In Ann Arbor, Thinking about Paris

On the Water

Enjoying a beautiful morning after two rainy days.

Len kayaked on Argo Pond in the Huron River.

I watched a group of young children tubing on the Argo cascades.
The water in the cascades was too high for kayaks.

A flock of geese swam out from the reeds from time to time as I enjoyed the view.

Reading This Week

Another book in the Leaphorn and Chee series by Tony Hillerman: The Dark Wind (1982). Policeman Jim Chee faces down a group of ruthless drug smugglers who are using the huge Navajo and Hopi reservation lands to conceal their activities. Chee is fantastically adept at tracking humans in the desert and mountain environment — far better than the federal police who don’t have the needed skills to find large vehicles that have been concealed in the uninhabited canyons away from the roads. He’s also very brave and nearly gets killed more than once, but always outsmarts his attackers and lives to star in another book. (In fact, he has outlived his creator: Tony Hillerman died in 2008, and his daughter Anne Hillerman has published nine sequels.)

As he investigates, Chee often has to evade other people — both drug smugglers and other policemen, as well as looking for hidden and buried objects. I was fascinated by the way he watched birds and used their behavior to deduce who and what was nearby. For example, he didn’t want to be surprised while getting back to his truck after looking for signs of hidden activity:

“He spent a quarter of an hour sitting in the shelter of the rocks there, watching for any sign of movement. All he saw was a burrowing owl returning from its nocturnal hunt to its hole in the bank across from him. The owl scouted the truck and the area around it. If it saw anything dangerous, it showed no sign of it until it saw Chee. Then it shied violently away. That was enough for Jim Chee. He got up and walked to the truck.” (p. 119)

Another example:

“A flock of red-winged blackbirds had been foraging along the arroyo. They moved from one growth of Russian olive toward another, veered suddenly, and settled in another growth, farther up the arroyo. … A dove flew down the gully. It banked abruptly away from the same growth of olives. … The only thing that would arouse such caution in birds would be a human. Someone was watching him.” (p. 63)

As always, I paid attention to the occasional mentions of food that Chee eats as he carefully searches the wild areas for signs left by the criminals. One day, he starts very early and eats breakfast outdoors: “hot coffee from his stainless-steel thermos and two sandwiches of bologna and thin, hard Hopi piki bread. As he chewed he reviewed.” Another day, he brings a pack of ice and  “a can of corned beef and a box of crackers.” Once, he has a meal of Hopi stew in a restaurant, which he thinks is not bad — though as he is a Navajo, this isn’t what he’s used to. (Quotes p. 56 and 110)

I read the Tony Hillerman series years ago, and I’m very much enjoying my return to these books. They are among the most interesting police procedurals I know of, because of the extremely careful depiction of the lives and beliefs of the two protagonists Leaphorn and Chee.

Reviewed this week: books by Kenn Kaufman and Stefanos Geroulanos.

An Old Favorite for Dinner

Beef, mushroom, and scallion stir-fry served with sesame-flavor cucumbers.

Paris in July: Thinking about the Eiffel Tower

Viewed from Belleville in 2013

From across the river, 2013

Up close in 2016.

From Montmartre, 2018.

Viewed by Remy the Rat in Ratatouille, 2007.

Fireworks for July 14, 1888, launched from the partially built Eiffel Tower.

July 13, 1989. Bicentennial of the Revolution. We were there — but not this close.
(Photo from National Geographic.)

Blog post © 2024 mae sander.

Original photos © 2013-2024.

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz