Returning to Earth Read Online Free PDF

stumbled twice in the yard. K is slender but very strong and could help Donald to his feet. K used to ride his bike all the way from Marquette to Sault Ste. Marie and later Bay Mills to see Clare, whom he had a crush on, and also, frankly, myself. Polly is always worried about K partly because she has given up on her daughter Rachel, who has always had drug problems and lives in New York City. Before Donald got sick I went to New York City with Polly to do a possible “intervention” with her daughter. David wanted to go along and help out but Polly said that he’d probably just give a lecture on the history of drug use in America. We had a fine time in New York City because it turned out Polly’s daughter wasn’t in bad shape. She worked as a receptionist and a general helper for a small off-brand record company in the Lower East Side. Her hair was orange, she had tattoos, and rings in her nose and belly button. We went to a strange concert with her and all her friends, who seemed to comprise a tribe of sorts. She lived with a rather tiny young man who was a singer with a large discordant voice. All in all we were relieved. I’m going to stop interrupting or maybe I’ll just edit out my comments. I think that a good deal of my exhaustion comes from trying to make sense out of all of this. I envy Donald’s mostly unspoken religion though it is maddeningly stoic. This religion has evolved from both his life and childhood stories plus the traditional three-day fast. Cynthia.]
    The next piece of luck Clarence had over near Duluth was again caused by his horse Sally. They were building ore docks near Superior and Clarence got a job as a teamsterhauling timbers, but then finally became a foreman of a big crew building the ore docks before he was twenty years old. I’ve spent quite a bit of time worrying about this man even though he’s long dead. Here’s the idea. The hours were so long your work was your life. Clarence’s workweek was six days a week, twelve hours a day. The only vacation you might get was if you got injured and then you didn’t get paid a dime. The powers that be could get away with this because there was plenty of available labor, a lot of them immigrants—Finns, Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Bohemians, and suchlike. There was an endless supply of iron ore from up on the Mesabi Range near Hibbing and Grand Rapids in Minnesota. That was open-pit mining while over in the Upper Peninsula it was deep-shaft for both iron and copper. My dad said that at least Clarence got to work aboveground. By and large your basic Indians don’t want to be deep-shaft miners. They’re leery because of the idea that to go deep underground would be coming close to the living world of spirits. For all I know this may be true.
    Anyway, I’ve been troubled by this idea of work. On occasion I’ve worked a fourteen-hour day laying blocks or finishing cement and I can tell you that you just become cement. That’s your life. The same with miners or loggers for that matter who got a day off a week at logging camps for thirty bucks a month. It must have been twenty years ago that David told me that between 1890 and 1910 in three mines over near Republic, west of Ishpeming, two thousand miners died in accidents. You can’t believe everything David says so I had Cynthia look it up in the Soo library and it turned out to be true. It was like the owners sent men towar underground. The company gave the miners a house and a milk cow and if the miner died the family got to live in the house for a month and then they had to move on. This is the history of our life up here. Cynthia helped me calm down a bit by having me read two books to show me it also happened in other countries. One took place in the mining areas of England and was authored by A.J. Cronin and the other was based in France and called
Les Misérables
, which of course means the miserable ones and