Monthly Archives: August 2013

Sensational Saugatuck

This was my favorite view of the harbor.

This was my last drive in the early morning light into Saugatuck. Down the winding road through Campit, the campground that was our home for the month…shafts of fog-filtered light dappling the lovingly tended seasonal campsites, my favorite of which had vintage trailers surrounded by landscaping worthy of full time homes. Past the Hambone Café where over the course of the last month I suspect I ate dozens of blueberry pancakes, topped with house-made blueberry sauce. Past a string of u-pick it farms from which the blueberries for those pancakes came and where now the peaches are ready for plucking. Past the flea market where we scored a tiny rattan elephant to accompany us on our journey. The perfect souvenir from this stop. Past rows and rows of towering blue spruce that make me feel like it’s always Christmas here.

We had the stunningly designed outdoor patio at Zing all to ourselves the morning I had this amazing Dutch pancake.

Past the restaurant Zing, where we’d have their patio all to ourselves on Saturday morning for a brunch, because as our server observed “Nobody in Saugatuck gets up before noon.” On past the turn for Douglas, Saugatuck’s twin village where we’d hang in the town park drinking cider from the local mill and listening to bands at the Thursday night town social. And where we’d pick up our mail. After our first visit the postal workers knew who we were and made us feel like locals. Then across the bridge over the Kalamazoo river covered in mist from the morning chill. (Yes my southern peeps, it’s chilly here on August mornings.) Past the most beautiful farmer’s market I’ve ever visited, where every booth was an art installation created from local produce and where I bought my first Armenian cucumber.

Even the public bathroom was part of Saugatuck’s art colony vibe.

The streets of downtown are lined with shops and restaurants housed in bright bungalows.

I’ve been to lots of farmer’s markets and never seen Armenian cucumbers before.

It wasn’t until that last morning that I finally saw the historic chain ferry inching its way across the harbor.

Past the harbor boardwalk lined with the boats of the beautiful people, and finally to my favorite morning hangout, a coffee shop that roasts its own beans and bakes its own scones. It’s hard to imagine how our next stop could be as magical as this one.

But somehow, I suspect it will.

First Impressions

In Praise of Pachyderms

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“You have an elephant for sale?” interjected the bewildered couple sitting next to us. They’d overheard our conversation at lunch a few days before we were set to close on the sale of our B&B and begin our new nomadic life.

“We do,” Dave answered with a grin. The elephant in question had quietly stood guard in the corner of our parlor for the last eight years. But sadly, even though he was made of wicker, he was too bulky to come along on our adventure.

So off he went to guard a neighbor’s house. And off we went to explore the world.

But we missed him. Life just isn’t the same without a guardian with big floppy ears and a flexible nose.

So you can imagine how excited we were when we spotted this little fella at the Saugatuck flea market yesterday. The perfect petit pachyderm to pack along. (Sorry I couldn’t help myself.)

Beyond American Gothic

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Sultry Night

I did a double-take. Yep, that was indeed a naked man right there on the wall in the middle of the Tipton library. Remarkably progressive for this small farming town near our campground in Iowa. And a remarkable example of how Grant Wood’s artistic genius has been given short shrift by the pop culture focus on his famous pinched-faced farmers.

Wood spent most of his life just down the road from where I grew up. He taught at my alma mater, the University of Iowa from 1934 to 1941. And yet, like most folks, I knew little about him other than that he painted American Gothic.

This gigantic homage to Wood’s best known farmers is touring Iowa at the moment.

And what a far cry from those farmers the one in this lithograph of Sultry Night was. American Gothic always seemed like a caricature to me, something this farmer clearly is not.

Grant Wood’s self portrait.

The library has one of a very limited edition of these prints because when it was produced in 1939, the postal service banned it from being mailed to customers as obscene, so only 100 were ever sold.

Spring Turning

Much of Wood’s work depicted the land that surrounded him, like this painting that so perfectly illustrates the serene beauty of the farmland in the part of Iowa where I’m from—something I tried in vain to capture with my camera while we were there.

Daughters of Revolution

But there were a few other notable departures from the expected. Like this piece Wood called Daughters of Revolution, where he depicts the founding fathers as cross-dressing members of the DAR standing in front of a recreation of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Imagine how that went over in 1932.

There is wide speculation that Grant Wood was gay. I can only wonder what his body of work would have been like had he been let out of the closet.