A Bonding of Days via Tehquamenon Falls & The Peace Forest

 A Bonding of Days via the Peace Forest and Tehquamenon Falls

in memory of my Mother, Katherine A. Smith, a.k.a. Miss Kappy,

and to the Smith Kids (Sabatini seeds)

Once upon a time, seemingly several life times ago, I sat with my mother and my brother and sisters, breathing the fresh air and walking through Michigan's Peace Forest in the Upper Peninsula. It is not far north of the Mackinaw Bridge. We took in the sights and sounds of Tahquamenon Falls, which looked to me like a giant Root Beer spill that never stopped flowing. This was not normal for us. Kids from Detroit's inner city, we muddled our way through the riots of 1967, equipped with tanks and fires and television news that was so dire, even the newscasters looked worried, except for Walter Cronkite who was the man WE always went to for news. Our father was suddenly (and fortunately) removed from our lives, the neighborhood was rapidly changing and 5 little kids and their mom tried our best to make sense of our dramatically changing world.

During the summer of 1971, our mom's friend Jim Linck agreed to do the driving, to take us on our one and only ever family vacation. My mom's Pontiac Catalina brazenly ate the many, many miles to the ultimate destination, The Soo Loches as far north in Michigan one could go before bumping into Canada. I remember the smell of the heated car as all 7 of us tried not to huddle or touch, before giving up and letting sweat glue the kids in the back seat together through scrawny bare legs. The exaggerated tearing of skin surfaces, one from another, repeated so many times, we stopped paying attention and just looked ahead, or out the side windows. We had air conditioning, and sometimes it was on. But to save gas, we also had (what seemed like) long periods of time when the windows were down just enough to have rushing air drown out the heat. Hair whipped and eyes blinked and teared up but the windows kept the sweltering summer from baking us, like giant, fidgeting gingerbread cookies, in a backseat heap. We were going on vacation, just like kids on t.v.! And we were thrilled.

What we didn't realize is how this even would come up again today. In a strange way, I guess we knew, but we didn't give it much thought at that time because life happens, and days that are circled in our list of years go by quietly and wait until the the mind's eye blinks back and hones in on it like a Department of Defense guided missile. And here it is. Time's tunnel erases as that day and today merge, as if it is one and the same. Our mother told us it would happen. In fact, she orchestrated these plans while we were still capable of watching sugar plums dance in our heads.

Although our destination was the amazing Soo Loches, in Sault Ste. Marie, where ships moved from one water-way to another, being either raised or lowered in the middle by a technology so simple it changed very little since it's creation. The Soo Loches were not the destination that is being brought back into today's present tense, but the stop along the way... The Peace Forest and the Tahquamenon Falls. 

We sat and picnicked, chewing on our bologna sandwiches, made with the fresh bakery bread from the National Bakery (that is now woefully no more) We savored, and sipped Kool-Aid poured from a pitcher into styrofoam cups, and we felt as privileged as the Brady Bunch. You know, the family that was always happy and always had everything they ever needed or wanted because life was just like that for them. At that time, we didn't spend much of our thoughts looking back, but rather looking ahead. Looking ahead to the Soo Loches, then, unexpectedly, looking ahead to our mother's eventual death.

While we were either still eating, or wandering in close proximity to our picnic on a blanket, my mother broke our rare silence by saying, “This is where I want my ashes buried. Come here.” She called us together and just in case we were not impressed enough with the tall, silent and yes, peaceful trees around us, our mother christened it with the honor of being her final resting place. “I want my ashes buried here by ALL of my children when I die. Can you just do that for me, please” She emphasized the last word, as if our agreement was of paramount importance to this moment. We did agree, but it had a momentary sobering effect on the picnic. Jim said nothing, just looked at us expectantly, knowing our mother would get the agreement she sought.

Immediately, a suspicion grew on us that our mom might just have planned that trip to tell us that she may be dying. She put those fears quickly to reset in the tone that only a mother can use to cut off the start of a child's impending emotional outburst. “I'm fine,” she reassured us. “But I love the way this place feels. I love the peace. And one day, in the years to come, I want you to bring me back when I am nothing more than ashes. Let my ashes stay here forever, or until they blow around or disintegrate or whatever my ashes will do.” The idea of our mother dying, crashing into our peaceful moment on our only vacation ever as a family, seemed morbid and bizarre, but normal for us. The hot and hazy streets of Detroit were a long way off. Our mom knew we would be returning to it, and probably envisioned all the struggles we would face there again and she just wanted to have a place in her mind to return to when her journey was over. “I want to be buried here too, mama,” my sister Jessica offered. “I don't want your ashes to be alone.” The thought of our mother, ashes or not, so far away in this quiet place was a bit disturbing when you added the "alone" part to it.

“I won't be alone, I'll be here, where I want to be,” my mother said more softly this time. “I wish we could just stay, but our picnic is coming to an end. We have to hit the road again.” Before picking up our blanket and everything else, we committed to the deed she asked of us.

As we used to call it, “age by age,” we each offered the requested promise.

Ralph (the brain of the family), Me, (the oldest living girl, as GeorgeAnn died as an infant. But she was never forgotten by our mother or us, as we were invited to wish her happy birthday each year on January 16^th to keep the promise my mom made her never to forget her), Suzanne (the beauty), Jessica (the rose), and Laurie Anne (the baby). Like the Musketeers vowing to fight for justice and all that is good and right, we piled our hands together to show our mother our dedication to this pledge. And then we hit the road and made it to our destination, the original focus of our “there and back adventure.”

Last July, our mother succumbed to cancers and was cremated, as she wanted. The ashes and their fate with destiny waited for their return trip to the Peace Forest and Tahquamenon Falls. They waited for my brother to return from California. They waited for three sisters in Michigan to come together. They waited for the Covid-19 atmosphere to calm down enough to allow family to hug each other, breathe on each other, and possible re-bond anew after twenty two years of not being together all in the same place. That bonding was probably one of my mother's hopes, as she always talked about her wish for us to keep our family unity. After more than a year of waiting, the advent of Ralph returning to Michigan was the turning point on the affairs of the waiting ashes. A trip was planned, finally, for my mother's ashes to return to the spot where we once sat, eating our bologna sandwiches, glad for the fact that she had not yet been turned to ashes. The only one who didn't make it, was me.

I didn't want my family to have to hold onto the moment of scattering her ashes any more. The finalization of her passing was only sporadically real, since the ashes were still with the family. It would not really be over until she was returned to her chosen final resting place. A place chosen for the body we could hug, the ears we could talk to, the hands that could gesture with the best of the Italian women in our family, the feet that walked her in and out of her every meeting, and her heart that became our first companion at a time we each rested in her womb. It would be the final resting place for the eyes that scoped it out and selected it, just as they scoped us out and saw us each for the first time, the faces that she would name for each of her 6 children.

I could not travel with them today and I did not want the event to be drawn out any longer for them. My sister Suzanne texts me photos of the journey today and I am sure, if there is reception on their cell phones, we will ZOOM a meeting so I can be with them in Spirit, if not body. I guess in a way, I will share that with my mother, to be there in Spirit, but not in body. Only she will be ashes, and I will be a Zoom call. That is something we didn't anticipate, but such is life. I love the Michigan autumn, the colorful leaves that makes death a more beautiful thing, as summer lays down its abundance, in anticipation of the quiet waiting days of deep snow in the Peace Forest.

Well, Mom, it is time. And the two days will be stuck together now, in death and life.

NOTE: There were no cell phones in 1972 and we had no camera to capture the places referred to in the blog. I pulled up the photo of the falls so I could ask you, "It looks like Root Beer, doesn't it?"

ADDED: Boy, the falls and Peace forest are much further north than I remembered and NOT along the I-75 route. Since it was almost 50 years ago, and I was a kid, I forgive myself. My family straightened out where they were, and sent me a map. You can see where the falls are (A).