6 posts tagged “glom”

Because I tend to be lazy, I've taken a full week to post some shots from last weekend's inaugural camping weekend. I found a great state park in Port Crescent, right at the very tip of Michigan's Thumb, and a short drive from Bill and Lindsay's place in Caseville. I met Glom up there on Friday (after working a half-day) and set up the tent. I had a great site.

Show us a happy memory.
Submitted by Liz.

Here’s a spooky tale for everyone on Halloween. And what makes it scary and creepy was that it really happened, as in, it is based on actual events.

My friend Tom (here I often call him Glom) I’ve known since we were about 5. My friend Trace, I met when I was a junior in high school. For years, along with Jase, we were all pals for quite a few years. My parents loved all of my friends, but my late mother had quite an admiration for Trace, as well as our friend Jamie. These chicks were all tits, makeup and clothes and I think my mother felt their presence kind of “classed up” the rest of my dirtball circle of friends.

My parents had a cottage in central northern Michigan, a beautiful little place on a lake in the middle of the woods, up on a hill. I hated going there as a kid, but loved it as an adult. The latter was mainly because my folks would let me and my friends up there for uninterrupted weekends of what 19-year-olds do. Had they known we were tripping our minds out, smoking down and getting blown out on booze and beer, they might’ve thought otherwise. Some weekends were downright toxic, others kind of mild and mellow, more like a serene getaway.

The place was fabulous. It had a huge stone fireplace, nice deck, cable TV, but no phone, which, I felt, made it even more attractive. Nobody could reach us and we kind of liked it that way. My parents bought the place when I was about 14, after owning the joint next door since about 1976. The new place was in disrepair we spent long weekends up there renovating it: new deck, new plumbing, new ceiling, the whole deal. We washed dishes in the bathtub while my dad and brother blew out the kitchen. That kind of shit.

My mother would pass away in January of 1990. She retired about eight months before that and spent about six of them up on the lake. About a year or so later, Tom, Trace and I decided to head up there for a weekend of relaxing. All we ever did up there was eat, drink, loaf, smoke, watch TV, and otherwise goof off. It was perfect. So we went this weekend, got there about 9 p.m. on a Friday night and, upon entering, claimed our rooms.

Since Trace was the lone female in the group, she took one of two single bedrooms on the main floor. Tom and I took the two single beds in the loft, directly above her room. The other main floor room was my parents’ master bedroom and with my mother’s funeral a year behind us, I wasn’t sleeping in there. We crashed early the first night, got up Saturday and lounged all day long. Saturday night we would do what we did best, tossed a bunch of beer, turned joints into roaches and basically fucked off, watching TV and wolfing down as much food as possible.

It was about midnight when we decided to go to bed. We were definitely in a different state of mind, but nobody was positively wasted. There was no stumbling or slurring. We were just beat and buzzed and looked forward to slumber. We met at the bottom of the steps. Trace said good-night and me and Tom went upstairs. I could hear her door close. Tom got into his bed and I sat on the edge of mine, smoking a cigarette before bed and kicking off my socks. We made quiet small-talk for a second before we could hear Trace’s voice coming from her room downstairs. It was faint. It wasn’t like a “Hey, shut the hell up!” or “Can someone turn out the hallway light, please?” Nothing like that. She said something else and I called to her, “What?” And then she said nothing else. Tom and I looked at each other and kind of shrugged. Whatevs.

We then fell asleep.

I got up first and went downstairs to start making some form of breakfast. Tom came down about 10 minutes later and then Trace opened her bedroom door, joining us in the kitchen. She had a smirk on her face.

“OK,” she said, “which one of you was it?”

Tom and I kind of looked at each other, like, “what in the fuck are you talking about?”
Her question made no sense, so I kept doing what I was doing. She pressed.

“Which one of you was it,” she asked, still kind of smiling.

“Which one was WHAT?” I asked. We had no idea what in the world she was talking about. She kept on with the vague questioning before I put the pan down and said “Trace, what? What are you talking about?”

“Which one of you came into my room last night?”

We laughed. “You wish,” Tom said. The three of us were friends and had, at one time, fooled around with our good friend. But we remained friends with no hard feelings and our boy-ish desires, at least for Trace, were well behind us. It was a respect thing at that stage of our friendship.

“Seriously,” she said, “which one of you was it? One of you came in my room, now who was it.”

The smirking had stopped and it was short of terse, like, “enough already with the games.”

The stairs to the loft were narrow and short, and made of wood. To negotiate them, you had to walk sideways, at an angle. And they creeked noticeably. All of the floors creeked. Had Tom gotten up in the middle of the night to go downstairs, so much to even piss, it would wake me up. And last night, it didn’t.

“After I went to bed last night, one of you came in my room,” she said.

Tom and I looked at each other.
“Tom?” I asked.
“No, man,” he said. And I believed him. I totally would have heard him and vice versa.

“We said good-night at the stairs,” Trace said. “And I went into my room, changed clothes, turned off the light and got into bed. About five minutes later one of you came into my room.”

“Trace,” Tom said. “We did not come in to your room, we swear.”
Meanwhile, I’m recounting the moment we went to bed, how I saw Tom up there when I went to sleep, how he was there when I woke up, and did not venture from the loft between that time.

We all had the same “oh fuck” look on our faces.

“One of you guys came in to my room last night after I turned off the light and sat at the foot of the bed. I called out to you, I said “Tom? John?”

I turned to Tom, “That must’ve been the talking we heard from her before we crashed. Trace, didn’t you hear me? I was upstairs and called out “What? As in, what do you want? I thought you wanted us to stop talking.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You both heard me from my bedroom and you were both upstairs at the same time?”

“Yeah,” we said in unison. “We were both looking at each other like, what the fuck does she want now.”

“That’s really creepy, you guys,” she said, almost freaked out. “If you guys are fucking around you better tell me now! This isn’t funny!”

“Trace,” I said, and she cut me off.
“Someone came in that room, in the dark, and sat at the end of that bed and stared at me for about three or four minutes. They didn’t say a word, but it could feel like someone was staring at me. I wasn’t scared because it didn’t feel scary, that’s why I thought it was one of you tw-“

And she stopped, putting her hand over her mouth.

I looked at Tom and he at me, and then us at Trace.

Holy shit.

I believe in spirits and energy and a small amount of the supernatural, superphysical or whatever you want to call it.

“You know Trace, ma always liked you quite a bit,” I said.

She slapped me on the arm and we all kind of changed the subject. I would make it up the cabin about a dozen more times before my dad sold it and I never felt anything strange. But I know where I was at that moment and I know where Tom was. And according to Trace’s timing, at the moment she spoke, there sure felt like someone sitting on the end of the bed. And it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t him.

Happy Halloween.

So, I'm bullshitting with Jase — like there's any other category of communication that exists between us — and I check his site to see this old story he's telling about how he and his buddy almost got clocked by a car when they were kids. And I started to entertain random memories from my childhood. One has been stuck in my head for the better part of a year, the other entered today.

I think as I age, I'm getting these very random, incredibly vivid views into my past. Most of them are brief moments, exact moments actually, not all that significant and not painful in any way, rather, some of them are quite pleasant — this strawberry sheet cake my mother used to make, the crunch of riding four deep in the cab of a pickup truck while my burly plumber father powered down Winstons and blasted Helen Reddy and Carly Simon cassettes on the way to the cabin, and assorted pickup basketball memories, mainly playing scrap 25 and, specifically, this image of Glom on the courts at Washington School, driving the lane, cutting between me and two others, borne of air, knees bent, feet behind him at about 45 degrees to his ass, right arm extended all of the way out with ball in hand, mouth open, eyes wide, rising, like he was being pulled by a string attached to his chest all the way up to the clouds if he wanted, rising from a ground and through opponents that could not contain him, rising to the sublime finger roll.

OK, so that's actually three memories.

The longer-term one is of our friend Trace. I'm maybe a junior in high school and it is early fall and she is knocking on my parents' screen door. I answer the door and address her through the screen. "Hey." I can see her like she's in front of me today. I think she was coming over so we could go to Tom's, which is all we ever really did, but for some reason, that imprint has never faded.

But the one that came out today involves my brother Frank and the air guitar, or as they say south of the border, La Aeroguitarra. OK, I fabricated that Spanish. Lo siento, bitches.

But this I did not make up. When I was in about the 7th grade, probably circa 1982?, Frank came into my bedroom and told me to "check this out." He put on a Rolling Stones record and proceded to perform, pretty much without error, the entire guitar solo to "Sympathy For the Devil." What I found remarkable were the crisp/choppy parts of the solo, the botta-bop-bop-botta-bah, doodle-loodle-loodle-loodle-lou, lou, BWOWMP! That crunchy slide thing on the end, he just blew it out, took his album and walked out of the room, like he just fucking schooled me, like he just fingerrolled on the entire world and everyone in it.

Whenever I hear that song, which, thankfully isn't often  ("Classic" rock kind of sucks, yo), I think of him and that exact moment.

Every August, in conjunction with my birthday and the Woodward Dream Cruise (the former is to be embraced, the latter avoided), I go camping with one of my best friends, Glom, at Leelanau State Park in Northport.

It's a beautiful place to camp, and, for my money (or what's left of it) I rank the Leelanau Peninsula as one of my top three or five places to be. The scenery is stunning, the air is crisp and, I don't know, there is just a specific feeling attached to that part of the state for me, one that is very nearly indescribable. Got a place you dig? Got a place where, in order to get there, you're willing to pack two days worth of work into one day and drive four and a half hours to get there? Got a place where, after you return from there your re-entry into the your normal world is difficult and uncomfortable? That's this place for me. After enjoying a Tigers win on my birthday proper, I got up Friday, finished packing, had breakfast with Kerry and hit the road. When I checked in, I was disappointed at first because this was my campsite.

Great, I gt to set up my tent right by the campground's road/path. Uh, that kind of sucks. But I walk into that little clearing you see there and found a cove of trees in which my tent fit perfectly.

To the rear of my tent, I see this:

To the front, and through the small clearing, I get this view of Lake Michigan:

Glom would show up about 2 hours later. We tooled around a little bit before we cooked dinner over the tripod grill and got blown out on wine and angel dust. OK, OK, I'm kidding about the dust. We woke up painfully early Saturday morning. Heidi had tipped us off to an event called the "Fly-In" held that morning at the nearby Woolsey Airport, this grassy little municipal airport just down the road from the campground. She'd mentioned pancakes, so we got up, hazy as hell and headed to the airfield at 8 a.m. for some flapjacks.

The food hit the spot. But the best part were the beverage options. They offered three — coffee, juice or, get this, orange Gatorade. I was bordering on hungover and that Gatorade, and two plates of pancakes, I believe saved me. Glom loaded up.

So this fly-in was actually kind of neat. These single-engine planes fly in, like, every 15 minutes. And while I'm not a huge aficianado of all things aviation, it was rather interesting.

Also included in the program was a classic car show. And while I'd escaped metro Detroit because of the 1 million people and 30,000 hot rods choking Woodward Avenue for a few days, the Motor City in me got to take in a couple dozen of sharp rides.

We left out of the car show and  took in some more of the peninsula before it started to rain. We left some of our gear out, including the wood, so we  high-tailed it back to the campground. There, I decided to nap. The sound of rain on your tent, with you inside dry as a bone and high as a kite, will put anyone to sleep like a  baby. Like a very stoned baby. I would get up about two hours later and take a long walk around the campground. They have an old lighthouse and all sorts interesting looking shit on the grounds there, including this birdhouse.

A fellow camper apparently felt a creative urge.

I roused Glom up around 3 and we headed to what has become an annual highlight for us, the Pow Wow in Peshawbestown. Heidi and her folks hooked us up with this years ago and now we go pretty consistently. We usually met them there before heading to Fred and Diane's for dinner, which, this year, and like every year before it, did not disappoint (ribs, chicken, brats, lentils, pasta salad, sweet corn, potato salad, lime-aid). But the pow wow itself is a pretty intense and respect-demanding event. A narrator kind of guides you through what you're watching and what it all means. It's fucking beautiful.

We would head back to camp later that night, after hanging with Fred and Diane, Heidi and the kids, and this very interesting business associate of Fred's, Eric. Eric was a trip, a former Frenchman living in Brazil. Glom and I burned more wood into the night before he kicked my ass, six straight, at Yahtzee. Man, I couldn't roll for shit, I swear. Horrible.

We got up Sunday, had lunch at the Bluebird and visited our favorite gift store, the Thundebird. They have a huge "Jesus is Lord" sign on one side of the building, and on the other, this:

And by the "king" I don't think they mean Elvis. I got a nice leather watch bracelet that, in Royal Oak, would be about $55 at Shine or some goddamn place. I paid $6 for it here.

Tom would take off after a swim in a very cold Lake Michigan. I met Heidi for a couple of beers back at the Bluebird and about two hours of conversation that's been overdue for about six months. She made a great point. We live five minutes from each other in Detroit, yet it took us to drive nearly five hours away from our homes to get together for a couple of beers. It was some great quality time and I'm hoping we can all keep the momentum going.

I spent the evening back at the fire, listening to the waves. Have I mentioned how much I dig it up there? I like to ramble along the roads around there, enjoying the subtly brilliant sights.

I got home on Monday and Kerry made us a fine meal. I love Leelanau and miss it when I get back to Detroit, but it was good to be home.

This upcoming weekend will mark the annual camping pilgrimage I make with one of my oldest and best friends, Glom. Me, Glom and Jason used to run pretty wild in the streets (running! running! wild in the streets! running! running!). Anyway, me and Glom go to Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula in the middle of August every year to a.) get away from the Woodward Dream Cruise, and to b.) embrace my birthday celebration. The weekend consists of some of the best camping ever, right at the face of Lake Michigan, the annual multi-tribe powwow in nearby Peshawbestown, swimming in Lake Michigan and a lot of driving throuh Suttons Bay, Leland and Glen Arbor. We may drive to Charlevoix to see another childhood friend of ours, Harold. But it's always back to the campsite for nights filled with this ...