Michigan's Upper Peninsula is blessed with a treasure trove of storytellers, poets, and historians, all seeking to capture a sense of Yooper Life from settler's days to the far-flung future. Since 2017, theU.P. Reader offers a rich collection of their voices that embraces the U.P.'s natural beauty and way of life, along with a few surprises. The sixty short works in this 8th annual volume take readers on U.P. road and boat trips from the Keweenaw to the Soo. Every page is rich with descriptions of the characters and culture that make the Upper Peninsula worth living in and writing about. U.P. writers span genres from humor to history and from science fiction to poetry. This issue also includes imaginative fiction from the Dandelion Cottage Short Story Award winners, honoring the amazing young writers enrolled in all of the U.P.'s schools. Featuring the words of John Adamcik, Nancy Besonen, Miina Chopp, Tom Conlan, Nina L. Craig, Art Curtis, Adam Dompierre, Julie Dickerson, Rosemary Gegare, J.L. Hagen, Mack Hassler, Richard Hill, Skye Isaacson, Kathleen Carlton Johnson, Leah Johnson, Larry Jorgensen, Rick Kent, Tamara Lauder, Ellen Lord, Raymond Luczak, Gregory M. Lusk, Beverly Matherne, Maria Vezzetti Matson, Becky Ross Michael, R.H. Miller, Hilton Moore, Mark Nelson, Eve Noble, Alex Noel, M. Kelly Peach, Jodi Perras, Isla Peterson, Jane Piirto, T. Kilgore Splake, Bill Sproule, David Swindell, Ninie Gaspariani Syarikin, Brandy Thomas, Edd Tury, Tyler R. Tichelaar, Analise VerBerkmoes, and Victor R. Volkman. 'Funny, wise, or speculative, the essays, memoirs, and poems found in the pages of these profusely illustrated annuals are windows to the history, soul, and spirit of both the exceptional land and people found in Michigan's remarkable U.P. If you seek some great writing about the northernmost of the state's two peninsulas look around for copies of theU.P. Reader. --Tom Powers,Michigan in Books 'U.P. Reader offers a wonderful mix of storytelling, poetry, and Yooper culture. Here's to many future volumes!' --Sonny Longtine, author ofMurder in Michigan's Upper Peninsula 'As readers embark upon this storied landscape, they learn that the people of Michigan's Upper Peninsula offer a unique voice, a tribute to a timeless place too long silent.' --Sue Harrison, international bestselling author ofMother Earth Father Sky TheU.P. Reader is sponsored by the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association (UPPAA) a non-profit corporation. A portion of proceeds from each copy sold will be donated to the UPPAA for its educational programming.
FICTION
A Hole in The Bucket
by Hilton Moore
I was only eight in 1952, too young to understand the term blended family. Of course, even that euphemistic term was far in the future. My father, a Methodist minister, was arm-twisted into taking a charge in the remote village of Nelson due mainly to an indiscretion on his part in the city of Alpena in the northeastern Lower Peninsula. The indiscretion became his third wife, Jeanine. She had two young daughters at the time, Susan and Karen. Father had two young boys, Donny and me, Arthur—Art for short hence the blended family. As for his assigned parish in Nelson, he did not consider his tryst with Jeanine, a married woman at the time, as a self-inflicted wound, despite the evidence to the contrary. I guess you could call that self-delusion as everyone around him knew otherwise. My father was a recent widower at the time, not that it matters now. My mother, Louise, perished in a head-on collision with a snowplow during a heavy snowstorm a year after Father began visiting with Jeanine. Suicide, perhaps? It doesn’t matter now, but at one time it meant a great deal to me. The Methodist Church and the District Superintendent were unforgiving about father’s affair and thought this remote parish was a due penance. My father disagreed vehemently, but it was a lost cause.
Nelson is the county seat, smack dab in the middle of Bishop County. Nelson is a town, maybe a village is a more appropriate word, of around fifteen hundred souls. The village is in the very heart of the Upper Peninsula, and a scant throw away from the enormous waves of Lake Superior when a wicked westerly comes crashing against the miles of rocky uninhabited shoreline. The tourists love it, but the folks who live in this harsh environment know you can’t eat water. Truth is, some locals love it, and some don’t. My father, William Langston, was in the latter category.
I have never thought of the Upper Peninsula in the same light as my father, but I do admit that, for the most part, it is not a bucolic picture at all. Still, there is an innate beauty here if you care to seek it. One must be willing to overlook the abandoned mines, and the anemic second and third growth timber left over after the lumber barons butchered the magnificent white pines, hemlock, and cedar. Of course, these immense forests were stolen from the natives, but hell, that’s all in the past.
My father was, in his own way, a refined gentleman, enjoying fine cuisine and classical music and the better things in life which, as a poor minister in the Upper Peninsula, he could ill afford. William once caustically compared the Upper Peninsula to a third-world country but with more guns and chainsaws. (William was as caustic as ever, and out of his element.)
Reverend William Langston, though he preferred the appellation Reverend Will, owned an old farmhouse with eighty acres of overgrown, fallow land thirty miles from Nelson. The farmstead was on a hilltop about a mile from Lake Superior. On sweltering hot summer days, all of us children would go swimming on the stretch of rocky beach near the farmhouse. To say that this stretch of beach was rarely ever used would be a gross understatement. The major issue was the rocky shoreline that informs part of this story. There was no closer beach for miles, and given our parents’ propensity for gin and tonics, they adamantly refused to drive us elsewhere.
To cast light on this story, Will and Jeanine, preferring to stay at the farmhouse, refused to walk the rocky shoreline, perhaps a hundred feet from the shore. They stayed instead under the shade of the farm’s tin porch roof, made rusted by years of neglect, sipping cold gin and tonics. The Nelson parish was morally conservative, to say the least, and our parents enjoyed being away from the prying eyes of his uptight parishioners.
That brings me to the rowboat. Will and Jeanine were both good parents and were sympathetic about the rocky shoreline, but needed much convincing that the family needed a rowboat. We children, all four of us, argued how a rowboat could take us past the stony shore and out to the sandbar, some hundred feet from shore, where we would still be in shallow waters. We could throw out a cinderblock for an anchor, we reasoned, and use it as a diving platform. Just so you won’t think our parents were negligent about water-safety, there was not a lifeguard for miles, and no one thought the better or worse for it in those days. It may seem incomprehensible now, but at that time, parents didn’t hover over their children like hens.
Because I was the oldest male, and the girls weren’t allowed to drive the tractor, I drove the faded red tractor pullin
