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It Runs in the Family

A Memoir

St. Martin's Press

IN THE BEGINNING

I started this investigation in deep winter of January 2009, when I was in retreat, beaten and broke. My business had failed, as did many in our nation that year. I drank too much. My house was on the market, a forced sale, since sold. Journalism, the good work I had done my whole life, was necrotic. The last of these weighed most on me, my life's work rendered worthless. Nonetheless, journalism was all I had then, so I used it to dig my way out of a hole. This is the process recorded in this book.

Asking questions and reporting answers is how I have always worked, so there is nothing at all unusual in my spending three years so engaged. What was unusual, though, was that the questions, of necessity, probed private matters, because of my own state of disrepair in the beginning and the simple fact that my father had died a few weeks before. He was an extraordinary man, and mostly not in any good sense of the word. Part of my burden that winter was a sense of shame for who he was. The truth is, I had spent most of my life to that point trying to get away from him, trying to ignore him and the rest of my family and trying just as desperately to deny any influence he might have had on the course of my own life. Yet oddly it occurred to me that the time had come to account, not just for my own sake, but more relevantly because of the public's stake in my private questions. I had until then lived most of a life never publicly acknowledging my parents, and now, paradoxically, public events demand I do so, as I will in what follows.

Anyone who had seen my dad in his last days — and I had, finding him literally in a jungle, a homeless, babbling bum lost a hemisphere away from home — would have thought him mad, and he was. He suffered a peculiar and specific madness. He and my mother — she had died a few years before — had lived their lives as fundamentalist right-wing Christians of the exact same stripe that plays an appallingly significant role in American public life. Indeed, in that January of 2009, the very month that fundamentalist-in-chief George W. Bush left office, it was easy enough to see how my father's madness had become a general plague on the nation. It is this parallel that dictated my assignment for the next three years, that I would need to abandon my studied ignorance of my father's life and admit to our common story, our common genes, even admit to the possibility of our common madness.

Now three years on, it is my job to report, but you already know I cannot bring news of great improvement in the nation's well-being. The troubles imposed by Bush did not end with his presidency; John Birchers, Koch brothers, Tea Party, Fox News, know- nothing fundamentalism, Newt Gingrich — my father's fellow travelers, every one — remain. We remain at war. We are governed by plutocrats, many of us impoverished, and a nation shaken to our financial foundations. The country is not much better off three years on, but I am, and I am as a result of asking questions, of learning and facing the consequences of my story and my kinship with a madman.

Then, though, I could only retreat to watch it snow and wonder what was to be done about me and about the rest of us. So I rented a small cabin for a week on the edge of the Rocky Mountain Front a few hours drive east of where I live in Montana. The cabin backed up against mountains of the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness at the western edge of the howling Great Plains. It snowed, and snowed hard nearly every day of the week I was there. Just up the trail, there was a wintering herd of mule deer, and from time to time I went out to walk among them, grand ghostly creatures circling me in halting steps I took for grace, but know to be their obedience to the demands of winter, a sort of ambulatory hibernation. Step easy and conserve every bit of energy if you are to survive. If there were a third party there to record that scene, it would look like a truce of deep winter's peace between man and animal. Honoring and understanding the terms of that truce have much to do with why I am better off today.

In the cabin, there was a bottle of good Irish whiskey with barely the neck knocked out. I had six bottles of decent red wine, a venison roast, some garlic and parsnips. I have a good wife, beautiful and decent enough to spend this week in the cabin with me out of iPhone range, cell range, a rare electronic silence. Willing even to tolerate my own silence as I retreated to wilderness to think of these things. I had a Filson wool jacket, red-and-black buffalo plaid, competent boots and thick wool socks. I had a stack of books piled before the rimed mullioned panes of the cabin.

There was a wood stove, a Jotul, a clever little Norwegian model and the best I ever used. There were parallel piles of thinly split yellow pine, limber pine, quaking aspen, and a bit of fir to each side of the cabin door. For me and for the long line of northern latitude people I come from, a woodpile is well-being. So my days passed mostly in endless fascination of feeding the fire. Hundreds of generations of my northern European bloodline, facing long, cold winters, bred this little stove, and I am proud of our work, proud of our people, immediate and otherwise, and I connect to them through my father. This, then, is my first realization and admission of kinship to him and the privilege it brings.

The stove has secondary combustion, which means if I get it running just right, it will burn its own smoke in a whooshing roar and with a blue flame one associates with natural gas, not wood, and I do indeed get it running just right. I can build a fire. I can jump-start a pickup truck. Grease boots. Wax skis. Split wood. Dress a deer. Break rock. Right a raft. Incise a clean dovetail in rock maple and fit the joint. Can and did build a house every nail, solder joint, and wire nut. My dad has something to do with this. He and everyone in his line could make things work, a simple fact every bit as relevant as his religion. This facility with real work is the counterbalance to religious fanaticism in the story that will develop here, in my story and in the American story. Owning up to this is part of what made me better.

My dad's death put a trigger in my hand, with a command to sit at this computer's keyboard and fire. The death of both of my parents frees me to tell our collective story, that last adjective a painful admission, but I make it. It is a family story, collective. I am from them. They are finally both dead, and now there must be an account, not because they were unusual, but because in the American context they were not.

HOME GROUND

I was born in Flint, Michigan, in 1951. Like many children of that town and time, my earliest memories were of traveling "up north." This was during the height of the postwar boom, which produced an enormous migration of southerners — both black and white — to the north, leaving the poverty of rural southern states for good-paying jobs in automobile plants in southeast Michigan. We called the nearby city of Ypsilanti, also an auto town, "Ypsitucky." There was, however, a smaller but significant exodus from the north. My father and his three brothers, and both of my maternal uncles and my maternal grandfather before them, left their home farms near Alpena, Michigan, two hundred miles north, and all settled in Flint, the town at the center of Michael Moore's film Roger & Me. (Moore was born near Flint three years after I was.) These former northerners returned home as often as possible, that is, went up north.

My dad didn't work in the auto plants, but had gotten a job first as a Flint city cop, then as a claims adjustor with General Motors' insurance division. This meant he got a new Chevrolet as a company car every year, part of the reason he called his employer "Generous Motors." When I was four or five, we frequently went north propelled by small-block V8s and progressively more prominent tailfins. The trip took a bit more than four hours, allowing for a stop at Pinconning to buy pickled baloney and Colby cheese, smoked suckers in season. If time was right, we — three kids then, my little brother and sister and I, spaced a year apart — could convince my dad to stop at the statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, a roadside attraction on U.S. 23 between Harrisville and Ossineke. Bunyan's blue boots were taller than I was, and we were reliably informed that we shared some sort of unspecified kinship with the Bunyan lineage. The legendary logger had probably even worked for a great-grandfather or great-uncle as they oversaw the clear-cutting of northern Michigan's giant white pine in the latter half of the nineteenth century, leveling forests for farms.

My paternal grandparents' house was sided in brown Insulbrick, two stories and full basement. A line of lightning rods trimmed with colored milk glass balls guarded the roof's ridges from heaven's wrath. There was a nickel-plated wood cookstove in the kitchen, a shingle-sided outhouse behind, a piano in the parlor, and oval-framed sepia portraits of my grandfather and his brothers as young men. The house stood across the highway from where it had been built. About the time my father was born in 1929, my grandfather had winched it across the road with a horse-driven windlass to clear the right-of-way for a highway. It was a fine old house and still stands on Manning Hill, at 919 feet above sea level, the highest point in Alpena County and officially bearing my family's name for almost a century and a half.

My great-grandfather settled the land, about two hundred acres, in the 1870s. His marriage record in Alpena County says he was English, by which it meant a subject of the queen. He had not been born in England, but in Huron County, Ontario, and I cannot trace his lineage beyond that simple fact. This makes sense. That region of Ontario saw a rapid influx of English, Scots, and Irish about then, people who had come from the British Isles seeking farm land. It was a frontier, and record keeping was poor. Technically, they were not immigrants to Canada, because Ontario was still a colony. I can find no record of his birth. He first appears in the 1870 U.S. census in a rooming house in Saginaw, then a lumber mill town in need of good men, so that was when he was lured just across Lake Huron from Ontario to Michigan. Typically immigrants to white pine country logged for a few years while stashing money and waiting for a good shot at a workable plot of cleared land. My grandfather found his home ground atop a hill one hundred miles north of Saginaw.

He married Eliza Ann Boyd, a childhood sweetheart also from Huron County, Ontario, in 1876 in Alpena, and they were on the farm on Manning Hill by 1878. Some of this detail I confirmed with a copy of his obituary that appeared in the Alpena News in 1916, the same paper where I would learn newspapering in 1976 by first writing obits. My grandfather Benjamin Wade Manning bought the family farm when my great-grandfather died in 1916. He was then twenty-three years old, the youngest son of the family's nine children. His older brothers had already settled on nearby farms, some of them adjacent. This heritage left about thirty families of Mannings settled mostly within sight of the hill where I grew up. It was locally rumored that my family members suffered a weird sort of Lamarckian evolution: all of us had one leg shorter than the other from living on that hill. It wasn't much of a hill, but Alpena County is mostly swamp, so it passed for prominence by comparison.

My grandmother Esther Collins Richardson grew up on the farm adjacent to my grandfather's. She descended from timber barons who came from Maine and settled in Alpena. In fact, if you were to draw a line from where Ebenezer Richardson, her grandfather, settled in Pittsfield, Maine, through where the Mannings and Eliza Boyd's family originally settled in Durham, Ontario, and then to Manning Hill, you would find the line oddly straight. In fact, it is an important line, the 45th parallel: Manning Hill stands at latitude 45.062789. My whole paternal lineage seems to have an odd affinity for living exactly halfway between the equator and North Pole. I have deviated significantly by living most of my adult life just north of the 46th.

In their time, though, there was a clear explanation for this fact, not the Mannings' and Richardsons' fidelity to latitude, but their shared tendency in trees. Lumbering then from Maine west as far as Minnesota was specifically targeted to white pine, and working the species required a specific set of skills and knowledge. The new mills in Michigan in the 1870s weren't after any man, but men who knew white pine, so recruiters looked east straight down the 45th parallel.

My paternal grandparents were both still alive for those early visits up north, and I remember them well. Ben Manning was taciturn and tough, and everyone deferred to him. He had lost an eye in a farming accident when he was just a kid, so wore glasses with one lens frosted over, the side of the frame shuttered, because his eye socket could no longer hold a glass eye, so long had he lived with the loss. My research turned up a copy of his draft registration card for World War I, and it notes the handicap. When I knew him, I was always terrified he would take those glasses off, and there would be nothing to prevent me from staring straight into a hole in his skull. My grandmother smiled a lot and mostly superintended a bustling kitchen. She too wore glasses, hers rimless, her short-cut gray hair in a netted bun, and housedresses. She had once fed threshing crews, and a family visit was no big thing.

Even better than genuflecting before Babe the Blue Ox and Paul was being put in bed for the night in that Insulbrick house, always at 8 P.M., a rule I would observe until I was in high school. The bed was in an upstairs bedroom, and its floor held a heating register grate, but not the sort hooked to ductwork. Instead, there was an enormous wood- burning furnace in the basement, "down cellar" they called it, with a plenum vented into a four-foot-by-four-foot grate in the living room floor. We called it a "register" and every kid who had encountered it forever had slightly burned feet from standing on it barefoot. The register in my bedroom's floor was simply a ceiling vent in the living room, positioned to catch the wood heat rising. Yet it would also catch the rising conversation of grandparents during those visits, uncles and aunts sitting around the grate and "visiting" on into the night. They laughed often and loudly. They spoke in country words like "dasn't." Their stories were local and immediate, often featuring running battles with "rotten sons-o'-bitches."

* * *

The oldest printed English stories are Viking and Celtic. Beowulf, first written in Old English in the eleventh century, records a version of events that occurred much earlier in what are now Sweden and Denmark. King Arthur was a Celtic warlord, likely Welsh. Then there is the marvelous body of literature, the Icelandic Sagas, recording events between the eighth and tenth centuries, not just in Iceland, but in Scandinavia, the British Isles, and even in what is now New England. All of this, I think, is deeply relevant to my story, or any English story.

First, the sagas tell us something about Viking expansion 1,200 years ago. The surviving mythology speaks of a bloodthirsty bunch of seafaring whack jobs bent on plunder, and so they were, but the truth is more complex. The Vikings were then in ascendance. They had developed a robust and wealthy culture able to expand. They ruled much of the British Isles for several hundred years, founded Dublin in Ireland, and spread influence throughout the lowland countries of Europe. All of this time they were mixing it up with the Celtic culture already in place, but also with Angles and Saxons, Frissians and Dutch. These are the northern Europeans: Celtic, Germanic, and pagan. This Norse, north culture was the antipodal force to the Mediterranean groups to the south, the Christians.

Because seafaring dominated the north, it makes more sense to see the flow of politics and culture by sea alignments than by landmass. The British Isles have three separate histories, defined by the North Sea, the Irish Sea, and the English Channel. Further, Mercator projections distort actual distance between the key landmasses of this region in our mind's eye, so biased are those projections toward the south. Look down at a globe with the North Sea at the center of your vision, as it was so centered for the Vikings, and you will have some sense of how this history flowed.

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Excerpted from It Runs in the Family by Richard Manning. Copyright © 2013 Richard Manning. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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