I make it to Tawas Point State Park on the 25th of November around one or two in the afternoon, although the position of the sun makes it feel later. I am on foot–I am all feet, my mind compacted into the most used part of my body, soon to be no feet when I’ve gone too far and all feeling empties itself out behind me. But it seemed to be a condition of my coming here, walking. There’s been an early cold snap. Ice already grows wide on the eastern beach, and Lake Huron, rising for years now, has sunk some of the old paths on the western beach. The entire sandspit will be gone one day, everything but the tip, the peninsula transformed into an island where the plover, no longer harried by leashless dogs, can sit on her eggs in peace.
The only people I see are a few children testing their bravery on the tips of the ice. Their parents must be behind the trees.
The bathrooms are closed for the season. I start walking toward the campground attached to the park, hoping to find an outhouse or porta-potty, but nothing is open and no one is here except for a couple of deer hunters. They’ve rented tiny cabins and huddle in them now, recounting not the trail and the musty blind, but the thoughts that came to them in the silence and turned in their minds until the woods faded and they were back in their living rooms where the worries came to them first, whatever it is that they can’t keep away, whoever finds them in their sleep, wives or children who don’t talk to them anymore. The bathrooms are locked. I wonder how many steps I’ve wasted when I should have just gone forward or turned back. Maybe I can hold it until the end, just a few more miles, but probably not.
I keep walking. The sun is everywhere on the sand, hypnotic and tedious. It catches on all the high points in the water. It catches on the pebbles near the surf and the ripples left by waves, it catches in or around my eyes. These days, my eyes gather light and don’t know what to do with it. They’re forgetting how to be eyes. Repeated patterns, like stripes or grids, jiggle when I look at them, and at the horizon, the water doesn’t appear flat like it used to, it’s now ridged like a lumberjack’s saw.
I circle through the campground back to the western side of the peninsula and find an unmarked outhouse on a corner of the beach, which I passed earlier because it doesn’t look like an outhouse from the outside. So I wasted steps after all. The door whines. A small black broom hangs on the wall inside. Someone once told me that all regrets are the foreshadowing of surprises. I pull down my pants and sit on the cold seat above the vault. Most people complain of the smell, or are too snobby to use vault toilets, but I find them oddly peaceful, maybe because you always know you’re alone, and the wind can come through by one of several means.
A cold breeze shoots up the vault and my ass breaks out in goosebumps. I pull out another page from my knapsack to pass the time. The words tilt and waver.
One hundred red eyes in the distance at night like alien ships hovering above the fields. Staring at the still, looming turbines by day, I feel the presence of God, the same god of loneliness. He is not hiding in the nacelle. He is not hiding on the farms where farmers harvest soy and corn and wind and muscle.
#
Official city sources say Tawas comes from a Saginaw Ojibwe leader’s name, O-ta-was, corrupted over the years by those who spoke other languages and couldn’t or wouldn’t manage the foreign sounds, the O dropped perhaps by the English, who called the Ojibwe the Chippewa, or maybe it was lost in documents, mistakes made when the name had to be written too many times by too many people.
I make my way further in, which is really out, away from civilized land. The Point is a well-known and important station for migratory birds, drawn to the spit every year, driven by a spontaneous attraction that can never be understood by us. By November, most of the birds are already gone except the few who stay for the winter, the ones you see everywhere in Michigan. I can imagine why they come here, why the wood duck’s ancestors chose this peninsula over others. Maybe I don’t have to imagine why they spread their wings here, above the sand, and not somewhere else, maybe I have knowledge superior to imagination. This is the kind of place where your soul begins to be redistributed. You feel yourself hammered thin by the elements, stretching painfully to fit the frame of a kite, and rising. It’s a place you don’t come back from, but the birds, perfectly unattached, come and go freely.
I almost slip into a pool of water. I’m clumsy now, my feet like rotten clubs. I’ve always been clumsy, but it’s gotten much worse with increasingly obliterative waves of fatigue and brain fog. It’s easy to slip. Severe storms and rising lake levels create strange inland pools full of dark weeds and sand stained by the tannins in leaves and the bark of sunken trees. The water claims picnic tables, informational signs, and birdhouses donated by AuSable Valley Audubon. A sign that says “Beware of Erosion” is buried up to the hilt. I once heard that if the Great Lakes were emptied and their water spread evenly across the continental United States, it would cover the land in nine feet of water. Imagine one morning waking up under so much water. Imagine the transcendent lethargy, the inertia you’d experience for a few seconds before realizing it’s not a dream.
I have to stop to catch my breath again. It takes what feels like about four minutes, significantly longer than it took yesterday. My breaths barely stretch my lungs. I pull a paper from the knapsack and try to sync my breathing to the reading.
This summer I was not myself, though I was at the time. Life–product of the green fuse still sparking its way to the final bomb–is about becoming what is necessary. Disruptions of order, because of order, create. They are inventions. Everyone is always losing someone. They say the stars’ light is old, but it’s new to me.
Her words are still alive. Is that what I’m doing, checking to make sure they’re still breathing? To think she traveled 12,000 miles to find herself, like a teenager, and discovered only further and further absence. Her swollen brain burned out through the soles of her feet. I’m trying not to be hard, she said. I don’t want to be hard. Did she regret all the time she spent willingly by herself, did it feel somehow lost? I feel I can answer for her.
I begin following a path that leads to the tip of the Point, a couple of miles away. The narrow paths, almost invisible unless you’re perpendicular to them, snake their way through the dune grass. They’re almost like tunnels through the grass, and I’m a little mole moving swiftly, silently. I pretty sure I’m going to make it–I don’t know what else to do with this body.
#
“No snowy owl,” someone says. I look up and see an old white couple on the path in front of me, birdwatchers dressed in layers against the cold snap, hoping to see something rare and unknown to them. A box in their handbook needs checking. I nod as I walk by.
“Hello,” the man says. He has an open face, especially compared to his wife, if that’s what she is.
I nod again.
“Here to see the lighthouse? You passed it. The easiest way-”
“I saw it, thanks.”
“We’re here for the birds. We come out about this time every year to look for snowy owls.” The woman adds: “Last year we saw two in one day, but maybe it was the same one, twice.”
“No luck this year?” I say.
The woman shakes her head.
“Someone not able to keep up with you?” the man asks. He smiles. “A little one?”
“Why would you say that?” “You keep looking over your shoulder is all. I thought-”
“I’m alone. I travel alone.” They look at me expectantly, as if they’re waiting for me to go on. “The natives, the Ojibwe, they only told stories in the winter so the manitok who hibernated underwater when the water froze wouldn’t hear their secrets and use them against them in the summer.”
The old man looks concerned, and the woman smiles and glances away, as if she has been told all her life to mind her own business. I nod and walk on.
If I’m ungenerous with my spirit these days, it’s because I have to be. I only have so many words. I have to manage my time down to the second, control input and output of various bodily and nervous functions in an oppressive calculus of energy and time. I budget every movement and pause, and I feel like I can’t stop right now and talk, or my boots will sink into the sand, and there’s water down there that I’m afraid of. Wet shoes would ruin everything.
The sun is lower in the sky. The numbness on my chin spreads to the left side of my face. For a while, I thought I had multiple sclerosis; sometimes, I wish that’s what it is. The buzzing fog in my head, once a temporary alarm, has become a permanent signal to lie down. My spirit resists, what’s left of it.
bighorns between rock formations locked in horns, bison,
prairie dogs; prairie locked in battle with the badlands, exploring the paradox
opposites. merciless wind. It is as if wet mud had dripped from
God’s folded hands into towers striped with fragile color:
white, yellow, green, and gray. They change in shadows.
Sometimes I forget why I’ve brought these papers with me. I forget what they represent, what they mean to me. I forget how young she seems in the words. How old I feel reading them.
#
It’s like I’m carrying a leaking can of paint to a distant monument, asked to make it bright again. I’m aware of the leak, but helpless to patch it, and I have to get there with enough paint for at least one full coat. The can is almost empty, a small debt of darkness accumulating. I watch my steps and keep my heart rate as low as possible. That seems to be important to my body now.
I accidentally stare directly at the sun and my eyes tremble in panic for a second before I can shut them. A similar shape is burned into both of my retinas, and I’m surprised to see that I recognize it: a swastika, right-facing. That must be where it came from. And we will call this the sun. Reversing the arms, and this will be night. As my eyes panicked to get away from the light, the sun drew those two broken bars on my retinas as it must have done to chiefs or shamans long ago. The shapes turned from white to green and purple and then to red, a hole burned into the black paper of my mind. An innocent symbol until broken under the weight of fascism. Someone wasn’t happy with the way the sun looked; it had to be captured, bent, placed under control. And now we’ve overused that word, fascism, even though its meaning depends on just the opposite. It should not be worn down; it should not be spent. And yet it’s a word that begs to be overused, like a swear. It practically falls from our mouths. It loves to slip away.
A needling sensation in the bridge of my left thumb draws my attention. A second later it’s fully numb. A new symptom. I expected something like this. My heart rate rises automatically. Each new symptom opens new questions, but I have to keep my heart rate down, or everything becomes worse, all my symptoms flaring up, urging me to stretch out on the ground and be still and quiet, or else.
I stand still watching the colors of dusk. Everything is blue and gold, shadow over shadow, as the sun sets, and the paper birches appear more solid than ever, white anchors, something to grab ahold of at last. Their trunks secure with resin, growing ring by ring. I knock on one, run my hand down the trunk until it catches on a flaw in the bark. Most people think trees gain their mass from something in the ground, that something as solid as a tree must soak up water and minerals from the soil and then convert it into what we know as wood, but this isn’t the full truth. Trees get most of their mass from carbon dioxide and photons of sunlight–they are things of air and light, a miraculous change of state. How long has it taken humans to invent that kind of power?
An old man like the kind you often see in these out-of-the-way places is coming up the path from the opposite direction. I think about all the carbon locked up in his body. He looks like someone’s grandfather, but one who is maybe lost or actually has no children of his own blood and only dreamed of being a grandfather. He may be gay. As we pass each other, I catch a side glance at his freshly shaven face, cut this morning. A female cardinal, its wing almost the exact same color as his cut, drops into the middle of the path ahead.
“Hey!”
I freeze. My heart bounds.
“You dropped this.”
I turn around to see the man handing me a piece of paper and relax. This is written at the top:
xeriscape garden at Smokey the Bear State Park part open
from out of state. But rescued nearby anyway, and his
existed years before. He was to the north and
lived to be 26 after the terror of the fire.
I thank him and keep walking, thinking the world would be better if more people minded their own business.
#
The Point isn’t the way I remember it, but why should it be? I finally reach the guard tower/weather station at the tip. A damaged sign reads: “Danger…sound signal…without warning…do not pass beyond these…” Now that I’ve stopped moving for a minute, I notice how heavily distorted my vision has become. It’s as if my eyeballs are undulating, repeatedly constricting and contracting. Across the bay, I can barely make out rows of what must be houses, condos, and tiny cabins tourists rent in the summer, imagining perfect days at the beach, but in their dreams there are no whining children, no goose shit, no algae on the water or Styrofoam cups floating in the shallows, no loneliness between dinner and bed. The setting sun turns the bay’s arms golden–golden hour stretched across the entire day past morning. The longest night of the year is coming, I realize. Time has already become strange for me lately. Unless I rest for a couple of weeks, my world is reduced to the island of a bed, or a comfortable chair, or the floor where time begins to adopt island laws. By the rule of insular dwarfism, my hours evolve into minutes, my minutes into seconds, and it feels possible to live a year in a day.
I need to catch my breath again. I take a seat on a flat piece of driftwood. It takes me a little over five minutes to take a deep, satisfying breath.
Every cell is cell ability to be awake asleep.
Aliveness is how many cells are open
windows letting in light or shutting
More than almost anything, I miss the control I once had over my body. The windows are closed now, and it’s not so easy to come to the lakeshore and leave yourself behind, as the birds do. There is no self, they say, but it’s easier to believe that when you aren’t constantly made to be aware of your body because some small or large part of it is calling for help.
A boy runs up to me from behind, and I jump a little. He runs past, looking over his shoulder at me. He’s Indian, I think. His feet are bare. “Watch out for snakes!” I say. Maybe a hognose or a brown snake, Emily Dickinson’s whiplash unbraided. The boy keeps jumping around and doesn’t seem to care about snakes. Maybe he knows they’re all in their hibernacula by now. The salamanders in their dens. I envy rest and motion, anything except this in-between. When I look up again, the boy is standing right in front of me, listening, waiting for something to happen.
“There are no snakes,” I say.
“I know.” He rubs snot from his nose with the back of his hand. My nose is running too, from the cold. “Have you ever seen me in your dreams?” he asks. I tell him no, I haven’t. “I’m trying to find my other half. He’s gone out.”
“For what? Visions? I saw a flaming tree once when I was young. Not a dream, but a vision. It stood in my neighbor’s yard, beyond the horse barn.”
“Oh. I don’t know anything about visions.” He slaps a fly on his foot, which I find strange: they should be dead this time of year.
“Ah.”
“And so what happened? It burned down?”
“What?”
“The tree.”
“Oh. No. It burned up.”
The boy’s parents call out from the path behind me, and he runs to rejoin them.
#
The sun has set. My symptoms have accumulated into an aura. I am no feet now; I left them behind. A bone white moon is visible. The clouds are violet, and the water purple. The landscape is absurdly beautiful, overwrought, even garish. I make it to the most densely forested part of the sandspit, where all the paths vaguely peter out, and there’s nothing, not even a cinder block, where I think there should be something. A small structure, a broken antenna on top. There are too many Points: there’s the Point in my head, the one on the map, the one under my feet, the one on these pages–the world fraying in despondence. The wind pulls another page from my knapsack, and I step on it before it can blow away.
Even a map hiding from the rain. My
mind called smokey
distance appeared like smoke to the natives
on the quiet rain the humans, and I
wildlife
tourists. as if they live on tracks.
I never liked the right people, always put my sympathy in with narcissists and people who gave me things in place of loving me. Before I realized what I was doing, it was already too late, and I had wasted my energy on another selfish acquaintance or childish family member who didn’t listen to a word I said. I never learned, repeatedly loving and caring for the worst people on Earth. But she was different. I was the worst person between the two of us.
#
My legs are allergic to their own blood, but I keep walking. It’s hard to believe I used to enjoy this, a thought I can’t really bear the full implications of right now. I can’t get distracted. Walking was the only way. My catalytic converter died and destroyed the engine, and I have no money because I can’t work, and no friends to give me a lift. Somehow in my mind, fatigue is a symptom of poverty and not the other way around. But I’m stubborn enough and small acts have always, by some vague principle, stood in for larger ones throughout my life. I sit down to rest my legs on a bench dedicated to “Captain” Graham Billings, his name stamped into a small brass plate.
“Do you work here?”
A family of three–husband, wife, girl of ten or eleven–stop in front of the bench. He’s wearing a camo ball cap and a winter jacket over a sweatshirt with a large yellow P printed on it, the top of the letter made to resemble a lightbulb, the logo for Tawas Light & Power. He smells faintly of marijuana. They don’t look like a couple: she has a pampered, white soccer mom look that contrasts with his coordinated stoner dishevelment. Their daughter looks sleepy and ready to get back to the car.
“No,” I say. “No one works here in November.”
“Oh, well, do you know if this is the way back to the parking lot?”
“Are you lost?”
“No,” he’s quick to say.
“You can’t get lost here,” his wife says, “we’re surrounded by water.”
“Something terrible has entered the state from the water.”
“What?” the husband says.
“I think you have to go back the way you came. This only goes deeper in. The path fades out.”
“All right, thanks, appreciate it. You gonna be all right out here?”
I assure them everything will be fine and watch them walk back the way they came. Immediately after they leave, I forget what I told them. The little girl has a spring in her step now, she’s getting her way; she skips, walks a zigzag, ducks down and jumps up. Luxurious, I think, and then realize I forgot my knapsack near the driftwood bench at the tip. Wasted steps. My mind is full of mists and holes. It’s important now not to leave anything behind.
#
plantar fasciitis
to speak at all
lungs
sleeping all
drenched
She could have been a poet. The manuscript is damp and scattered, pages missing, corners torn off. She called it Twelve-Thousand Miles, a rough estimate of the distance she traveled by car and on foot in a month during the pandemic. We had stopped living together, set against each other after three and a half years of disagreement and instability. But I exaggerate my role in it. Her son died of White Lung Pneumonia. He was from a previous marriage. We never married. After that, her grief complicated into a dissociative disorder, some kind of terrible depression, and I didn’t know what to do with it. She wondered if a land could be cursed by the past. She went on a road trip to try to heal. She could have been a poet. That’s not what she wanted, or pursued, but she might have had it. Sometimes I think that to be a poet is to be used, animated and burned out by the voices above or beneath us, wherever the fonts of language gather and spill, but I don’t think she would have agreed. She was not romantic.
Why did I bring her here–to kindle my memories? Surely not in remembrance, as an honor, or a pilgrimage; she would have hated to be brought here, dragged to the end of the spit in a cold snap. She would have hated to be used like this. Even now, I can’t touch her, my condition or illness like a second body between me and her final words.
#
I find the hatch. It’s covered in dead grasses, the lock rusted over, ice in the cracks, but it opens. The hollow earth smells like iron and fungus. Did O-ta-was and his brothers and sisters hide in these tunnels all winter while the world froze over, telling each other stories until more venison could be thawed, until the budgeted rations allowed them to stuff their mouths again? And did the Cut-Throats find them and lock them inside until all their light and power was extinguished, their stories locked inside their lungs, their lore finally safe from all who would use it against them? And they gnawed on rusted darkness waiting for a white buffalo.
The trees are silent and ashamed.
I make it through the fractured tunnel to the lighthouse.
I put my things on the floor, all the loose papers like leaves around my feet.
I’ll take care of it this time. I didn’t know how, before–I never knew how to get close enough to anything. The first stair is marked with a bright strip of tape. I watch my step; no mistakes now. The tender days were too few, the scattered comforts of my life culled by the pursuit of this nameless inertia. Symptoms of a heavy mantle blown from the limb of a tree, blameless. At every turn in life, I’ve had the sensation of stepping back from the edge, refusing to go quite far enough, even as the future pulls me by the throat. I have so been a coward when the little gods called me to dress myself in air. Why have I been made to see so many sorrowful and cruel and beautiful mysterious things and then been asked to keep them? I give them up here. The light at the top is full of polished quartz, a 19th century fourth-order Fresnel lens. The night calls for a pause in darkness. I unmake myself again.
Kyle Miller can usually be found wandering Michigan’s forests, turning over logs looking for life. He currently teaches first year writing at Eastern Michigan University. His writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, ergot, and Propagule, and he won first place in poetry at Poetic Visions of Mackinac 2022 and again in 2024. You can find more at www.kyle-e-miller.com.