Winds Howling

As of today, I’ve had my car, a 2021 Subaru Crosstrek, for six years. I paid it off this year on April 10.

It’s been a good car. I’ve got 75,788 miles on it. Soon after I got it, I drove it several hours north to move away from home and start a new job. Since then I’ve used it for road trips from Michigan to Niagara Falls, Quebec City and southern West Virginia, and once boarded it onto the S.S. Badger for a ferry ride across Lake Michigan. In my last 2,859 miles, I’ve gotten 28 miles per gallon.

My first car was my mom’s gold 2001 Honda Accord. I drove it for about four years, using it to commute to summer jobs, community college and then off to state college. I crashed it only once along the way. It entered into terminal decline on Aug. 26, 2020, when I embarked on a round of DoorDash deliveries and noticed a horrible groan when I turned the wheel. As it turned out, the power steering fluid was leaking. One mechanic tried to fix it but failed, and I spent a while driving around with a can of power steering fluid in the backseat to top it off when it got low. Before long I noticed a nail in a tire, and that was the end of mom’s Accord.

I came home with the Subaru Crosstrek on Sept. 29, 2020, about a month after that whole sequence began. In the year or so leading up to this, I’d been romanticizing the retro two-tone look of the old Subaru Outbacks and lamenting the homogenous bubbly form they’ve resigned themselves to today. This Crosstrek was firmly a step into that homogenous, bubbly world, but practicality won over aesthetics, and I’m glad I allowed it to, because it’s served me very well. It’s a reliable go-kart for someone with an outdoorsy bent who doesn’t care to think about their car.

I’ve rear-ended one car with it. We were on the way home from Thanksgiving on a snowy night, and I slid into the car in front of me when they slowed down to turn into their driveway. They were clearly high, and we both went our separate ways, but a piece of my car must have fallen onto the road without me noticing. I bought a replacement piece a couple years later but still haven’t gotten anybody to install it for me.

I also got a bird stuck in the grille in 2021 while driving down a dirt road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It darted in front of me and somehow just got sucked in there. I felt so bad and didn’t know what to do. It ended up dying in there, and I pulled it out later in the day. I’ll spare you a picture.

Finally, someone keyed the passenger side while it was parked at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport between Sept. 15 and Sept. 22, 2024. I haven’t done anything about it yet.

I got this car around the time that Michigan started reissuing its vintage license plates. I’ve gone through a few of them, but think I’ve landed on one I have to keep: the plate for the 250th anniversary of America, which reuses the great design of Michigan’s 1976 bicentennial plate and is only available this calendar year.

1. EGZ 1087 (the “Pure Michigan” plate, default as of 2013)

2. 6PGN24 (first issued in 1965; became the first reissue in 2021)

3. 37AAS9 (first issued in 1954; reissued in 2024)

4. AAK65P (this year’s redo of the bicentennial plate)

Here are a few of my chief grumbles with the car:

• I sort of wish I’d thought to go for a hybrid car, though I haven’t looked back at what would have been available at the time.
• I wish I could transport my bike with it. There’s no hitch and barely enough room inside for a bike.
• I hate bright headlights on other cars, but my headlights are too dim.
• I had a spontaneous 180-degree spin on what I presume to have been black ice in the winter of 2020-21. Ever since then, I’ve felt like the car is not as stable in snowy conditions as I’d like it to be.
• It’s peppy from a stop, but getting up to speed on a freeway can feel like a slog.

Finally, I went back through all my receipts and emails — here’s all the maintenance I have a record of:

• 3/13/21: Oil change at 7,736 miles
• 5/5/24: New tires installed at Costco; Michelin CrossClimate 2; $860.64
• 10/1/24: Oil change at 54,733 miles; $84.02
• 4/13/25: Oil change at 60,147 miles; $94.53
• 9/13/25: Replaced battery, air filter, rear wiper, and got oil change at 65,901 miles; $321.58
• 12/20/25: Costco tire service for leaking tire; no charge
• 1/26/26: Front differential fluid replacement and oil change at 68,595 miles; $181.77
• 8/12/26: Oil change at 73,016 miles; $98.65

Total recorded maintenance expenses so far: $1,641.19. If I remember correctly, the unrecorded 47,000 miles between 2021 and 2024 only consisted of regular oil changes. I’ve also replaced the front wipers a couple of times.

Overall, I’m grateful to my former self for picking this car. I haven’t found myself yearning or lusting after other cars in any significant way, and whenever I do, it’s easy to remind myself of something I like about the Crosstrek. Here’s to another six years?

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Camilla and I just got back from a weekend road trip from our home in metro Detroit to Indiana Dunes National Park and back. Along the way, we…

…stopped for dinner and drinks at One Well Brewing in Kalamazoo.

…camped at Indiana Dunes National Park, site 4 of the Mather loop. There was a lot of train action around this area; tracks everywhere, stopped the car once to wait for one to pass, and all night we heard their choo-chooing.

…woke up and hiked the Greenbelt trail, up and down the dunes to the shore of Lake Michigan, where we glimpsed a hazy Chicago skyline.

…saw the lighthouse in Michigan City, Indiana, the 65th lighthouse we’ve seen together. We couldn’t walk all the way out to it due to some kind of amphibious construction work going on.

…got drinks at Transient Artisan Ales in Bridgman, Michigan. We’ve been wanting to come here for a couple years now, trying and failing to make plans with multiple different groups of people before we finally decided to just go by ourselves. It was pretty quiet and unremarkable on the inside, very much like a hundred other breweries we’ve visited. Their beers, on the other hand, are pretty unique. Their Bark Lord stout and Smolverine line are basically what got us into beer and breweries a couple of years ago.

…poked around the campus of the University of Notre Dame outside of South Bend, Indiana. Lovely Catholic vibes. Lots of sprightly Christian-summer-camp-looking youths walking around. Only one group of these started harrassing us. The rest were nice.

…got pizza and beers at Danny Boy Draft Works. While we were here, I got a huge headache. I ended up KO’d in the passenger seat while Camilla drove to our next campground.

…camped at Pokagon State Park Campground, site 278 of nonelectric campground 2. This was a nice, quiet campground, though the layout is nefariously mazelike.

…gloried in the full moon.

…got breakfast at The Bull Pen Cafe in Fremont, Indiana.

…toured the bison herd at Wild Winds Buffalo Preserve in Fremont, Indiana. We saw birds flitting from one bisons’s face to the next, picking at bugs and seeds. Our tour guide was a soulful 86-year-old self-described “old hippie” named with Cherokee blood, named James William Elias (alias “Three Paws”). He had lots of stories about the bison talking to him and generally being mystical.

…drove to the point where the states of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio meet.

…checked out the town of Manchester and got beers at Manchester Brewing. I’ll be writing more about this town.

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Yesterday I wrote about our visit to Ogemaw Springs, a 19th century boom town in northern Michigan that is today sufficiently minuscule for Google Maps to call it a “ghost town,” even though some people do still live there. Is it really a ghost town, though?

I’ve gotten in touch with Sherry Wagar and Udo Huff, who live in the village on land Sherry’s family has owned since the 1950s. They laughed when I asked about the “ghost town” label.

“It’s not a ghost village,” Sherry said.

“The church is gone, the post office is gone, the school is gone, the store is gone,” Udo said. “That kind of maybe encouraged some people to say it’s a ghost village now.”

Ogemaw Springs rose and fell with Michigan’s lumber industry, which boomed in the 1870s and was finished by 1900, having all but clear-cut the state. A local historical marker puts the population at 200 people in 1873, with “several saw mills, a post office and a grocery.” The village entered into “decline,” as the historical marker puts it, when the trees ran out and another town, West Branch, was selected as the county seat.

“When the lumbering died off, everybody either moved away from there or became farmers, and it wasn’t the best land for the farmers, either,” Sally Rea, curator of the Ogemaw County Historical Museum, told me, adding, “Now it’s just not much of anything.”

Sherry visited this area throughout her childhood, beginning in the 1950s, and described the changes she’s seen since then.

“It started out as mostly little cabins, little houses. A lot of folks used them as their getaways — their summer cabins and hunting cabins,” she said. “It used to be kind of a little retirement village, or used on the weekends and holidays. It’s developed now to have folks that live there all year round, more families with children.”

Sherry and Udo cautioned against overstating any growth, though.

“If you do a count of the houses of people permanently living out there, I think it’s not even 10 houses,” Udo said.

When I asked them what living in this so-called “ghost town” was like, Udo said: “Quiet. No light pollution. Bear and deer in the front and backyard.”

“And turkey,” Sherry added.

They still deal with their share of humanity, though. In this part of Michigan, the main recreational activity is blasting down forest trails on four-wheelers, side-by-sides and other little machines, and the woods around Ogemaw Springs are exactly where that kind of thing goes on.

“It was a very nice area for horseback riding 20 years ago because there weren’t all these side-by-sides,” Sherry said. “First it was the three-wheelers, and then it became the four-wheelers, and then it became the side-by-sides.”

Regular vehicle traffic can be a pest, too, Udo said.

“The speed limit is 25 miles per hour,” Udo said. “Some cars are driving 70 or 80 miles per hour through the village.”

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Camilla and I recently passed through the “ghost town” of Ogemaw Springs, Michigan. I put “ghost town” in quotes because that’s how Google Maps labels it, even though there are still some people living here.

The village of Ogemaw Springs, the oldest in Ogemaw County, had its heyday in the late 1800s, supported by a booming lumbering industry. It got its name from the nearby spring that supplied its water. According to the historical marker standing there now, this spring was “the sole supply of water for early settlers” and “supplied water for the boilers of the railroad steam engines that served the area’s lumber industry.”

We were surprised to find that this all-nourishing spring was really just a small hole in the ground. Somehow we’d expected… more water? The site also looked like it had been altered and landscaped a fair amount, so we couldn’t be quite sure what we were really looking at.

Since then, I’ve gotten in touch with some locals, including Sherry Wagar and Udo Huff, who live together in the village on property Sherry’s family has owned since the 1950s. They confirmed that this is indeed the spring.

“It used to be bigger around, and deeper,” Sherry said. “There used to even be fish that lived in there, because we would see the fish when we would go to get our water.” She said the spring was “at least a good five feet deep at one point.”

”The girls dared me one time to jump into it,” she said. “I’m 5'4", and I went in up to my chin.”

The spring can first be glimpsed on Google Earth in a satellite image from April 28, 1998. It appears as a dark circle, identifiable only by comparison with later, clearer images. The main dirt road through town runs basically right next to it.

The first clear view comes on October 10, 2013, by which point the road has been paved and reconfigured to be slightly farther from the spring. There’s a small carveout in the grass next to it, but the area is pretty natural looking otherwise.

That changes in 2020, when work started on its current form:

A stroll through Facebook comments reveals that some people have complaints with the “pea gravel” material laid around the spring as part of this project. Sherry echoed those complaints.

“That was the worst thing they could have ever done,” she said. “All of this pea gravel has fallen into it.”

On Facebook, Terrie Clayton posted this photo of “the wishing well before the pea gravel.”

Here are a couple other pieces of local flavor I dug out of Facebook comments:

A lot of wishing has been done there. … After walking there it would be fresh water to drink.

Back in the 70’s we lived about a mile from there, at the end of Grey road, while I was working my wife would walk the kids down there and she’d bring a lunch and bring some water home she had a little wagon. Looks a lot different now

I’m told there are still plans floating around somewhere to further develop this spot into a “picnic area" — if I’m ever able to learn anything more concrete about that, I’ll be back with another post.

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Last night Camilla and I went to see Weezer play at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit.

The show was part of a tour called “The Gathering” to promote their new self-titled “Gold Album,” which I gave a five-star review on this blog just a few weeks ago. I quickly fell in love with the band, whipped through the rest of their discography and even managed to get Camilla into it. It’s been a fun couple of weeks — we’ve both had four or five Weezer songs stuck in our heads at any given time.

I made sure to bring my earplugs, because I figured this would be a loud show, but I never ended up using them. Weezer was louder than the openers, but all three bands were at nice, digestible volume levels for me. The trouble I had was with the mix, or the acoustics, or both — there was a too-reverby, shoegazey sheen over all the music, and there were plenty of times I couldn’t hear Rivers Cuomo’s voice in the mix, try as I might.

Weezer played for about an hour and 40 minutes, stopping every once in a while for a little skit or joke. They played in a mock-up front yard of a house, out of which guest singer Nikki Monninger emerged for three duets toward the end.

They played a total of 26 songs, one of which was the live debut of “Say Yes,” the first track on the new album. They’ve been playing different songs from the new album from night to night; a few nights before, the final track of the album had its debut.

Lots of people in the audience were wearing all blue, even though it’s the new Gold album that brought us here.

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Yesterday was my 1,232nd, and final, day as an iPhone 14 Pro user.

After spending about an hour inside the local T-Mobile store, I walked out with a new iPhone 18 Pro.

This was the longest I’ve ever held on to a phone. Before the 14 Pro, I had another fairly long run with an iPhone SE 2 for 972 days. I jumped around more frequently before that, with an iPhone XR for a year and a half and an iPhone 7 for two years.

I owned the iPhone 14 Pro during three years full of travel, with many of the best and biggest trips of my life to date, during which I had no iPhone-related disasters, mishaps or major memorable glitches. It never really slowed down to a substantial degree over time, and even survived last year’s transition to Liquid Glass with its everyday performance pretty much intact.

The thing that really made me want to upgrade was the battery life. After a little over 3 years of ownership, its battery health was at 77%, and I was pretty reliant on battery packs to make it through a day of heavy use. I could have replaced the battery for $100 or so, and kept trucking with it, but… the newer iPhones are noticeably lighter to hold, I really wanted to leave my Lightning cables behind, and I had the usual degree of FOMO, so the scales tipped toward it being an upgrade year for me.

When I got the iPhone 14 Pro on May 8, 2023, I’d just gotten a new job, moved to a new, bigger, town, and decided to graduate into the life of a Flagship Phone User. Until that point I’d always chosen the smaller phones of Apple’s line-up, or, in the post-iPhone X years, whichever one would allow me to have a home button and Touch ID. I chose to get over all that for this one and just get the best phone I could (though I still can’t quite stomach the leap in size to Pro Max).

I was happy with it, then quickly had a twinge of regret that haunted me for the next three years. I bought it at a bad time without really thinking about it. The iPhone 15 came out four months later. With that phone, Apple switched from their proprietary Lightning ports to USB-C, bringing it into line with virtually everything else that charges, and they switched stainless steel parts to titanium, making it a lot lighter in the hand. I put all this aside in my mind and resigned myself to a few more years of the Lightning cable lifestyle; the 2010s would live on for me a while yet. I nearly went for the iPhone 17, and for a time was convinced I would have to hold out for next year’s 20th anniversary iPhone, but eventually concluded I could wait no longer and would go for this generation.

Here are some initial thoughts from a day of lightly using the iPhone 18 Pro:

• I like the Action Button and the dedicated camera button. I’ve got the Action Button set to activate the flashlight. The camera button helps me snap photos for this blog a few milliseconds faster, at least in theory. I’ve still got to get used to using it.
• Sort of disappointed to not feel a boost in battery life. I keep looking up at the percentage and thinking, “huh, seems like that ought to be higher.”
• Visual Intelligence and Siri AI seem quite nice.
• I was pretty intent on trying to go caseless this generation, but I’m caving early and already ordered a couple cases to try. The iPhone 14 Pro was too angular and slippery to hold without a case, and while this form factor is improved in every way, it’s still just way more slippery than it needs to be. It’s better with a case.
• I got the “glacier” blue color. It’s the first iPhone I’ve gotten in a color other than black since I had the yellow iPhone 5C. I quite like it and am reluctant to cover it with a case. A little bit of the glacier blue frame is visible along the edge of the screen when I’m using it, so you get to enjoy the color even from the front.

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Olivia Rodrigo — You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
Released June 12

It’s an efficient, slightly updated distillation of Lorde, Taylor Swift and others. A little eye-roll-inducing at times, but the sound was good enough, and the delivery heartfelt enough, that it never became hateable. The lyrics are full of zoomer romantics, referencing Zodiac signs, cyberstalking and the obligatory verse about “my friends are doing drugs in the bathroom at the party.” Songs reflexively go for big, extended crescendos full of pumping synths and soaring vocals, which are effective individually, but the trick wears thin after a few times. There’s a tenderness in Rodrigo’s voice that contrasts these big moments in a kind of interesting way. A good listen, overall, but one that becomes increasingly predictable as it goes along.

Shania Twain — Little Miss Twain
Released July 24

I found little to like here. The production is super polished, Twain’s voice overly compressed and claustrophobic in my ears. Songs occasionally repulse me, for example the dreary and repetitive “Little Miss Twain” (“…according to my mother/I’m the next Tanya Tucker…”) or the sugary nonsense of “Down the Middle” rendered off-putting by the gravel in Twain’s voice (“Good love’ll do it to you/right down the middle every time”). Two refreshing anomalies were “Take It To The River,” which has an open and natural sound and backing vocals from the War and Treaty, and “Northern Town," which has pretty good lyrics, convincing delivery and was the only track that got stuck in my head.

Temples — BLISS
Released June 26

I’ll admit I went into this one carrying some prejudice. I was a big fan of Temples’ debut at the height of 2010s neo-psychedelia and was always disappointed with their increasingly electronic, dancey direction. I dropped off to the point that I completely missed their previous album. At first, this one felt like another step further away from what I liked about Temples in the first place. My first impression was: too many effects, too much distortion, just a sort of throbbing feeling in my head. But the more I listen to it, the more I come to appreciate this album for what it is. If one of these songs played while I was returning an Amazon item at Kohl’s or sitting at some brewery, it would be one of the better songs I heard while I was there. They recede easily as background music, but when you pay closer attention you realize they might actually be playlist-worthy. The main attraction is the synths, which are pretty nice sounding and distinctive from song to song. The lyrics are mostly unintelligible and the vocals unremarkable, leaving the listening experience shallower than I’d like, especially from a band that’s done better. But it wasn’t that bad.

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Earlier this summer we spent a night camping at Silver Lake State Park on Lake Michigan. This park is defined by large expanses of sand dunes, with dune buggies, Jeeps, pick-up trucks and everything else crawling over them all through the summer. We were just there for a hike and a camp, though.

We spent about 2 hours hiking, covering a distance of 4 miles and stopping for a while at a concession stand halfway through.

We camped at site 53 of the state park campground for a cost of $56.

Here are some dune views from the hike.

Along our hike we got to see some people going down the dunes on little surf boards.

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Shout out to local journalist Dane Kelly, who wrote about gas prices in metro Detroit this week and found a way to name-drop his favorite snack.

Gas is one of those rare products for which demand does not drop when prices rise. It is not like a package of Oreos picked up at the checkout counter. For most people, gas is a necessity.

I reached out to Dane for comment on his love for Oreos but have not heard back.

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My walks frequently take me through the expansive parking lot of St. Sharbel Maronite Catholic Church, the bustling spiritual center of what seems to be a mainly Lebanese Christian community.

Over the last 10 years, they’ve given this corner of the neighborhood a total makeover, developing a mostly empty field into a big, attractive new church, a house for the pastor, and tons of parking spaces. I’ve been watching them build the latest addition to this empire over the last year, wondering what it was.

I took an interest in it because, at the time, I spent a lot of my walks listening to the audiobook of “Pillars of the Earth,” a huge novel about people building a cathedral in medieval England. Here before my eyes was “Pillars of the Earth” in amusing suburban miniature.

Fast forward through the fall and winter, here it was on May 2, 2026.

I finally got to go inside and find out what it is a couple weeks ago when the church hosted its annual St. Sharbel Festival, featuring a food truck, bounce house and live music in the parking lot.

It turns out to be a shrine to St. Sharbel, which is open to the public from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. St. Sharbel is a Lebanese hermit associated with numerous healing miracles who’s one of the key saints of the Maronite Church, a Christian denomination that’s basically the Lebanese flavor of Christianity. I went in again a couple nights ago while mid-walk, and it was a nice, cool, peaceful sit.

The shrine’s ribbon cutting was on July 19. These videos on Facebook show a vast crowd filling the parking lot outside the shrine, then flooding inside after the ribbon was cut. I had no idea this was going on that day, but happen to have been at Glacier National Park anyway, most likely hiking Grinnell Glacier Trail at the time.

During the construction, there were signs posted saying it was being built by Angelina’s Construction, with the name Al Karana and a couple of phone numbers. I reached out to Al and extracted this comment about his involvement:

“I go to the church every Sunday,” he said. “I like the church. I love the priest, father Fred, he’s the best guy. This guy, when he asks for something, I like to do it for him. He’s a good person, and he likes to make the church look beautiful. And I do that from my heart.”

While I was in the shrine, I picked up a church newsletter where Pastor Alfred Badawi laid out the future plans:

The next project for the Shrine is the Stained Glass Windows funded by parishioners, with just one window still available for purchasing for sponsorship.

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