George”, he chastised, “you neglected to confess that you snuck out of town for a few weeks basking in the warmth of Southern California, probably spent more time in the cocoon of Marquette General than in the wintery wild of the Harbor, and, given your frailties, are rarely out in the middle of the night sledge hammering frozen firewood piles.” Ah, all so true. But I’m there in spirit.

So, I’m relegated to the ranks of the unvetted storytellers. A good deal short of the likes of Twain or Keillor, but they never won a Pulitzer either.

Riding It Out Eagleharborweb lurkers will occasionally depart from their understandably desire for anonymity to press the website editor for an explanation of what one could possibly do to maintain one’s sanity in the long interval between color season and the return of snowbirds and bugs – a period that encompasses almost two-thirds of annual existence for bipeds hunkered around this little niche in the rock shouldered shore of the world’s biggest, wildest, and coldest freshwater lake.

The honest answer is not much. We just ride it out.

They say, “We know you take a weird delight in measuring the abundant snowfall, seemingly find sufficient solace in just cozying up to a warm fire with a good book or your Bach as winter storms send cold drafts inside and noisily batter your old camp, and get a kick out of trudging outside in the ever present darkness to sledge firewood free from your frozen and toppled woodpile, but is all that enough to ward off senility and atrophy; i.e. how do you keep from going crazy?”

Ah, that’s the secret. We do go crazy – at least by what seemingly passes in more urbane places as norms. (I take undue license with “we”. It’s probably just “me”.)

While we delight in the all too occasional shoulder rubbing with our common specie, the nectar of most of mankind, we find equal satisfaction in just being with ourselves. It certainly helps to arrive at this place with a rich reservoir of lifetime experiences and interests - personal resources one can draw on for intellectual nourishment in our extended winter hibernation. I often counsel Eagle Harbor year-around wannabees, that if you find your own company as insufficient, this is not the place for you.

We who inhabit this place also seem to have in common a perhaps unusual appreciation that we are but one species, and perhaps not the most savvy, of the warm bloods in our midst. Many a long winter day can be fulfilled by simply watching the graceful soaring of an eagle, the coyness of a coyote perched on a snow bank alongside your camp, or the playfulness of an otter fishing among the harbor ice flows. Not the stuff of our more urbane counterparts, but it works for us.

We are also delightfully focused on history, not the stuff of school quizzes, but rather an innate appreciation from the still evident reminders that we who hunker in the Keweenaw between freeze-up and thaw are but the latest of this country’s adventures. Their ghosts are ever present – neighbors of sorts. (I told you we’re [me] a bit crazy!) When we stumble upon many millennium old mining pits on our bush treks, encounter the beautiful hand laid century-old decaying rubble stone mining structures that dot our snow clad landscape, and even during our “history tours” of old copper town bars, we feel and are nourished by the souls of the hardy who inhabited this place in much more difficult times. Soul food of sorts.

And of course, if you are lucky enough to be of the many Harbor year-rounders with deep family ties to the Harbor community, the experience and events of each day, trial or triumph, evoke comforting memories and good vibes. Moms, dads, siblings, children, grandparents, crazy uncles, et al, are forever with us. Having a sense of “place” in our lives’, a rare privilege in an increasingly transit society, forestalls many a “what am I doing here?” thought.

And lastly, we not without a sense of community. Indeed, it’s powerful, made even more so by our sparsity and resulting, of necessity, in a strong sense of interdependency. We may be few, but we’re close. Committed to looking out for one another. I know that if my lights are not on by late dawn, or my car is unmoved in a day, someone will stop by or call. I’ll do the same. Oh, what comfort this provides. In truth, the essence of the successful existence of “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.

So dear lurker and wonderer, take heart. There is reason to hope that we who “ride it out” may maintain enough sanity to be pleasant, perhaps even stimulating, company upon your return – which we hope is soon!

Grand Opera Last evening was so peaceful, and so beautiful. Our daylight now lasts through the evening hour and the sun is now ending its daily stay with us by dipping behind the tall poplars that stand like sentinels along the west shoulder of our swimming beach. Dark tree shadows inch out across the pristine white snow that covers the beach and then onto the harbor ice, their ghostly images stretching almost to mid-harbor before being lifted off the ice and absorbed by the gathering darkness of the approaching night. The mostly vacant cottages along the harbor’s south rocky shore, their higher perch affording them a longer bask in the now gold tinged light of the setting sun, seem to be almost retrieved from their long winter hibernation as the light briefly plays across their harbor facing, making windows glow. Then as the sun dips lower, seeking the sanctuary of the big lake, and now once again darkened cottages return to their slumber, the last, and usually most colorful array of sunlight climbs up the darkly forested ridge lying to our south, offering for a moment a hint of the forest’s spring potential. By now the sun has disappeared into the cold and dark lake, but sends its brilliance around the earth’s roundness and through the dusty near earth heaven to transform the bottoms of otherwise lifeless winter clouds into a mesmerizing mosaic of shifting rust hued reds laced with black shadows set against a background of fading blue sky. This closing seems like the end of grand opera, the moment the magnificent curtain envelopes the stage.