The men wore hoodies with the hood up under a thick flannel shirt. Ragged beards. Threadbare cotton winter hats, rediscovered in the garage after the summer, pulled down to protect the ears from persistent chilling wind. All camouflage and earth tones set against a flat, white, icy backdrop.
A cobalt blue colored cardboard 24 pack of Miller ice sat against a steel and muslin bench.
My son and I walked out onto the icy lake to visit with some ice fishing neighbors, and to walk out onto the icy lake.
He wandered over to a home made tip-up... small pieces of wood leaning against one another, with a red piece of cloth attached at the end of one. He examined it while I talked with the fishermen.
"Oop" a gruff voice said "Your son tripped one of the flags"
"Oh geeze...sorry about that." I told him, and called my son over.
"Oh, he was just curious." He pulled off his gloves and with heavily calloused hands gently set the aparatus back up, explaining to my son as he went "See...these need to be up like this, so that when the fish bites it and tries to get away, it pulls this string and this flag goes up. Then we know we have a fish."
"Perch?" I asked
"Walleye."
We talked a bit about our vegetable gardens from last year, he's got an admirable one, until the boy got cold and pulled on my sleeve to go back.
The past week has been snowing fairly consistently. Sometimes soft and lazy snowflakes. Sometimes small and fast. They catch the orange yellow streetlight in the night time and create a false sense that you're moving. Though not today.
My boy gets stuck in the snow now. It's nearly up to his knees in parts. He's reached the awkward age when the snow banks no longer hold his weight, but his legs aren't long enough to step over.
Nearly every day at 4 o'clock I bundle the younger boy up, place him on a sled and pull him out into the yard to wait for his big brother's bus to arrive from Kindergarten. The little one yells the big one's name as he steps off the bus into a snow bank and trudges through knee deep snow to meet us. He climbs into the sled, and we go back to the house, shedding layers at the door as water pools up from the boots and shoes.
This week a take-and-bake pizza place had a hand written sign on the door, saying "Sorry, our EBT machine is down." EBT...electronic benefit transfer. Food stamps. I watched as people walked up to the door, reached for the handle, read the sign, paused, turned on their heels and walked back through the slush to their cars.
Last night our friends and I drove through a heavy snow to meet with a local politician at a coffee place. A state representative. We sat amidst the smell of coffee and shared our stories about trying to support and raise our families. The stories blended and interlocked, one being almost the same as the next. Underwater mortgage. Having a child with lousy insurance and being thousands of debt from it. Having no job options and starting a business, a final life raft, that's quickly eroding. Not sure how much longer we can hang on.
A battery factory is moving to Muskegon, expected to employ as many as 750 people. The state representative said "People are constantly asking 'is this real? Is this really going to materialize?' and I say yes! Yes! They're coming! It's like people have been let down so much lately they're afraid to believe it."
Like we're holding our breaths until the ground is broken. And the people receive a first paycheck.
750 jobs after several years of operation. Subtract it from the 13,789 unemployed. It would reduce today's U3 unemployment from 15.7% to 14.8% in Muskegon. The largest incoming factory in decades will reduce the unemployment rate by almost 1%. And yet, when I read my representative's initial email about the jobs, I nearly cried, it sounded unbelievable. Like I was dreaming it.
Today was "Hats for Hunger Day" at my son's school. We brought a bag of canned beans, and spaghetti, and fruit, and soup and he got to wear a baseball hat all day long. The food collected school-wide will be distributed among the community.
The snow right now isn't quite right for making snow men. My son constantly asks "can we make a snow man?" And we go out and kick around the powdery dry snow and try to roll it into a ball, but it refuses to adhere to itself. Better for sledding this time of year. An evenly spaced processional of young snow-boarders ascended the snowy hill along the dunes today, through twisted naked trees, up to the top of the dunes.
Maybe tomorrow I'll take the kids sledding.