Kiitos

Saying "thank you" in American Sign Language

I was the victim of stereotyping the other day.

"How much is this?" I asked the hardware store clerk. "Ten ninety-five," she said, after scanning the bar code.

"Okay," I said, proffering a twenty.

She made change, handed it to me, and said "Thank you" in American Sign Language.

She had recognized my "deaf speech."

Not so long ago I would have bristled inwardly at the clerk's clumsy lumping together of all deaf people. We do not all speak sign language. Some of us prefer speech and lipreading. However imperfect our skills may be, they help us communicate with the hearing world on its own terms. We have chosen our path and those who believe in ASL have chosen theirs.

Age and experience, however, have led me to realize that in their blissful ignorance most hearing folks in this situation mean well. That clerk wasn't patronizing, trying to be kind, or showing pity. She was simply acknowledging my humanity, even though she may have been clueless about what specific part of that humanity I belong to.

"You're welcome," I said -- again in voiced English -- with a wink and a nod.

She beamed, even though she missed the irony that I had responded in her language.

For her our brief connection must have been a small blessing in a long day.

That was fine with me.

(By the way, "kiitos" is "Thanks" in Finnish. Now you know.)

F***up of the week

. . . Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times. (The Times? Say it ain't so!)

I truly hate to sound like a broken record, but this is what happens when a newspaper doesn't have copy editors who know how to check facts and have enough time to do so.

Be sure to read the comments. I suspect half or more of them come from copy editors, a large number of whom probably have been laid off.

Sunset No. 4

The ominous cloud formations of approaching storms over Lake Superior almost always make great sunset photos, and this one from July 22 seems no exception to me. The thick cumulonimbus clouds looming miles away in the background seemed to be advancing at a lower altitude than the feathery cirrocumulus just over the Writer's Lair. (Click photo for larger version.)

Spirit houses

Spirit houses at the Pinery Indian Cemetery, L'Anse, Michigan. Though unmarked with names and dates, they serve the same purpose as stone monuments.

Yesterday, on another of my authorial research forays, the Lady Friend, our chum Tina, and I drove from the Writer's Lair 48 miles east to L'Anse, Michigan, at the foot of Lake Superior's Keweenaw Bay. There we paid a visit to the ancient Pinery Indian Cemetery, an Ojibwa site that has been a tribal burial ground for centuries.

It is still in use by the Zeba Indian Mission United Methodist Church, and since 1840 people buried there have been memorialized by conventional stone monuments as well as traditional spirit houses, unmarked knee-high wooden structures that give departed souls shelter from the elements.

Last May 20 a forest fire, fanned by gusts to 60 m.p.h., devastated the woods around the cemetery and destroyed 45 spirit houses, but spared the majority.

Already the mission is planning to replace the burned spirit houses, and on the day of our visit the graves they protected were marked by little red flags.

Naturally the sight suggests a chapter in the novel-in-progress in which Steve Martinez, born Lakota, chases a bad guy through the woods and stumbles upon an old graveyard of his tribe's ancestral enemies, the Ojibwa. This has a lot of possibilities.


An eloquent historical marker tells the story of the cemetery.


Many of the spirit houses that survived the fire are very old.


Some are returning to the earth, the names of their inhabitants presumably lost to history.


Red flags mark the sites of the spirit houses destroyed in the May 20, 2009, fire. They will soon be restored.

Fourteen Mile Point

Made a honest man of myself today.

Those who have read my most recent mystery, Cache of Corpses, know that its climactic shootout takes place at the ruins of the remote Fourteen Mile Point lighthouse, which actually exists on the Lake Superior shore of Ontonagon County, Michigan, model for my fictional Porcupine County.

But until today I'd never been there. It's reachable only by boat; the old road to it was overgrown by forest long ago. So I'd done heavy research and looked up photographs, and felt confident enough that in the novel I could describe the place more or less accurately.

When people asked if I'd actually laid eyes on the lighthouse, I'd stammer and shrug and say, "Well, of course -- in a manner of speaking."

Today a tour boat came down from Houghton, 40 miles northeast, to take sightseers from Ontonagon to Fourteen Mile Point in celebration of Lake Superior Day. I went along, and although we never got closer to the ruins than a quarter of a mile offshore, I can now say "Yup, been there done that," and look you in the eye.

The photo is proof.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite's death yesterday reminds me that for decades my maternal grandmother would watch his news report every night without fail. No matter where she was, she would stop whatever she was doing, shush everyone and turn the TV to him.

Each day as he said "And that's the way it is," giving the date, and signed off with "Good night," Nana Rena would arise from her chair, say "Good night, Walter," as if she were seeing him to the door, and click off the television.

We, her clueless grandchildren, might have snickered, but Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.

Consulting the experts

There is nothing like consulting authority to demonstrate the paucity of imagination. My imagination, at any rate.

In Hang Fire, my mystery-in-progress, a VIP goes missing in the vast Wolverine Mountains State Park during the first week of December, the opening of muzzle-loading hunting season. I had built an entire chapter around the search for the VIP, using only my fevered imagination, a little history, and my sketchy knowledge of the real Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in upper Michigan.

No mystery writer worth his salt relies solely on what he can make up out of his head, so yesterday the Lady Friend and I went to see Bill Doan, operations chief of the Porkies park and boss of its search-and-rescue crew. What Doan told me is much, much more interesting than what I had made up in that draft chapter.

I'm not going to telegraph the important details, but I can tell you this:

1. My VIP victim couldn't have driven to the spot on the boundary road where he left his truck to go hunting. In reality that boundary road closes to wheeled traffic December 1 and becomes a snowmobile route. He'd have had to take a snowmobile.

2. Search and rescue would not use ATVs -- wheeled off-road all-terrain vehicles -- as I had envisioned. The trails are too rocky, and so is the shore of Lake Superior. The searchers would go on foot and snowshoe.

3. The sheriff's department of Ontonagon County, the locality on which the Porcupine County of my novels is based, no longer fields a search-and-rescue team because of budgetary woes. Instead, a trained group of civilian volunteers supplements the park rangers after their initial search for a missing person. However, S&R protocol is that the sheriff is nominally in charge, since the park is within his bailiwick. In practice he will defer to the Porkies operations chief as incident commander, although he and his deputies are available to assist.

All this and much more will add the verisimilitude of detail. Yesterday morning was well spent in Bill Doan's presence, and today I'm going to get started on revising that chapter.