By: Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
"The Indian pipes are blooming."
It was my friend, the writer, Gloria Whelan, calling on an August fourth to announce the yearly event happening in the woods around her Kalkaska County home.
Indian Pipes, a gift for me, she knew, because of Emily Dickinson who called it the "preferred flower of life." For me it was more than Emily. The ethereal flower reminded me of my fey Aunt Mary; maybe even the sad drunken lady from my childhood, or Gloria, herself. Quiet women who touched my life.
"Would you like to come take photographs?" she asked in a come-to-my-party voice. I would, I answered, grabbed up my camera and was out the door.
"In the middle of the woods, on a little lake," she had told me the first time I visited her backwoods home, describing as best she could, her place among the trees where shad blow and trilliums bloom in the spring and Indian pipes grow in August and in between are welcomed all birds and animals, to stay, to become part of her forest, and live unmolested.
It was early fall, that first time I went to see Gloria. The drive through her woods was dusty. My window was down to let in the last of the warm, September air made pungent by the scent of dying sumac and the chilly dampness that rises from the forest floor announcing winter, a cruel reminder of the killing season, never far off up here in snow country.
A pair of doves, bathing in the sand, flew up in surprise as I wound my way beside a small lake where long views of the water were broken into vignettes by the listless end-of-summer trees just beginning to turn colors, a shocking red leaf here, a burnt umber branch ahead. A gaggle of flocking geese honked noisily on the shore and I couldn't help but think how this trail to find Gloria Whelan, through so distinctly northern a landscape, might be the only setting imaginable for this retiring yet accessible northern Michigan writer.
My small, pale-haired new friend waited behind a brown door. I could hear her rushing to put her massive dog away in the garage before daring to let me in. And then a warm greeting. Her expression faintly quizzical, as if she needed to grasp the essence of me, and couldn't quite, at least not to her satisfaction.
I'd come to interview her about a new book and to learn how living back in the woods informed her work. I asked all the usual questions though I knew some of the answers to why she and husband, Joseph, had come to the woods; why they had moved here so many years ago.
We settled to talk on a screened porch looking out on her garden where she'd lost two hundred lilies to some mysterious, marauding worm the spring before. She bemoaned the fact she hadn't put in the time necessary to create the garden she wanted. But I see fall flowers in abundance, and sculpture, and beyond that the wild lake mirroring a milky sky, and beyond, thick green trees along the shore where Gloria assured me deer and coyote come to drink.
"Alone, up here, you get to know yourself. You have no choice," she told me, in her tender small voice. "It takes a lot of strength to come to terms with who you are. You must accept it, or change. I decided long ago that writing was what I wanted most to do."
Our conversation roamed across many subjects that afternoon. Our voices grew quiet and unhurried as there seemed to be plenty of day left to say the things we'd been tripping over each other to say. All our words and silences were interspersed with a soft breeze from the lake, the cry of hawks wheeling high, and caw of hungry crows demanding handouts. We talked about disappoints and joys (one of her special joys being the writings of Anthony Trollope). She told me about a visit to Lamb House, the English home of writer, Henry James, where she found none of his books on display beyond a few paperbacks. Once back at home she was able to collect eighty first editions of his work and donate them to the house. On a return visit she was happy to find her eighty books displayed, and no others beyond those same few paperbacks.
On first drafts Gloria said: "I feel like the bird that pulls out its own breast feathers to make a nest. That's a first draft."
On Trollope's themes that intrigue her: "All those small daily moral choices we make that then form our lives."
And then there was another afternoon at Gloria's. We'd become friends. She knew I was an Emily Dickinson devotee and was pleased to hear how the small Amherst poet had loved the Indian Pipe.
_I cannot make an Indian Pipe but please accept a Humming Bird,' Emily wrote in a note thanking a friend for a drawing of an Indian pipe. She included the poem _A Route of Evanescence" as a return gift (priceless treasure for an Indian pipe).
"But they grow in my woods," Gloria'd said, surprised and pleased. I expressed a wish to photograph them but thought she'd forgotten until the August fourth, when she called.
She walked back with me to where this most delicate of flowers lives. We hunted under trees where she thought she'd seen them but there was nothing. When we finally located one, others seemed to jump out at us. Dozens of them. Narrow, white, drooping, pipe-shaped heads. A startling economy of bloom, so much like Emily Dickinson's poetry. No wonder it was her favorite flower; the flower her sister, Lavinia, wanted embossed on the book spine when she had Emily's letters published after the poet's death.
Indian Pipes grow around fallen logs and in piles of rotted leaves, somewhat like mushrooms. They grow in quiet, untrodden places. They contain no chlorophyll and therefore are pale, translucent, ethereal, not real looking, not like a thing alive. It is more as if they'd been stuck into the ground by a Druidic cult, or sculpted and placed as frail decorations, easily overlooked and trampled.
I knelt to take my photographs and thought of Emily's joy at so much treasure. Then thought of other women, small, shy, trembling. My Aunt Mary and all those summer weeks I stayed with her when I was a child. We read for hours in the front porch swing of her west Detroit home, saying nothing to each other. Me with my comic books. She with her poetry; always her poetry. She didn't talk. Or smile. She had a long, sad face, and thin red hair she was always trying to improve. So alone those last few years after my uncle went to stay on his farm leaving her in the family home in Detroit. He said he couldn't stand having a wife any longer.
And then there was the Drunken Lady, a diminutive woman with hair like steel wool. I washed her dishes for almost a year. She gave me ten cents each time. I stood on a chair propped against the sink to steady it on the crooked floor of the decaying Detroit house. I was small, but apparently not too small to do dishes. She sat behind me at her kitchen table and talked in a tiny voice while she drank, pouring one glass after another from a wine bottle as she told me about a sweet great-aunt who'd given her a fine doll one Christmas; about a play she'd been in at Pierce Grammar School, about the wedding dress she'd worn--so many things to tell me. By the time I finished with her dishes the talking would have stopped and she would be sound asleep, head on her bent arm.
Receding souls and Indian pipes. I guess that's the connection I've been making.
This fall afternoon it's time for me to go and for Gloria to begin her circle of the woods. I leave her to her garden, to her house, set as low and dark on the landscape as a cave, to the coyote coming to drink at the lake.
All I can think, as I drive out the long drive, is how grateful I am for Gloria, a transcendent gentle soul who didn't shrivel, didn't fade; a soul who thrives among the trees and Indian Pipes, in chosen solitude.
Gloria Whelan's left the woods now. Her husband, Joe, is dead. The Indian Pipes are there, blooming every August fourth.
Like the Indian Pipes chosen for Emily Dickinson's books, like the quiet women I remember, eternity doesn't require sound and fury to register. Sometimes a steady evanescence is enough.
Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli is a member of the Michigan Writters, Inc. and a lover of Indian Pipes and Emily Dickinson.
);)