How the Old Men Killed the Grizzlies that had Eaten Them

The snow hangs on. Its an onslaught, a blizzard, maybe the last blizzard, trying to reclaim lost territory, it’s territory, northern Michigan, trying to claim it’s own, it’s men, it’s fishermen, ice fishermen, it’s children, it’s rough-shaven smelly old carharts clothed, broken toothed old men that should have fallen through early January’s thin ice long ago; or maybe the stubborn ones who even tried in April, whose shanties went under and had to be salvaged when the ice was only a dull memory of aching fingertips; old men who should have died from cigarettes or liver damage or from the stupidity (or thick-headedness) of driving broken-down rusted-out beaters without brakes; old men who should have died but didn’t, who instead of dying have disappeared, displaced by transplants from Detroit or Flint or Chicago, displaced in their poverty by tourists-turned-locals who believe that they have been assimilated by the old locals who don’t give a damn about the woods and water that have sustained their souls; but the truth is that the transplants have displaced them and they have moved further north and deeper into the dwindling woods, into the U.P. and up into Alaska to die in alien woods; old men that got eaten by grizzlies which they in turn killed by transforming themselves back into the old rusty lumps of iron ore and lead sinkers and tangles of cat gut that they really ever were in the first place, that and the big clots of black gooey chewing tobacco, cigar butts, tar and nicotine, and the sticky residue of evaporated Coca-Cola, and coffee stains that they only ever were. They bled on the land and pissed on it. They and their fathers before them lived off the land, off the fungus and berries and the meat and organs of the creatures that fed off the land, and both the animals and men smelled of the brown swamp water that saturated the black decomposing mud of places only they had tread, the places that were themselves displaced by the blonde sand of fill dirt and developer’s bulldozers (not that the old ones shunned the chainsaws, nor the hammer- many of them walked about like specters, white with spackle and drywall dust, spent by the work- they themselves built the very thing that displaced them even betraying themselves by becoming the same as those that had displaced them). So the old places have vanished, have been stripped away and covered with a new veneer of laws that attempt to preserve the very thing that they have eradicated, to preserve for the elite the very land that they have torn from the hands of the old timers who had abandoned it.