Tag: lake

Collectanea 29.25 Topography-Hell-Cubs

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

Week of July 14, 2025

Travel

We traveled to Michigan this week, Sunday through Thursday, so Collectanea slipped from routine to resting pose. Laptop in backpack. Vary your compositional yoga. Trip was two very different Airbnbs in and around Washtenaw County, winding routes through Dexter, Chelsea, Manchester, Saline, and Milan, then through Pinckney, Gregory, and Unadilla. A swim at Pickerel Lake. Ice cream in Hell. A just so-so “glop” taco salad in Depot Town. A Zoom meeting from a cafe. Catching up with friends and family as much as time and coordination allowed. Great to see some yas; sorry to miss some yas! And then back to Virginia, across Ohio and for too long stormed upon in West Virginia.

Airbnb #1

Figure 1. Der hund, relieved to be out of the car.

Ice Water

Figure 2. Shifted plans and there was Sweetwaters delivering cool-off refreshments.

Anecdoted Topography of Ann Arbor Chance

Figure 3. Before brunch, Zola Bistro. Outdoor options, calling ahead to learn which places were easy-agreeable to Feta’s companionably sitting sidetable: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Jolly Pumpkin, Hell Saloon, too, were welcoming.

Airbnb #2

Figure 4. Portage Lake near Pinckney. Much to say about this place, but for that very reason, I’ll let it go, unsaid and unreviewed. No comment. No stars.

Take A Stick! Do Not Take A Stick.

Figure 5. Feta passed on Hell’s Doggie Library, perhaps because the offerings were not as appealing as the many sticks back at home, perhaps because she determined that this is exactly the sort of conditional enticement an officer of the devil would place before an unsuspecting canine. 😈

Downpours of Charleston, WV

Figure 6. Thunder and lightning and downpours and slow-downs for what felt like hours on the drive back to Virginia.

Cutie-pies, Cerberus

Figure 7. Back at the holler, Friday morning, this pair of black bear cubs playfully sauntered over the creek, along the yard, pausing, hummingbird nectar I smell?, at the walnut tree before heading up the embankment behind the mailboxes again.

Now What

The rest of July is a heap of review tasks and further syllabizing ENGL3844 into existence, plotting out two fall conference presentations, painting some more of the shed, keeping the hummingfeeders nectared, the tiny birdkin fueled, fed.

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the eighth in this series from Week 29 of 2025, or the Week of July 14). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The vulture guardian, Hell, Mich. #travelogue #rollcall

Butterfly Zag

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 minsMonarch Butterfly, El Rosario Sanctuary, Michoacàn-Mèxico.

Monarchs are “tough and powerful, as butterflies go.” They fly over Lake Superior without resting; in fact, observers there have discovered a curious thing. Instead of flying directly south, the monarchs crossing high over the water take an inexplicable turn towards the east. Then when they reach an invisible point, they all veer south again. Each successive swarm repeats this mysterious dogleg movement, year after year. Entomologists actually think that the butterflies might be “remembering” the position of a long-gone, looming glacier. In another book I read that geologists think that Lake Superior marks the site of the highest mountain that ever existed on this continent. I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it, to feel when to turn. At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. (Dillard, p. 258, 1974)

Before shelving Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of the small handful of books (at focus’s edge) I finished on this research leave, I flipped back to a couple of dog-ears to see if there were passages I wanted to keep, post, circulate, remember later. Remember when a blog was a good location to stash miscellaneous passages? In this one, mostly about monarchs and their migration, I must have taken as wonderful (i.e., wonderful enough to warrant folding the corner of the paper) the swarm’s seasonal navigation as it maybe? does it? draws on some faint memoria, a directional inheritance, passed along grid cells from every butterfly mother and every next one before her. Fascinating and strange to think of a group veer, much less over the open expanse of a great lake in summertime.

But of course reading the passage again–no same two ways through it twice–its emphasis on the veer, on turning, stand out. This, the sort of turn spotting that is more akin to following the turns taken by ancestors, those redirects inherited, a quietly encoded rule for monarchs next. So it’s a curious aside that extends turns–more than the multimodal turn, the archival turn, the digital turn, and so on–to that which is only remembered, ancient monuments, a mountain or a glacier. Turning, bending around figments; the butterflies know, but how would we regard such knowing? How would we judge it if we, too, were prone to such predictable and long-established path-following as this?