This weekend, my wife and I restarted our hikes in the Midwest. Last year we did a number of them, exploring northern Midwestern areas from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern (lower peninsula) Michigan to the Hocking Hills State Park in southern Ohio, nearly on the Kentucky border. Most of the hikes were, of course, fairly tame. We're in our early 50s, not in great shape, and my wife has an old knee injury and hates being outside after dark in case there's any kind of animal about, or someone suggests that maybe she should camp or build a campfire. She's strictly a day-hiker.
We drove a fair bit up to the so-called "tip of the thumb" of Michigan, near Port Austin. I've been around a fair bit of Michigan and Ohio in particular the last years since living in the northern Midwest, but my exposure to "the thumb" has been nonexistant. I've spent more time in the upper peninsula than in the thumb, in spite of the fact that it's considerably harder to reach. On the way, we also did some listed hikes near Bay City, which is I guess at the point where the thumb and the rest of the "mitten" come together at the bottom of Saginaw Bay. There we hiked the Pinnebog Trail at the Bay City State Park, and up near Port Austin we also did the Port Crescent State Park trail.
Maybe I have a problem psychologically with being satisfied with things as they are, but whenever I drive around in these rural areas, seeing the interesting names of little rivers, tiny little towns, and then walk around in the woods, forests, hills, dunes, cliffs, mountains, or whatever other feature I'm hiking through, it inspires my imagination for fantasy versions of the same. I've spent a lot of the last few months with my imagination in space opera mode, but if there's anything that may tend to bring it back to fantasy, going on hikes out in the natural (naturalish, anyway. I don't really go very deep in the wilderness) world and poking around through sleepy little farming towns will do it. I've always said that if I had to choose, I'd pick fantasy over space opera, but I'm also glad that I don't have to choose.
To be fair, my love of space opera has less to do with the attitude that it originally engendered of futuristic excitement. I like space opera in particular because it's a retro genre, and it reminds me of the 30s-50s and what people thought the future would be like back then. I like the old pulps where people were in the future, but still acted like they were people from our own cultural past. A sense of nostalgia for what has been lost is a part of my love of both fantasy and space opera; sure—they're both genres that are exotic and fantastic, but they are also both genres that are rooted in the past and my sense of nostalgia for a time when things were better than they are now.
As an aside, this nostalgia baiting is big business, it seems. When I was a kid in the 80s, nostalgia baiting for the 50s was big business, and lots of movies and TV shows were set in that era, perhaps most famously Back to the Future... although it was hardly the only one. 50s songs were even released; I bought 7" records of "Yakety-Yak", "Runaway" and a few others. Nowadays, it seems like 80s nostalgia bait is pretty keen; the whole synthwave musical genre is based around it, and stuff like the popularity of Stranger Things and the music used in the show is just one example of it. Nostalgia, even for things that you never actually had (like me having 50s nostalgia, to the extent that I did) is a powerful thing, and Americans in particular, being a new nation split off from an older one but in a new land, seem like we've always been in the search for roots and a past so we don't feel unmoored in the world, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, as James says.
Curiously, we seem to have turned our back on formative eras of our own American history; the Old West and the Colonial and Revolutionary period. This is largely because our public square has been taken over by self-hating liberals and foreigners, especially Jews, who have no understanding or appreciation of our founding or what it means... because to them it means very little if anything.
Anyway, what does all of this mean? Am I finally ready to talk about Dark Fantasy X again? I'm not sure. Maybe.
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