Ambassador Bridge
Michigan–Ontario

By Ramya Swayamprakash

I grew up in India. I have now lived in the United States, and in Michigan, for almost a decade. But I cannot claim to be from Michigan or India — it is hard to call a place your home when your connection to it is defined by a temperamental piece of paper. Emotionally and geographically, I feel like a vagabond, without a place to root me. As much as I feel that lack of place, my entire adult life has been guided by rivers. I have followed them to their sources high in the Himalayas, chanced upon some of their most magical beginnings in Tibet, and written about their entrapment in peninsular India. I grew up listening to stories about these rivers. Rivers have been home, intellectually.

Yet, when it came to the river that I have written and thought about for the past decade, I did not know of it until I met it. The first time I flew over the Detroit River in 2013 was the first time I even heard of it. Growing up in India, I was familiar with New York and San Francisco. Much of the Midwest was a blob, with the Great Lakes at its center. At the time, Detroit was just beginning to be in the news because of its financial situation. When the captain announced we were flying over the Detroit River, I did a double take and wondered whether this was a chicken and egg situation — which came first, the river or the city. The answer as I was soon to find out, was inconsequential.

The larger story has always been how this river strait has become what author Paul Vasey calls “a fabric” of our lives, a part of “our vocabulary.” I was recommended Vasey’s 2013 memoir The River: A Memoir of Life in the Border Cities by one of my advisors, and I read it during the summer of 2017 when I was in Windsor, Ontario, finishing up archival research for my dissertation. In the shadow of its more famous neighbor, Windsor was an interesting vantage point to be researching from and reading about. I used The River as a sort of guide to walk the city and get to know it better. The Detroit River looms large in Vasey’s imagination in ways that I had not factored until I read the book and walked the city myself. The river was as much a way-finding device as it was the edge of theater — you could watch an entire city go by on the other side if you sat long enough. There was a rootedness to the river that I had not yet found on the other side of the river and border. I spent a wonderous afternoon speaking with retired ship captains at the Marsh Collection in Amherstburg, understanding the river and specifically the infrastructures that I would then spend half a decade writing about—and continue to gush about.

The river was everywhere, and never too far that summer in Windsor. The air was muggy and humid, and winds blew little or no smoke from Zug Island. It reminded me of summers long ago, in Bombay, a lifetime and half a world away. That summer, as I kayaked across from Walkerville to Peche Island, it was breathtaking. The summer sun lit up the water into a magical shade of blue, and the ruins of Hiram Walker’s mansion seemed to come alive. If you squinted enough, you’d experience some time travel. From the main shipping channel on the other side of the island, the familiar but jarring sound of a massive laker — a ship that plies the Great Lakes — might wake you up from your reverie, just in time to head back to the mainland, and across the border.

These memories are perhaps just my rose-tinted glasses, but as I remember it, the river seemed more open, more welcoming, on the Canadian side. A decade ago, it was also just easier to get to the Detroit River from the Canadian bank and sit by it, watching it, just as Vasey did, “rolling past with ducks and gulls on its back, the ocean on its mind.” It was a centering experience. As trucks crawled by on Ambassador Bridge, standing under it at Assumption Park, I would gaze at the Michigan Central Station.

Walking under Ambassador Bridge along the riverfront trail, near some maintenance workers, I spotted a laker. This park, where Vasey talks about the history of Jesuits’ landing along the southern bank of the river. On that summer day, as I looked onto Assumption Church and the bridge, Vasey’s descriptions of the park swam in my head. It was the however the people of Windsor whose descriptions really occupied my mind. Vasey paints Windsor with the love of an insider-outsider, a feeling I understand deeply.

My biased view of the river may have been filtered by the political border, which while silent and unproblematic for most North Americans, remains an anxiety-inducing experience for immigrants and those individuals with “weak” passports like mine.  Taking a day trip to Windsor was a thrill, not least because I was crossing into another country with ease. I was even welcomed with a smile! Crossing back into the U.S. was a lot scarier. For those of us with weak passports, borders are real, and as much as I enjoyed The River, I found myself jealous of the author’s obliviousness to the barrier. I wanted to feel that obliviousness for a minute.

I do not quite know how to explain my relationship with this river. It is unremarkable on the surface but every time I am near, it feels like home. While I may never be oblivious to the border, the river has never judged me for the misfortunes of geography. Standing on its banks, geological time rolling by while I try and write about humans, I feel humbled, mesmerized by everything this body of water — which flushes every twenty hours or so — has seen. I have spent a decade trying to understand and tell these stories. These tales and their river have grounded and sustained me. As a person, I am very much a work in progress, but this river and everything it does are the closest thing I have to a “home,” at least one rooted in place.

Taking my toddler to meet the river last spring was a special homecoming, my worlds colliding in the best possible way. Yet, when my toddler asked to go to the Canadian bank where the parks looked cooler, I had to say no. My child holds a stronger passport than I do. The border that was immaterial to them was very much visible to me, with a weak passport in my back pocket. If we crossed over, my toddler could return at the drop of a hat, but I could not. One does not need a wall to see the border divide everywhere — you just need to carry a weak passport.

As I write this, sometimes my toddler wistfully asked for their passport to cross the border “home” to go shop at Target, since the Great White North lacks that convenience. For the first time in their life, the border has become visible. As a parent, I feel guilty about taking away their obliviousness. As a scholar, I hope this will enable more careful attention to and, someday, abolition of borders, at least in our minds. Either way, we will wait, gazing at the sun-kissed waters of the Great Lakes, thinking about making homes.

Ramya Swayamprakash is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. A transplant to the Midwest, Ramya researches and writes about rivers, infrastructure, and borders. Her work has appeared in the Michigan Historical Review and Water History, among others. She co-hosts Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern Historical Association.

For further reading on passportism, the discrimination against people holding passports from certain countries and its uncritical acceptance by citizens of wealthier nations, see Shahnaz Habib, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel (2023).

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358 Bus Stop, Torrence Ave. & Pulaski Rd.
Calumet City, Illinois

By Ava Tomasula y Garcia

“forgive my geography, it’s true i’m obsessed

with maps.” –José Olivarez, “Wherever I’m at That Land Is Chicago”

The Calumet Region coheres into shape and sense through the totalizing language of maps. The gridmarks through which reality has been arranged here for over two hundred years are that of longitude, latitude, scale, treaty boundary, x-marks-the-spot. Isn’t that the work that maps do, after all? They make the real, real. Chart, fix, occupy, extract. They make the given world seem inevitable.

I’ve been looking at these maps for a long time, trying to understand how land becomes resource and then gets thrown away. How people continue to live on it and love it.

José Olivarez is a poet from Calumet City, the city that takes its name from this Region. I think he gets it. His images always seem to return home to the Region. This is true even when he’s battling, word by word, the terms of that return: this is one of the most segregated and polluted areas in the lands now called the United States. Looking at the maps, the Calumet Region emerges as a total sacrifice zone; a waste dump for centuries of capitalism; an overdetermined and overburdened 90-ish-square miles stretching from South Chicago through Northwest Indiana along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

A hard place to call home. Even harder not to go back to the map to describe it; harder still not to get trapped by the dense tangle of border lines and scale markers and RxR crossings which would choke you. To not feel like there’s no way out of the world its representations would have you believe are inevitable.

Blueprints to the city-sized steel mills, past and present. Hazardous waste containment sites marked out on a grid. So-called “early settlement” maps of Indiana and Illinois show how the Potawatomi Nation was rounded up and cornered by gunpoint. How Menominee himself refused to sell Neshnabé land even after he was viciously detained by settler militia men. See how quickly land speculation is mapped into reality in the wake of the Trail of Tears: limestone quarries marked out, coal veins sought, railroad lines laid down.

Chicago booms into existence on the map, literally constructed from the “raw materials” of the cleared Calumet: water, wood, limestone, coal, sand for cement, and clay for bricks. The world’s first refrigerated train cars, carrying meat from the Chicago stockyards across the country, cooled by ice cut from Calumet lakes and rivers and running the rail lines that crisscross the Region today. Plat maps showing how houses butt up against the Standard Oil refinery, now BP. 

My family’s history of living and working around the Region walks in lockstep with a history of illness: cancer and dementia from so much pollution, from day in and day out drinking in the soils and waters that industry has determined must be wasted for bigger profits. It seems like illness is hard baked into what it means to be from here, and, for me, so is leaving. When Olivarez writes, “i needed to believe suffering was honorable,” the line hits hard.

Yet what I love most about Olivarez’s work is that, while always being grounded in place, he doesn’t write about the map. He doesn’t “mistake the map for the territory,” as Sylvia Wynter put it. This poetry doesn’t go around, in Olivarez’s words “pretending the bones / are the real thing.” He’s after life, not its flattening. When I take the bus up Torrence Ave. through Cal City, past the train lines, past the scrap metal yard, past the recycler plant, I’m riding through territory which exceeds those bones. The land doesn’t give up. Look one way and you see intermodals speeding by on miles of burnt-out rail lines. Look the other way and you see sand cranes and egrets burst out of the dune grass. A cloud of starlings flits through the sunset. Marsh water floods the road. Heavy industry mixes with the watery, oh-so-alive earth.

Olivarez finds the little cracks in the totality. His images of life in Calumet City mix with my own memories, peeling themselves off the map: Olivarez in “Cal City Winter” as a kid on another frozen winter morning, “jumping up & down at the bus stop / trying to warm up.” My own memories, waiting in the car for Berta to get off work at the Burger King at River Oaks Mall, breath curling in the December air. Biting into a gordita from Loli’s, steaming hot down my throat. Springtime bugs gliding back and forth on the Little Cal River, weaving a gossamer haze, summer heat shimmering, a thousand mirages. People always say that we have the prettiest sunsets, then joke that it is because of the pollution. The road the car snakes along was once the shore of an ancient lake, was taken over by settler stagecoaches, was a sand mining pit, was paved over for scrap trucks to traverse. You settle into place.

This is what no map will ever show but sometimes a poem does: the way individual lives layer up moments of anger, pain, and love — how these emotions sediment themselves into place as tracks for others to walk whom you may never meet. This is what living in the Calumet means, too. Olivarez’s poetry has become my map to the Cal Region. Not a map as in chart, fix, occupy, extract. A map as in “i’m always out south / of somewhere. i know the sun rises / in Lake Michigan & sets out west.”

With it, I’m trying to navigate those questions that I haven’t been able to figure out for my own life: “I want to learn what the birds know— / to love a home when it is abundant / & to leave when the love stops.”

Olivarez’s map is a question in answer to my questions. Where does a person begin and the place they’re from end? Can you ever leave a home? Can a home ever cease to be that — can it be ground out, like a cigarette butt on a cold winter morning? When you leave, do your memories go with you? Or do some of them stay behind, settling into the landscape?

Surely, some mark of the love a place gave you and that you gave back stays in the soil. Surely.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia was born in 1994 in Chicago and grew up in South Bend, IN. She currently lives in New York City, studying medical anthropology as applied to the so-called “undiagnosed” illnesses of the Calumet Region. Before, she worked at the Southeast Side of Chicago’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos.

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Before she left Long Island to return to the cherry capital of our country, northern Michigan — where she was a member of the sixth generation of a farming family — Carolyn gave me a large book to fill with my writings. I’d originally sought her out about 20 years ago. I had a column on “women in the arts” in a small, now folded, monthly women’s newspaper. I’d interviewed upwards of 50 artists, but until Carolyn, I hadn’t yet found a writer. Thus began our friendship, most of which took place

1. According to Wikipedia, Weequahic is derived from a Lenape word “wee-qua-chick” meaning “head of the cove.” The high school is the one Philip Roth graduated from less than a decade later.

through correspondence. In late March 2019, Carolyn passed away from the complications of early onset dementia likely exacerbated by chemotherapy for breast cancer.

In addition to her expertise about cherry farming, Carolyn was a lawyer, and she made her living as a freelance editor. Though she wrote masterful stories, she had yet to publish a book. The publication of her book happened by way of her husband — the writer Stephen Lewis — who not only became her caregiver but took it upon himself to find Carolyn’s work a publisher. The Wolfkeeper was published by Mission Point Press three months after Carolyn’s death. Of the 10 stories in this collection, five had been published in literary journals, one of which was a semi-finalist in several literary competitions.

Generally speaking, these stories present a cast of quirky, charming characters, some of whom we see multiple times throughout the stories, but the dominating force is the natural world, the land and its lover — the great lake. The lens through which we behold this world holds a clarity that imbues itself in each word. The words urge us to slow down, to take the puzzle pieces and fondle them — replete with imagery, sound and the occasional understatement — leaving us to finish the stories ourselves.

While reading, I’m taken to a time and place that is otherwise unrecognizable. The land is both pristine and unforgiving, and an unearthly community exists between the geography and its two- and four-legged inhabitants.

These stories read like myths, partly due to the texture and luminosity of the prose, along with the compression that asks us to create this world in our minds, to see its pictures, to smell its smells and hear its sounds. We are taken far north to a part of the U.S. that shares a watery border with Canada, a terrain that is more often than not covered with snow, where horses pull a sled runner across the ice, and sometimes the ice melts or breaks, and sometimes there’s a seam through which a ton of lumber falls. These stories are populated by lumbermen and fishermen and impoverished families where there is abuse, where religion is known more for the harm it does than for salvation. These are stories of Jesuits and Indigenous peoples, some where there is a mix within the same family. There is a story with a body that must be chipped from the ice, a story about a bet that will become as deadly as the weather, about women running a “Tavern of Dreams,” about the wives of the “King of the Mormons” left to fend for themselves on an island in Lake Michigan in the dead of winter.

One sees here a tenderness, a ferocious love of place and respect for its denizens who thrive here. The first story envelops the reader in a sanctified world where a very old man is living out his days in a cabin with a swinging door. It is cold, “for winter had not yet invited spring in.” A young woman appears whose job it seems is to stoke the fire and make sure the man will not starve. She leaves a number of warm loaves of bread stored in a vine basket above the hearth, some of which he proffers to the wolf who visits him and seems to know this man well.

There is a life force that makes itself evident in each of these stories. The dusk has a mouth. The cries of wolves “float down” from the cliffs.

The voice of Carolyn J. Lewis’s stories is the voice of the land. If it could speak, in a language we might intuit, it would use her voice, it would say we connect — the land sees to that. It calls us to itself. We rise to the demands of time and place, what in fiction we call the setting. In Carolyn’s book, it’s the interaction between setting and character that remains so defining, so revelatory.

One could say that setting provides the challenge of our lives even now. That which is difficult presents as an opportunity, directs us to see beyond the moment, beyond mortality, beyond fear, even — offers a connection to what some have called grace: whether it is through World War II, whether it is a great lake melting under us, whether it is Covid-19, whether it is Black Lives Matter, whether it’s a liminal moment in our very democracy. We make a choice in this moment of clarity when we glimpse the fragility of human bodies, of human institutions, of human civilization; we respond with something more noble than the insatiable appetites of the self.

We will look back one day. We will see what was once insoluble. We will see how we changed our world.

In her introductory epigraph, Carolyn writes: In the land there is a longing/and the longing is in the people,/and the people who come to it/ have a name for it they never speak.

The post There is A Longing appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Smith Lake Camp
Herman, MI

By Ray E. Boomhower

Writing about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in his classic regional history Call It North Country (1944), John Bartlow Martin described the expanse as “a wild and comparative Scandinavian tract—20,000 square miles of howling wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior.” Like numerous fishermen, hunters, and hikers before him, Martin was attracted to the UP by its “magnificent waterfalls, great forests, high rough hills, long stretches of uninhabited country, abundant fish and game.”

From his introduction to the region in the summer of 1940, selecting it as a suitably remote site for a honeymoon, to Martin’s death in 1987, the reporter, freelance writer, diplomat, and Democratic presidential speechwriter found himself drawn, again and again, by the UP’s quirky charms. As he warned would-be tourists: “You will have to do nearly everything for yourself. The region is not geared to make your visit painless.” The lack of modern conveniences and the clannishness of the locals could be maddening, he pointed out in Call It North Country (tattered, well-thumbed copies of which can still be found on bookshelves in many UP cabins), but if an outsider adjusted his thinking and fit into the region’s ways, he could find “no better vacation spot.”

The UP, however, became more than just a regular tourist stop for Martin. In January 1964 Martin and his wife, Fran, purchased a 180-acre site outside of Herman, Michigan. Not far from the water’s edge on their property they discovered the ruins of an old trapper’s shack, which they used as a temporary shelter. They constructed a camp (as cabins are known in the region) on top of a high, granite cliff sixty feet above the lake. Enormous white pines towered over the hemlocks located on the cliff, sheltering and shading the cabin.

Martin oversaw the construction by Finnish carpenters of a thirty-foot by thirty-foot log cabin with a large living room, kitchen, bedroom, indoor bathroom, and an enormous fireplace built out of fifty tons of native rock. As Martin’s son Dan noted, his father and mother loved “the wildlife, the remoteness, the sense that they were in touch with nature.” His family remembered that Martin did not believe in cutting down trees or their branches on his land, even if they interfered with the view of the lake from the cabin. “If you want to see the lake,” Martin insisted, “go get in the boat and see it.”

During his family’s summer stays Martin fished, tried his hand at carpentry, did some writing, and relaxed in a sauna that later featured the front page of the New York Times announcing the resignation from the presidency of his longtime political foil Richard Nixon. “No television, no telephone, once a week to town for mail,” he said of his routine. The cabin also became a sanctuary for Martin, a place where he could retreat to when tragedy, as it often did in the 1960s, struck, as when his friend Robert F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in June 1968. At night, Martin, when troubled, could look up and see the Milky Way, appearing like “a white river,” with every star “blazing” as he witnessed “man’s satellites slowly tracking across the firmament.”

I decided while working on a biography of Martin that I needed to visit his Upper Peninsula retreat to get a better sense of what this wild place had meant to him. Martin’s daughter, Cindy Coleman, graciously offered to show me the cabin on a visit I made in September 2013, just before it was shuttered for the upcoming winter. I knew I was in the Upper Peninsula when, upon stepping out of the truck to open a gate so we could proceed along a rugged former logging road to the cabin, a large black fly saw its opportunity and delivered a vicious bite to the back of my neck. The spot still hurt when we passed a small, wooden sign with white letters affixed to a tree near the road that read: “J. B. Martin / Smith Lake.”

Reaching the end of the road, I could barely make out Martin’s cabin, nestled as it was among the trees. Although I did not stay long enough to hear coyotes howling in the night as Martin had done, I sat on the screen porch attached to the cabin, enjoying its dark-wood floor, sturdy beams, and simple, rustic furnishings. Relaxing in one of the wooden chairs, I was stunned, at first, to see that, with Martin’s death, there now was a clear view to the lake through the trees. Watching the waves from the porch as the wind rustled the branches of the nearby trees, I reflected that Martin had made all the right choices when it came to his cabin’s location, but maybe, just maybe, had been wrong about the lake view.

Ray E. Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is also the author of more than a dozen books, including Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog, and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. His next book is about Malcolm Browne, Associated Press Saigon bureau chief in the early 1960s, and his famous photographs of the burning monk.

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