Finding place of mind

When I was about nine or so my parents gave me a little powder blue typewriter from Sears. Putting it on my lap, sitting in an upholstered rocking chair, I spent the first couple of minutes just feeling happy about how heavy and shiny it was.

I liked rolling in a fresh, snowy sheet of paper. I liked how the keys clicked and carriage rang and return lever felt, how an inky black letter could evolve so fast into a word and then a sentence and then a story. I typed from one end of the margin to the other, starting less than one inch down from where the paper began and stopping usually only after the paper fell out or I was called three times for dinner.

I can’t recall when I first started using the Internet. But I can remember every musical, magical thing about my first typewriter.

That’s why I collect them: Underwoods and Olivers, Royals and Remingtons, Smith Coronas and Woodstocks. Usually they’re pretty worn, costing anywhere from $150 to just-take-it or this-is-for-you. I come across them in antique shops, garages, friendships and Goodwills.

Honestly, I don’t know much about them, except for one thing: They take me back to a place I love.

Along the edges of a hidden Northern lake, Ken Kelly collects his canoes (page 32) for different reasons. Mostly, he loves “the substance” of being in one, especially at dawn, especially alone, when steam is rising up off the water’s surface, birds begin to call and the deer come out for a drink. “I just become an integral part of it all, ” he says.

Renowned Michigan writer Jerry Dennis offers us a collection of stories in “A Place on the Water” (St. Martin’s Press, page 43). In this issue, you’re invited to vicariously canoe Michigan’s wildest river with him, the Presque Isle, noted by some as the toughest whitewater route east of the Rockies and by others, generally speaking, as nothing less than life-threatening.

“Of the five paddlers in his party,” Dennis notes of guide Wayne Overberg, “two had broken their ankles and only one had completed the trip.”

But experiences such as these may be among those we most treasure, memories we harvest to share over coffee and campfires, stories we revisit with relish like favorite childhood playgrounds (page 26).

On a safer note, BLUE also invites you to savor this Fall Issue’s gathering of scenic bike trails and inviting log resorts, famed sandstone bluffs and flavorful seasonal recipes. These are places, too, we think you’ll want to revisit.

Let us know: A collection’s worth is best measured by the enjoyment it brings.

Lisa M. Jensen
Editor, Michigan BLUE Magazine