Robert Root

 

Years ago, while researching Walking Home Ground, I visited Aldo Leopold's shack and nearby Leopold Center, and I still follow their Facebook page. Recently I learned that they were transcribing Leopold's journal—its thousand-plus manuscript pages already viewable online—for print publication. The organization invited volunteers to help with the project. I quickly applied and quickly received a link to 20 manuscript pages online and a set of guidelines. Perusing Leopold's handwriting immediately reminded me of having done this kind of task before.

 

At a display in Central Michigan University's Clarke Historical Library, I'd encountered the manuscript of an Isle Royale journal. Our daughter Becky would be working on the island that summer and we would camp there for a week and so I read it. On Isle Royale we wandered locations where the journalkeeper and her husband lived in fall 1848, ending on December 30. Although the journal was credited to C.C. Douglass' second wife, Lydia, I discovered it had actually been written by his first wife, Ruth. It took me a while to learn when they had left the island and what had become of her.

 

In 1998, I published my edition of "Time by Moments Steals Away": The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass, my introduction much shortened by press editors, but still absorbed by the text and by the personality of its author, I felt obligated to uncover the full background of Ruth Edgerton Douglass, resulting in a second book, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale, a blend of travel, biography, and memoir, published in 2003. The two books had an impact of me: editing Ruth's journal altered the direction of my scholarship; composing the memoir altered my sense of identity as a writer.

 

My title for that first book comes from Ruth's final entry. The journal's calendar format was designed for business, each page divided into three separate sections and no Sunday entries provided. She skipped many dates until they reached the island. At year's end, she claimed the need to "reflect upon the fleetness of time, with its many changes, and that every rolling year adds another to our age, and draws us nigher to Eternity, and we might well say with the Poet,

 

'Time by moments steals away,

First the hour and then the day!

Small the daily loss appears,

But it soon amounts to years:

Thus another year has flown,

And is now no more our own.

Forty-eight! Old year! So thou

Hast for aye departed now.'

 

I have no idea if "the Poet" is anyone other than Ruth Douglass herself and confess to doggedly writing an annual New Year's entry in my own journal ever since.

 

The illustrations in my edition of Ruth's journal include that an image of that final journal entry. It's challenging to read in the small size allotted to it, but even without a magnifier it's still legible. That's not always the case when you're reading old manuscripts and some adaptation is often required. The older the manuscript, the greater the chance of finding out-of-date spellings and letter formations, not to mention unfamiliar terms and allusions or random errors in word choice. Since editing Ruth's journal I've sometimes transcribed portions of other writers' manuscripts. It usually requires adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of individual writers.

 

In my own handwritten journals, I tend to print, a habit I picked up from my father, but when drafting an early sketch of something in longhand that I know may eventually be revised and re-revised (or abandoned), I tend to scribble in a cursive script other readers might justifiably curse at. The longer I work on it, the less legible it becomes; sometimes later I have more trouble transcribing my own handwriting than I have with a stranger's. I'm pretty sure Aldo Leopold's journal entries are principally thoughts he expected only himself to read, recording clues to his reactions at the time, allusions to information he thought worth keeping. He would expect to be able to read his own handwriting, fill out his own abbreviations, understand his own allusions.

 

I self-published my grandmother's newspaper column years ago, thinking it would be good to have it out in the world, to have her descendants know they could connect to them whenever they wanted. Somewhere I have a file folder with my mother-in-law's handwritten poetry gathered inside, poems I meant to transcribe and print to pass around to family members. It might be past time to unearth that folder and complete the transcription.

 

Aldo Leopold's handwritten journals are viewable online. It will be good to expand their accessibility into print. They won't be as popular or as influential as A Sand County Almanac but then, they don't have to be. I think I need to volunteer to transcribe another 20 pages soon.

 

Notes: Aldo Leopold papers: Diaries and Journals: Shack Journals.

 

Root, Betsy. How to Develop Your Personality. Edited, with an Introduction, by Robert L. Root, Jr. Glimmerglass Editions, 2012.

 

Root, Robert. Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. "Time by Moments Steals Away": The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

 

Root, Robert. Walking Home Ground: In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017.

 

 

My mobility problems were heightened by immobility: sitting at my desk or in a coffee shop or in a local library or driving for curbside pickup, mask on, trunk open, adjusting to isolation during the continuing pandemic. Our walks became shorter in time, distance, and frequency. I sometimes wobbled standing up, my balance unpredictable, shaky halfway through a walk, uncertain much of the way home. In March, my feet suddenly couldn't get out of one another's way and I fell flat on the paved trail near the university. In mid-May, at my annual appointment, a thorough check-over and a CT scan convinced our primary care physician I had spinal stenosis, specifically neurogenic claudication and needed an MRI for confirmation. At home I searched medical references online to better understand what I was going through.

 

Neurogenic claudication is "pain caused by too little blood flow to muscles during exercise," usually "occurs in the legs after walking at a certain pace and for a certain amount of time," and "because of narrowing in the spinal canal (stenosis) causing pressure on the spinal nerves." Stenosis is "often caused by age-related wear and tear," its symptoms pain, numbness, and muscle weakness. A CT scan (Computed Tomography) is a "quick, noninvasive" imaging technique using radiation (x-rays) to obtain pictures of tissues, organs, and skeletal structures. An MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) works with magnets to obtain more detailed information about inner organs (e.g., the brain, skeletal system, reproductive system).

 

I'd been wedged into the tight tube of an MRI radiology machine before. The first time, a pacifying injection calmed me; another time, unpacified, I panicked from claustrophobia. This time, undrugged and less anxious by inserting earplugs and wearing heavy headphones over them, I lay prone, eyes tightly closed, silently counting numbers to myself while piped-in 1930s big band music was drowned out by constant thumping and pounding. The CT scan had lasted a few minutes on an open berth; the MRI ran thirty minutes in a boombox tomb. Each time the nurse checked on me, she left the room before the MRI came on again.

 

The clinic and my doctor both provided reports about the MRI and scheduled visits with a spine care specialist. In early June an Advanced Nurse Practitioner showed me detailed interior images of my spine, emphasizing where things seemed somewhat problematic. She arranged a series of sessions where a physical therapist coached me about repetitive daily exercises—arching and straightening my spine, bending and curling my legs, pressing my back to the floor. The next day, I did morning exercises and repeated one a second time near noon. Sue and I walked north, past a park playground and along an open field. When I paused to bend and straighten my legs, I couldn't move my feet well and fell over into the grass between the sidewalk and the road. I couldn't tell if the exercises had made my feet and ankles numb, but I seemed to do better when striding on the way home.

 

I tried to be conscientious about getting into those routines the recommended number of times each day. Two weeks later we walked through the nearby woods and across the river and back, roughly an hour of walking, formerly a customary outing. I felt the exercise in my legs and feet but had no difficulty completing the circuit and felt a little relieved. My internist gave me additional alternative exercises in later meetings and, by the middle of July, he approved of what I was doing, thought the exercises were helping, and updated some of them. He doubted I'd need further appointments after my next check-up.

 

In the interval we attended a family gathering on the Leelanau Peninsula, four hours of driving, four hours on the Lake Michigan Ferry. One day, with our daughters, son-in-law, and grandchildren, we hiked the Empire Bluff Trail, a 1.5-mile trek up and down very steep, very sandy, well-wooded terrain with a rewarding view of distant Sleeping Bear Dunes. Two days later a larger group of us walked five miles on the Mud Lake and Lake Michigan trails to the Manitou Overlook above Cathead Bay. None of that hiking bothered me, barely pained me.

 

At my final check-up yet another doctor reviewed my progress, scheduled no further appointments, and urged me to stay active and contact her if things worsened again. I'm theoretically no longer in need of consultations but I still need exercise.

 

For most of this year I've been conscious of mobility problems. Casually typing up an earlier longhand draft of this post, I wrote "mortality" instead of "mobility" and didn't realize it until I typed "immobility" further on. I didn't confuse it with "immortality." Glancing back, I corrected the spelling of "mobility." Since then, I haven't made that mistake again.

 

 

The composition and rhetoric courses I studied during my University of Iowa post-doctorate year led me to write conference presentations about popular culture and preoccupied me as I settled into teaching at Central Michigan University. Eventually, long after I'd published my first book, drawn from my Restoration drama dissertation, I pieced together a completely different second book, published about ten years after I became a fully employed scholar/teacher. The chapters of The Rhetorics of Popular Culture: Advertising, Advocacy, and Entertainment are now between thirty-five and forty years old.

 

I revisited the book recently, after inadvertently finding an online video of "Night Moves" by Bob Seger, a favorite song of mine. It's not a good video but I listened to it twice, the second time singing softly along with Seger. Each time, I reached moments when I started to choke up, almost moved to tears. The song had affected me that way in the past, and hearing it opened the door to connections to Seger's songs lurking in memory.

 

I usually collected albums by singer/songwriters, first on LPs and eventually on CDs. Seger was a Michigan songwriter, and he was invited to share a Detroit concert stage with Bruce Springsteen. My students celebrated having purchased tickets—my class that evening was sparsely populated—and later let me know how great it was watching Bob and Bruce together. Some had attended my rhetoric class where I compared two thematically linked songs to help them appreciate familiar cultural elements as a way to consider what makes one song profoundly moving for someone and another, similar song seem irrelevant and unaffecting.

 

Together the class read the lyrics and heard recordings of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" and Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night," examining the rhetorical angle in both: how the narrator portrays himself and presents his case to his particular listener, in either song a potential lover. Both songs were recorded in 1976 and eventually examined in a chapter in my popular culture book a decade later. They are essentially seduction songs, each centering on a man's attempt to talk a woman into bed, but differing notably in the presentation of the speaker's persona and the sense of who might be in control of the situation.

 

In "Tonight's the Night" the man prepares a younger woman to be initiated into sex, emphasizing his expectations ("Don't deny your man's desire"), his control of the situation ("Don't say a word, my virgin child"), and his semi-veiled explicitness ("Spread your wings and let me come inside"). Melody and arrangement reinforce a seductive rhythm running through the song and the lyrics center on the man's anticipation. The title is essentially a pronouncement of what is imminent for her. (In class we focused on the words and music, but a video I didn't show focuses on the man's leering persuasiveness—we never see the girl's face.)

 

In "We've Got Tonight" the speaker appreciates the woman's position, expressing a sense of their mutual needs ("both of us lonely, longing for shelter"), explaining his own situation frankly ("Deep in my soul I've been so lonely/All of my hopes fading away"), and offering the woman the chance to make the decision ("We've got tonight. Why don't you stay?") The song concludes with the repetition of earlier lines, the chorus heightened in intensity, the resolution open-ended.

 

Clearly the songs make a different impact. I prefer Seger's recording because of a certain individual literary quality in his songs. Compare "We've Got Tonight" to "Night Moves," where the narrator recalls experiencing robust sex with an avid and unsentimental partner ("We weren't in love, O, no. Far from it/We weren't searching for some pie in the sky summit"). There's a celebratory nature to the narrator's reminiscences of energetic and exploratory youthful sex and the verses rise to a crescendo ("Felt the lightnin' and we waited on the thunder"), but then the music grows calmer and the lyrics become a quiet epilogue that moves the speaker forward in time, into more remote and contemplative circumstances, where he wakes to the sound of distant thunder, starts humming a song from a much earlier time, and ponders:

 

Ain't it funny how the night moves

When you just don't have as much to lose

Strange how the night moves

With autumn closing in.

 

Unlike other popular sexual initiation songs, Seger's "Night Moves" ends on a mature perspective, adopting an older man's persona and asking listeners to identify with and accept its unromantic view of sexual initiation and the changes in self-awareness that come with maturity. I appreciate the perspective. But I should also acknowledge that my preference for Seger's "Tonight" song over Stewart's is more philosophical than musical, a judgement based on their rhetoric—the speaker's persona and perspective—rather than on their poetry or melody or orchestration.

 

 

Note: Root, Robert L., Jr. "A Listener's Guide to the Rhetoric of Popular Music," The Rhetorics of Popular Culture: Advertising, Advocacy, and Entertainment. Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture, Number 16. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987): 105-116.

 

 

When we got together with my cousin and her friend from Arizona recently, they were passing through Milwaukee bound for Door County. It had been several years since we'd seen one another. She caught us up on some of her world travels and we shared our visit to the Leelanau with family. All kinds of memories opened up as we talked, and I began to call up images of a variety of houses and yards and young cousins and long-departed elders and siblings. I'd seen my cousin more frequently in our youth, when both sides of my family largely resided in my hometown. My mother's parents had lived across the street from us, and her three brothers had raised their families, cousins abounding, within readily walkable blocks on the south side of the city. My father's father, his mother long departed, spent his remaining years across town from us and his sister's family lived for a long while closer to our neighborhood before moving across state. I had a good sense of whom I was descended from and who I was related to as I grew up.

 

Those of us in my generation eventually dispersed rather widely, and later our children did as well, to Wisconsin, Florida, and California. My wife's siblings still gather annually, as best they can—there have been losses among them as well and Covid complicated things, particularly this summer—and we've often hoped to get our children and grandchildren all in one place for a spell. When we got home from that Leelanau reunion this year, I noticed a photograph in our living room that evoked one of our earliest gatherings.

 

In summer 2007, we'd rented a house on the Door Peninsula, and the photo opposite my easy chair shows three of our grandchildren and two of their grandparents ostensibly reading from Sleepy Time Tales, a book I don't really remember. The picture always amuses me since our oldest granddaughter and her brother and their grandmother, holding the book, are all looking at the camera, the youngest child, their cousin, is gazing away from everything, and only Grandpa is intent on continuing to read the story aloud, completely ignored. The grandchildren's ages are likely four, two, and not-quite-one at that time. Both families will each add a daughter in a few years time.

 

Since we've just spent a week with those three and two more grandchildren on the Leelanau Peninsula across Lake Michigan, I can't help being aware of the passage of time and the changes those kids have undergone. The granddaughter in the photo will soon start her sophomore year in college, the boys will be a junior and a sophomore in high school, and their younger sisters will be in junior high; incidentally, their grandparents' hair is now considerably lighter in color. I'm tempted to try to replicate the photo, in the way I've seen people on Facebook display decades of family growth by annually staging photographs of family or friends in the exact same poses in the exact same locations. I'm aware of the likely differences in our version. Our grandkids would sit in the same positions on the couch, the co-ed to the left, the boys still in the middle; Grandma possibly needing to perch on the nearest boy's lap. The younger granddaughters would kneel or squat before them all. Since both of the boys are now very much teller than Grandpa, he would be entirely hidden behind them, except possibly for a glimpse of his shirt—fifteen years later he still wears that same one each summer.

 

The Leelanau family reunion is not certain to be repeated next summer, so the recreation of that first picture is in doubt. Luckily, a few weeks ago, one of our daughters photographed all of our grandchildren on one of the Cathead Bay trails in Leelanau State Park, deep in the woods. The three from the first photo stand behind the younger girls to the rear, the oldest granddaughter still to the left, the grandsons' positions switched so that her brother is deepest in and the youngest one (with glasses) is furthest on the right, while his sister is furthest to the left in the foreground, and the youngest granddaughter is most to the front, her siblings directly behind her. Knowing something of their energies and interests—they dance and play sports and read online—I won't try to read to them this trip.

 

We have many photos of their younger years around our house. It's always rewarding to relive moments we've shared with them. It's always stirring to recognize how much they've grown when we gaze at recent pictures. I'm content to stay here with them in the present. I'm in no hurry to see images of them in the future but certainly hope to have many chances to view them.