Tag: writer

Hemingway’s Paradise Lost

  • Students do 'the Hemingway thing' (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

A good book has the ability to transport
you to different times and places. You can travel
to far off exotic countries or cities nearby. You
can also visit places that aren’t so easy to get
to – mostly because they don’t really exist anymore.
Places like Hemingway’s wild north woods. Jennifer
Guerra reports:

Transcript

A good book has the ability to transport
you to different times and places. You can travel
to far off exotic countries or cities nearby. You
can also visit places that aren’t so easy to get
to – mostly because they don’t really exist anymore.
Places like Hemingway’s wild north woods. Jennifer
Guerra reports:

Say what you want about Ernest Hemingway’s writing, the man loved his North Woods.
Up until his early twenties, he spent almost every summer up north at his family’s cottage
in Michigan.

And it’s there where most of The Nick Adams Stories take place.

“They were walking on the brown forest floor now and it was springy and cool under
their feet. There was no underbrush and the trunks of the trees rose sixty feet high
before there were any branches. It was cool in the shade of the trees and high up in
them Nick could hear the breeze that was rising.”

This is Nick Adams country in the early 1900s. The Last Good Country, Hemingway
called it. Filled with cathedral-like forests and streams swimming with big fat trout.

Now, it’s said that some of The Nick Adams Stories are based on Hemingway’s own
experiences in the north woods. Especially the parts in the book about hunting and
fishing.

“That was one of his favorite things to do.”

Valerie Hemingway was with the author when he wrote The Nick Adams Stories. Before
she married into the family, she was Hemingway’s secretary and occasional fishing
buddy. She says Hemingway used to go on and on about the good old days back in
northern Michigan.

“He taught me how to shoot a gun, told me about the river fishing – and these were
things that were initially associated with Michigan. And I think Michigan
represented the freedom in his life.”

But if Hemingway went up north today, he probably wouldn’t recognize the place.

“I think we’ve done our share of damaging it. And I’m sure there are areas where we
can still find something that he found, but it would be few and far between.”

Mary Crockett just finished The Nick Adams Stories. She read it as part of a state-wide
reading project put on by the local chapter of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. The reason The Nick Adams Stories was chosen for the great state read was
because of its obvious ties to Michigan and the north woods.

But Adam and Eva Colas
just read the book in a high school writing class. They’ve lived in Michigan their entire
lives, and they can’t relate to Hemingway’s North Woods at all.

“It doesn’t feel really representative of Michigan to me, cause it’s not the Michigan I know.”

“Cause even if you go to
Lake Michigan now for camping, there are specific pits for bonfires and specific cabins and all
these designated areas that make sure you don’t get lost or hurt, and you don’t have
to do anything for yourself.”

Their teachers thought that might happen, so they came up with the next best thing. An
outdoor classroom where the students can talk about the stories while doing what Adam
and Eva Colas call ‘the Hemingway thing’.

“The nature, hiking, canoeing. We can’t do the hunting/fishing thing, but just sort
of experiencing nature as nature.”

“Michigan as it was back in the day when this takes
place.”

See, that’s the beauty of a good book. Virginia Murphy teaches a class on Environmental
Literature at the University of Michigan. She says just because the students can’t
experience Hemingway’s world as it was back in the day, doesn’t mean they can’t learn
from his words.

“It allows them to see an environment that they’re not necessarily exposed to on a
daily basis. Most of us live in cities, drive our cars, work in buildings. And so it offers us a
perspective that we don’t have.”

So even if you never got to experience the north woods with all the big open spaces and
virgin forests and clear blue streams, well, there’s always the public library.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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CUBA GROWS ITS WAY OUT OF SHORTAGE (Part 1)

  • A market in Cuba where growers sell what they don’t keep themselves. Photo by Mary Stucky

While organic farming is growing across the U.S., the number of farmers in the Great Lakes using organic methods is still quite small – not so though in Cuba. In the past decade that island nation has embraced small-scale organic farming and urban gardens. Production of vegetables has soared, which has attracted attention from experts in the Great Lakes region who are visiting Cuba in increasing numbers. In the first of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Stucky went along with one group to find out how the country transformed its agricultural practices:

Transcript

While organic farming is growing across the U.S., the number of farmers in the
Great Lakes using organic methods is still quite small. Not so, though, in Cuba.
In the past decade that island nation has embraced small-scale organic farming and urban gardens. Production of vegetables has soared… which has attracted attention from
experts in the Great Lakes region who are visiting Cuba in increasing numbers. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Stucky went along with one group to find out
what the Cubans can teach Midwest farmers about farming.


Cuban farmers had little choice about whether to embrace organic agriculture. Just seven
years ago, the Cuban people faced starvation, but today.


“For us, we are alive, we are alive.”


For Mavis Alvarez, and other Cubans, just having survived is an accomplishment.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it had a ripple effect on Cuba as well. That’s because Cuba’s economy was based on financial assistance from the Soviet bloc, especially its food economy. And when that money stopped, Cuba’s citizens began to feel the effects. Before long, Cuba could no longer afford to import food, fertilizer or pesticides. So the government made a
drastic decision. Food would be grown without chemicals using alternative methods.
To many, it was seen as a major gamble…. but it worked.


(Natural sound from vegetable stand)


Vegetable stands in residential Havana display piles of lush vegetables at reasonable prices. While there are still severe shortages of meat and milk, the country is now producing four
times the vegetables compared to the worst year of the food crisis – and this is done largely without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.


“I have so much respect for that and Cubans are evidently in the forefront.”


Diane Dodge is a master gardener from St. Paul, Minnesota. Among organic farmers, Cuba is
renowned – and many, like Dodge, are visiting the island to see Cuba’s methods with their own eyes.


“They’re not necessarily trying to change anything. What they’re trying to do is go with the
flow of nature and that’s very contrary to what we do. We’re always trying to manage nature, change nature and here it’s all of a piece.”


Cuba has combined organic farming methods including natural pest controls and
fertilizers… along with a vast new system of urban gardens like this one in Havana.


(Natural sound of windmill)


A windmill pumps water for this garden. Ten years ago this was a weed patch. Now it’s a lush
jungle of vegetables, spices and fruit… by law no chemicals can touch this soil. Through a translator gardener Ignacio Aguileras Garcias explains he feeds 10 family members from his plot.


“Here we have 43 farmers and maybe only 8 or ten sell the products. The rest use the products for their own consumption. You work on your piece of land and you do with your production whatever you want.”


Just a few short years ago many Cubans were starving. Nowadays most Cubans are eating well
enough to meet standards set by the United Nations. Some experts’ say that proves organic farming can feed a country’s people. Urban gardens produce more than half of the fruits and vegetables consumed in Cuba. Minor Sinclair lived in Cuba in the 1990’s. He represented Oxfam America, a charity working on food policy, and says it’s justified to use valuable urban land to grow food.


“You produce it locally, you get people involved in the production, you market it locally. You can go out and walk two blocks and buy a head of lettuce that’s been removed from the earth right there in front of your eyes. And that lettuce lasts a week in the refrigerator. Better product, cheaper prices and better income for the farmers too.”


So what those who came to visit the farms have found is that in ten short years Cuba has transformed its agriculture production… and that’s a good thing, says the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Wayne Monsen.


“You know they know how to feed themselves. I’m not sure Americans would know how to feed
ourselves if there was a crisis where the food supply stopped.”


But Cubans are looking beyond feeding themselves. In February, the first certified organic sugar
from Cuba was sold to European chocolate-makers. There’s a great demand in Europe for other
organic foods as well. If organics become a Cuban export bonanza, it would certainly get the
attention of farmers up north, in the Great Lakes.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mary Stucky.

Huck Finn Rides Again

  • Looking for an America with "substance," Mike Delano of Boston, along with Ben Doornbos and Ethan VanDrunen (L-R) both from the Holland, Michigan area are making their way down the Mississippi River on the 'Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn of Michigan,' a homemade raft they hope will carry them to New Orleans. Photo by Lester Graham

Inspired by Mark Twain novels, a trio of Huck Finns is taking a raft down the Mississippi river. They started their adventure where Mark Twain often did in his novels — Hannibal, Missouri. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has the story:

Transcript

Inspired by Mark Twain novels. A trio of Huck Finn is taking a raft down the Mississippi River. They started their adventure where Mark Twain often did in his novels, Hannibal, Missouri. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.


Looking at their raft, it appears to be a little precarious. Inspecting a little more carefully doesn’t inspire confidence. They’re thrilled to find that the 1947 pontoons that they patched with fiberglass don’t seem to be leaking. This little vessel, a small deck of not much more than plywood and two-by-fours with an even smaller roof overhead has been dubbed the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn of Michigan. It says so in magic marker and poster board tacked to the wooden side rail of the raft.


Ben Doornbos and his friend Ethan Van-Drunen are from the Holland, Michigan area. The third member of the trio, Mike Delano is from Boston. The little raft is supposed to take its passengers from Hannibal, down the mighty Mississippi to New Orleans. Doornbos says their trip on a homemade raft is inspired by Mark Twain’s characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, from the nineteenth century. But their reasons for launching the rickety craft seems to be more a reaction to frustration with the twenty-first century’s culture.


“We’re always griping about America and about kind of the loss of culture and how everything seems to look the same on the interstates. You know, it’s always McDonald’s here and, uhm, it’s just kind of– we wanted to find something else that was– had some substance, something that felt like something.”


We’re all sitting on lawn chairs on the raft, still on the trailer that hauled it to Hannibal. While his friend talks, Ethan Van-Frunen nods his head in agreement.


“I too, like Ben, am just kind of frustrated by cookie cutter America and mall culture and everything like that. And part of, like, what I hope to accomplish on the trip is seeing people who are, like, finding their identity and their culture and their past. So, that’s what I’m going to be looking for a lot on the trip is just talking with people who we meet along the way and what they’re interested in.”


As they try to explain their reasons for the trip, again and again the young men use the words “be free” and “freedom.” Each of them is twenty years old, quite a bit older than Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, but Mile Delano says really for all of them it’s the perfect time for an adventure before their freedom disappears.


“Right now I have no payments at all, car, apartment, insurance. So, I am completely free and this is the perfect time for that, so, I’m going to get on the river and get down to Louisiana.”


Van-Drunen and Doornbos built and tested the raft in Michigan. They noted when they slipped it into the still waters of a local lake that the raft rode deeper in the water than expected. They’ve been warned that the swirling currents and wakes of barge tow-boats can be unforgiving.


(Festival Band Sound)


The three friends have timed their trip to start during Tom Sawyer days in Hannibal. They even got to put their raft in the big parade. The local folks are a bit skeptical. They applaud the courage of the young men, but as David puts it,


“Well, I’ve been out on it on a boat before and I don’t think I’d want to do it on a raft, no.”


There are a lot of folks from all over the nation in Hannibal that come to see some of the sites mentioned in Mark Twain’s books. Standing across the streets from the site of the whitewashed board fence that inspired the story of Tom Sawyer persuading his gang to paint it and pay him for the privilege.


Larry Woodward shakes his head, he’s heard about the raft trip. He just brought his boat down from Wisconsin, and wonders whether the three friends know what they’re getting themselves into.


“I floated down in a 24-foot sailboat, but we were under power all the way with a diesel engine and I felt real intimidated by, particularly, the locks and the dams and a lot of places where the current could easily overpower my boat. So, I wish them luck, but it sounds like risky business to me.”


The three Huck Finns say they’ve been told the trip is a piece of cake. They’ve also been told they’ll likely get themselves killed. Mike Delano says they think the little craft has a fighting chance.


“We’re really hoping to raft to New Orleans, but I think we’re making our goal just to get to New Orleans, but if it doesn’t work out, we’ re just going to enjoy ourselves and, uh, no worries, I guess. We don’t want to have to worry about things like that. At least, I certainly don’t and I think I speak for all of us.”


His friend Ben Doornbos says, they feel a to like Huck Finn when he was adopted by Aunt Polly.


“He runs away from her. He talks about how it’s all too cramped in there and everything too civilized and he can’t stand it. And we’re just thinking the same thing. It’s time to get out and have some adventure.”


The trio says they’ve got six weeks for their adventure and they plan to use every moment. No matter how their raft, the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn of Michigan fares.

A Backyard Encounter

Covering the wilderness experience during the cold winter months has
taken Knight-Ridder outdoors writer Sam Cook on snow-shoeing and camping
trips throughout the Great Lakes region. But in a
sampling from his latest book "Friendship Fires", Cook points out that
it’s not necessary go any farther than your own backyard to share a
winter encounter:

Radium Girls

It’s not unusual for authors to feel a bond with the people they write about. But that connection is especially strong between a modern-day university professor and a group of working class women in the early 1900’s. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson has more: