An American Map

Warming the Flue: The Think House, Empire, Michigan

Warming the Flue The Think House, Empire, Michigan Tucked as it is in a Michigan woods thick with tall maple and ash, the Think House eddies with chill in winter, and remains too-cool and shaded in the summer. So I build a fire in the woodstove. A decade ago in Leelanau County, my David and I built by hand this sixteen-by-twenty cabin out of mostly recycled, damaged, or deeply discounted goods. As a result, each autumn we seal leaky windows with plastic and stuff insulation strips around the eternally peeling though still partly brilliant red door. The small black Jotel perches in the corner—inadequate against drafts—and dusty pine bookcases filled to bending line the walls—doing double duty as insulation when the cold comes on. A butcher-block table faces the insect-spotted an american map 2 window; a second-hand desk holds a newer computer; a school chair leans toward the woodstove. Here are a Depression-era rocker; three dictionaries—two unabridged, one belonging to my grandmother; and more books—revealing an obsession with having them as much as with reading. I wad newspaper into rough coils and place them side by side in the chamber. I pile shards of pine and scrap walnut on the wasted news, crisscrossing them like highways on a map. Then I realize it’s so cold that I have to warm the flue before I start the fire. I roll a full sheet of newspaper into a long crinkled tube. I light one end with a wooden match, hold it into the firebox, seeking that small invisible place where a hint of draft should pull. I sit back on my heels. In this room, wild turkey feathers tuck into cracks, lake stones rest on sills, Petoskey fossils serve as doorstops. The place is rough on all its edges, messy with piles, and it lacks plumbing—though the electricity works most of the time. It is too quiet—except for wind, the voice that always enters this place. Still. Here is the place where the stories and poems take root. But even before that, where does the process begin? At what point is the imagination sparked? Just as there must be fuel to warm the cold stove’s firebox, there must be inspiration for the imagination to warm. Will the fire take? I wait in the cold. Sometimes when the chimney is too cold, the warm smoke is trapped and backpuffs , filling the cluttered room. Then there is only coughing and ugly haze. I’ve worked in this room for years, fired this stove every cold day that needed warming. I know the ways of this stove I bend to; I also know how my thinking goes. It doesn’t always warming te flue 3 work, this attempted combustion of air and tinder—or its parallel of imagination and language. The writing doesn’t come from nowhere. Other routes, like a tube of flaming paper to channel fire and warm the flue, must warm the mind. The fuel of travel, the experience of other places and their people inspire me. For me, this desire to seek out new places is not simple; despite an innate curiosity, I love home and isolation. Solitude. The chill of the Think House, the wind against it. In contrast, the intensity of New York City unnerves me, the Mexican border disturbs me, Culebra’s wild surf shakes me. Always I feel uncertain and often lonely opening the door on fresh territory, following new routes away from old roots. It feels blank and anxiety-ridden, and, yes, I thrive on it. I pack. The tube of old news flutters, unwilling. I bend to it. Fire grows from fire, small to large. But nothing happens without the air, the oxygen drawing across it to feed it. I blow a little. Lately I have been thinking about how discrete places, and perhaps an entire country, might become placeless. No, not placeless, for that is more or less impossible, but how places might lose their individuality, and in turn lose their meaning. I sense the disquiet, the loss of place that may be happening in my America. Will we one day alter Pete Seeger’s melancholy anthem: where have all the places gone? Are they still out there—places where meaning and geography and people are linked so closely they make the stories that give...