by Dave Balcom
She had obviously spent a lot of time researching the perils of this kind of development. She told me that the short sightedness of retailers was usually where small communities failed when they became “discovered” as the next cool place.
She explained that the people who populate the Penny Points and other high-end rural developments weren’t the same kind of people who make a town into a community.
“It’s not like they’re bad people,” she said. “It’s just that people who only come to a town seasonally or who just come for the attractions have different motives than people who come to build a life.
“Those new people will make Mineral Valley a rurban environment. They’ll create a high-end fly fishing shop, for example, or a sushi restaurant, but they won’t serve on the PTA or the school board. Their kids, if they have any of school age, won’t be going to the school.”
She cited the drain on resources that such developments made and how those costs far exceeded the return in the form of property taxes.
“If you look at it, residential development property taxes don’t begin to pay for the police, fire, schools, sanitary services they require… and that doesn’t even start to talk about how those property prices affect the rest of the area.
“If Penny Point builds out, the eventual assessed price of my home would make it impossible for a regular working person to even rent it, much less buy it.”
She had been on this rant for about 15 minutes when it dawned on her that she was on a rant and stopped abruptly.
“I’m sorry, Jim. I become a bit heated on this topic…”
I tried to direct her back to her newspaper issue. I didn’t personally know of anyone who had dealt with a boycott, but suggested a couple of ideas. I reminded her Traverse City had had such a boycott in the ’70s when the newspaper’s coverage of the state’s plans to close a mental hospital there had led to an advertiser boycott.
“I should have known you’d know somebody.” She then pulled out her cell phone and called home.
The afternoon was pleasant. I shopped both lists. We had dinner and a history lesson at the hotel, and arrived at the house just after 8.
There was no sign of Punch.
I called the Nelsons before we took their stuff to them. Shirlee said she had to go to Pendleton on Monday, and she’d deposit my reimbursement into my checking account. We did each other’s banking all the time. Pioneer cooperation, I explained to Jan.
Jack was gracious and invited us to have a drink with them on their porch. It was nice to have a nuclear sit down – four people – two boys, two girls. Nice.
Without prying, Jack went to work learning about Jan, and when he worked talk about her musical career out of her, he really brightened up.
“Do you still play?”
“Sure, do you?”
“I try, but I’m awful. Will you play right now?”
“Show me the way!” They moved to the living room where Jack’s piano was open and ready.
Shirlee and I sat on the porch, watching the night open up its star show, and listened as Jan started playing old standards, going off on jazz riffs that sounded lost only to melt back into the melody. I could actually hear Jack giggle from time to time.
“She’s a nice gal. You like her. It shows. I won’t be able to console Jack if she never comes back,” Shirlee said, prying just a little.
“You can always invite her, if you like her. She’s pretty special.”
“You need to give yourself a break, Jim,” she said with gentle intensity. “You deserve another special person in your life. It won’t hurt you or your memories. It would not be unfaithful.”
I appreciated her counsel, but I couldn’t answer. I just nodded and breathed in the night air and listened to the music coming from the house.
27
Sunday was schizoid.
The first four hours after dawn saw me in my work room hooking up and programming my new laptop to communicate with the world. When I engaged it, my email in box showed 42 messages.
After I had checked all that, I took a backup thumb drive from a file and restored my address book, and then sent out a blanket notice of a new address: “punchline.”
About 8 a.m. I heard stirring down stairs and found Jan in a frantic search for coffee. I escorted her tousled-hair, sleepy-warm frame to a stool in the breakfast nook and then assumed the coffee chores. “Decaf okay with you?”
“If that’s all you have, just direct me to the Nelson house.”
I perked some “fresh squoze” Cowboy Canyon beans.
“I drank too much,” she said as she waited for the coffee to brew. “It always happens any more when I play the piano. It seems to be luring me back to the bad old days. I’m sure the Nelsons think you’ve hooked up with some kind of floozy.”
“Undoubtedly.”
I explained that we were once again connected to the outside world via Internet and suggested she call the people close to her that if they wanted to e-mail her, they should use the punch address, and to not let their spam blocker keep it out of their in boxes.
She picked her phone up, disconnected it from her charger and started dialing out on the porch.
When she came back, she was smiling, albeit a bit ruefully. “Four voice mails. I’d think maybe everything is pretty smooth if they were all out on Saturday night partying, but it could be they just all jumped in the river…”
I poured her coffee. She showed her appreciation with a cockeyed smile that I was growing accustomed to seeing. I headed off to the shower.
After she was dressed, we decided that a typical May Sunday in the Blues deserved a walk, and we set off to the mountains.
Jan had grown up in the middle of Michigan’s mushroom heaven, but had never been hunting for the little fungi.
“I wasn’t outdoorsy. What can I say?”
“You sure caught on quickly.”
“I love the way you say you ‘caught’ morels. Today I figured out why you use that term. The hunting is really fun.”
We stopped back in La Grande at Foley Station to eat a mid-day meal. It was about 3.
After lunch, on the way home, I decided to stop at a place I knew up off the Summit Road which was a favorite plinking spot for locals. I wanted to practice a bit with my handgun.
Not only had Jan not been outdoorsy in her youth, she had never fired a weapon or even touched one.
“Are you afraid of them?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. It’s just that I don’t see a use for them in my everyday life.”
“I don’t use a hammer every day, either. But I think everyone should know how to use one if the need ever arises. Mind if I teach you about this gun?”
She agreed to try it so we parked near a natural amphitheater where we could safely target practice.
Down in the bowl I hung a couple of targets on an old pallet that someone had dumped there for the purpose long ago.
I went through the safety features of the gun. The Taurus has a key locking feature for storage, and I showed her how that worked, but I also noted that in the field I didn’t have it locked.
“You don’t want to be fumbling for a key if a mountain lion has taken an interest in you.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you? Mountain lions?”
“Ever since the state banned hunting cats with hounds, their population has just exploded. I’ve never seen one, but everybody else I know who camps, fishes, hunts, or lives in these mountains has a cat-sighting story.
“A game biologist I know who takes care of the elk in this forest and a sheep rancher I know both tell me that the big cats are really making a mark on those herds and flocks. That biologist told me he expects a human attack any day, they’re getting that plentiful and that bold.”
“How big can they be?”
“I don’t know, but a healthy adult male can be eight feet long and weigh upwards of a hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Could this gun kill it?�
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“If you could hit it, maybe. But for most of us, it’s just a matter of making enough noise. If he’s stalking you, and you know it, you’d have time to draw your gun. If he came close, I think I could hit him, if he wasn’t moving too fast. But I think the noise would be enough to save your skinny butt.”
I took her through the dominant eye drill, to see how she would hold the weapon. She was right-handed with a right dominant eye. Shooting is difficult for right-handed people whose left eye is dominant.
I took her through the basic stance and how to hold the gun. “You point a gun like this,” I said. “You have both eyes open, just like shooting a shotgun. You sight down the barrel, and create this design with the front sight inside the rear side,” I said drawing on the back of a target. At real close range, it’s like pointing your finger. Try this,” I said, turning her so the target was off her right shoulder. “Quick, point your finger at that target.”
She did. I stepped beside her and stooped down so I was sighting along her extended arm. Her finger was right on the bull’s eye of the target. I described it to her. I had her turn and face the target. I placed the gun in her hands. I had her raise it, “look at the target, not the gun. Just bring it up there… that’s just right, now don’t move it, just look down the barrel… see?”
“It’s pointed right at it,” she said with some wonder in her voice.
“Let’s shoot.”
And shoot we did. I put a pair of headphone-like ear protectors on her, and I held the gun with her the first time, thinking I could keep her from dropping it if the sound and recoil scared her. She didn’t flinch a bit as the gun roared and bucked.
I backed off and let her shoot it on her own. She took her time with each shot. We were about 15 feet from the target, and little holes started appearing in the paper before she finished the first cylinder.
I taught her about emptying the cylinder and reloading the gun. I stepped back, and she emptied it again, more holes.
“You want a turn?” she asked.
I took the weapon from her, loaded it and then emptied it in quick order, a series of “double taps” followed by one shot.
“I had never heard of a seven-shooter when I was growing up,” she said. “All the cowboys in the movies had six-shooters.”
“Some had five. Automatics often will handle nine or more; some will hold a lot more. I like the revolver because it’s easier to make safe when you’re carrying it in a knap sack, or in a shoulder holster when you’re trout fishing. You can have an empty chamber under the hammer and still have six loud bangs in the bank.”
“If you had one cardinal rule of safety, what would it be?” she asked as I gave the gun back to her.
“That’s easy. Never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to kill. Ever.”
By the time she’d burned up almost my whole box of ammo, she was showing me that she had mastered the basics, and wasn’t afraid of the sound or recoil. She was also imitating my “double tap” process, which gave me a chuckle.
With just a few cartridges left, I had her remove the Mickey Mouse looking head phones.
“Just shoot one time,” I instructed. I wanted her to hear the real discharge.
“Wow! That’s loud,” she said laughing. “I didn’t realize just how much protection those things were giving me. I could hear every word you said.
“That noise would probably deter a cat, maybe even a bear if you weren’t between her and her cubs.”
“But would the bullet stop them?”
“In theory, yes, but it would have to be placed just so, I think to stop a charging bear. I think it’d put the cat down.”
“Where would you aim?”
“Body mass, my dear, yaass, body mass,” I said in my best W.C. Fields impression. “We don’t practice enough to take a head shot. You stick one in the heart and lungs area, and you’ll have their attention at the least.”
Back at the car. I showed her how to break the weapon down, clean it, reloaded it, and lock it before I put it away in the center console.
“Does it stay in there all the time?”
“Not so often lately. It stays pretty close to me since the break-in.
“You getting paranoid, Stanton?”
I quoted the famous line about how you’d be paranoid too if you knew everybody was after you…
All day I had kept taking a census of my feelings. Here we were, both of our minds split between this day and our being together amid the events swirling around us and our jobs.
Still, I was having fun. Every time I checked, I found her reactions, comments, attitudes – everything – were perfectly in tune with mine. I started wondering if she was an actress. Had she read me, and was being who I wanted her to be?
Then another voice came through in protest. “You deserve to have another special person in your life. It wouldn’t be unfaithful.”
We returned to the house about 6, and I immediately started checking the place out while Jan took her cell phone to her room and started making calls.
I put on tea water, and she came out. There was a visible relief on her face.
“Good news?”
She explained that Rhonda had been talking with advertisers all weekend – at the market, at the café, at church, and anywhere she could corner them.
“You know, we pull about sixty-two percent of our revenue from Traverse, Kalkaska, Grayling and Cadillac. It’s not like if all of our locals quit advertising we’d be out of business, but still. That thirty-eight percent could easily be the most important part of our advertising message.”
She sat for a minute, and I realized she was debating how far she was going to let me into her thinking. I sat quietly and waited.
“I worked so damned hard to build the Record. You wouldn’t believe what it was like. The grocery store told me they didn’t need a local newspaper – ‘Where else are people going to shop?’ he said. I finally told him that if he’d run a weekly ad and his insert in our paper for a month, if he didn’t attract more business that month, compared year over year, I wouldn’t charge him.”
“What happened?”
“Two things. I ended up buying another freezer to handle all the groceries I bought that month, and his sales were up twenty-three percent,” she said with that rueful smile.
“All little newspapers are really all about food and auto with real estate coming in a distant third. You probably know that, but it really narrows the market, you know?” she said.
“But you’ve built a successful business model. It must be working for those advertisers or they wouldn’t continue to invest.”
She thought for a second. “But after a while, they lose sight of how it works, and they start feeling proprietary, you know? Like they own a vested interest in the paper.”
“That can’t be all bad. I always thought I wanted all my readers and advertisers to think of my paper as a privately owned utility that they treated like their own.”
“Sure. Until they decide that what you’re writing isn’t making them happy instead of remembering that news isn’t for them and them only, but it’s what brings eyes to their ads.”
“That can’t be a prevalent opinion, even in a small market.”
“The nature of our business is about momentum, and it doesn’t take too much prevalent opinion to shift the Big Mo in the wrong direction.”
So I asked. “Will you be all right?”
“Rhonda and Julie have it under control. All but a few of the guys who announced they were walking away from their contracts have agreed to continue their advertising this week. We’ll be fine.”
“And this week’s lead story?”
“Oh, I almost forgot. Patty has a bunch more information on who owns what, and what they paid for it. It doesn’t really tell us anything, but it’s pretty fascinating.”
“That’s the wonder of fine print. Every reporter I’ve ever known hates the court house. The Register of Deeds office is about the worst
of the worst, but there are many stories in those columns of numbers.”
“But where is it all leading?”
28
Monday morning found me on the road, walking and doing my forms. It’s a habit that has become essential to my life.
While I practiced the breathing exercises and forms at variable speeds, I contemplated my future with Jan.
That’s right. I wasn’t wondering if we had a future. I was into the mechanics of how it might work out. I came out of a move called the duck, landing in perfect balance, ready to strike in any direction, and the thought burst on my mind: “Maybe you should consider what she thinks?”
29
The mail arrives at about 4 every afternoon, and I was actually expecting a check from my agent. With a couple of books out there and still selling, my royalty checks were important to my budget. If they stopped, I might have to find meaningful work.
I heard the postal truck pull away. Jan was on the porch, on the phone. She had written an editorial for the week, talking about freedom of the press and profit. She had asked me to edit it before she sent it to Julie, and I had been flattered. Now she was checking to see if it had arrived and what Julie thought of it.
I pulled the mail out of the box. There was a bunch. The top envelope was from my agent. I stuck it in my hip pocket.
The next envelope was a thickly padded Number 10 business envelope with my address and a Pendleton postmark. There was no return address on either side. I thought it might be junk mail and slid it to the bottom of the stack.
There was a credit card bill, a mortgage statement and a bunch of unsolicited mail. There were five glossy catalogs that would never make it past the recycle bin in the garage.
I don’t understand why we can have national “do not call” lists to protect us from phone predators, but we can’t have a “do not mail” list to conserve resources.
I think a business that sells your address should be liable for the cost of every unwanted piece of mail you receive from then on. We’d streamline the postal service real quick, and I’d go to recycling about twice a year instead of monthly.
