The Circle of Life

... Jerry Garcia-style:

Tie Dye Project Summer of 1973.

(Judy Van't Hof Alphenaar, far left.
Joanie Van't Hof Rosema, third from left.)



Fast forward THIRTY SEVEN YEARS!

Tie Dye Project Summer of 2010


Step One:
Rubberbanding T-shirts
(Annalise Alphenaar, Lauren Jung & Laina Rosema)



Step Two:
Dyeing T-shirts
(Lies Rosema Kelder, Lauren J., Annalise A., Laina R.)








Step Three:
Feeling Groovy,
expressed so eloquently by Robert Plant



"What we have in mind is
breakfast in bed for four thousand.
Tie dye on the highway
See the garlands in your hair
If your going' my way,
come along,
What a beautiful sky
We just have to stop and stare
See the beautiful colours fill the air ..."



Step Four:
Future Project
(start collecting Chuck Taylors, now).

He's baaaaaack ....

After a rah-ther long hiatus

and several more bear sightings
but, alas and alors
no bear photographing,
we finally have a picture for you
of the Bird Feeder Bear
and this time he (or she)
is wearing bling.

When I gaze upon this photo
I am reminded of the well-known
much-loved rhyme from
days of yore
that goes like this
(say it with me):

"Brown bear, brown bear
what do you see?
I see a big honkin' grizzly
lookin' at me!"

Now,
to be ever true to our Dutch nature
which genetically includes
the predisposition to ponder and research and study
and debate something
to the point of ridiculousness
(Think: "How many angels can dance on the
head of a pin?" and "What does this
mean in our post millennial
pre-apocalyptical
herman hoeksema hermeneutical
nonsensical daily life?"
Please fill as many bluebooks as necessary.
Your time limit is 40 days and 40 nights.)

ahhh ... where were we ....
oh yeah ....
Dutch pedantic nature y'all ....

To be true to our Dutch nature
we must be very clear
in asserting here that the
intrepid Bird Feeder Bear
is not actually a grizzly bear
or a brown bear,
which are actually
the same thing
so,
I know
confusing confusing
but what we're looking at
is actually a black bear.

And thank you Dave & Ellen
for so helpfully taking this photo
in black and white
lest we forget.

Another easy way to recall
which bear is which
is the fact that a black bear
sports the Latin nom-de-plume
Ursus Americanus.
Just remember that we like our ursus,
americanus,
thank you very much.

We do not like our ursus,
horribilus,
like the Grizzly,
or middendorffus
like the Kodiak,
although middendorffus does have kind of a
nice Dutch ring to it!

All right everyone,
kijk es below
because we have found in the
archival wonders of all things Hofmanesque
the following historical document:

Wow!!
Beside the fact that there are
simply so many things politically incorrect
and just plain cuh-razy
about this picture
it nevertheless illustrates
that Hofmans have this strange
affinity slash attraction
to all things flora and fauna and ursa.

Here we see another black bear
drinking what appears to be
a bottle of Country Fresh Chocolate Milk
pointedly ignoring the Dutch stoicism
of Billy Barrows, Dave VH, Tommy Barrows,
SueEllen Barrows, Steve VH and Judy VH.

Now, the astute viewer will see that
Steve VH is wearing his Davy Crockett T-shirt
in honor of the occasion.
In case you don't know the words to this song
like every other red blooded American
including the Ursus Americanus,
we will include it below for your
Survey of American Heroes pleasure:



BTW, the portrait on the you tube video
is not the real Davy Crockett.

Here is the real Davy Crockett.

Another Nook in the Woods

This is a cheating kind of blog-i-sode
so just bear with me.

This is what Dave & Ellen's cabin looked like when we first saw it.

In case you can't locate it in the photo, Dave is pointing at it.
We're looking at the back door. Don't ask me what direction we're facing ....
after 3 years I still can't tell if it's north/west/east/or south.

This is the cabin from the front.
The front does not face the road.
A tricky thing to remember.
Very disconcerting for Dutch people who like things straightforward.
I'm taking this picture from down by the creek.


Here's the creek in the summer ....
Gorgeous.


And here is the creek in the fall ....

Gorgeouser.


And here it is in the winter....Despite the beauteousness of the snow,
I do not care for winter.
So, no comment allez-vous from moi.


All right.
Why all these pictures of a cabin in the woods?
And why all these pictures of a creek
when this blog is about Big Star Lake?
Because I have a point and the point is,
this little creek flows into a bigger creek which
flows into the Pere Marquette which
puts us right at Big Star Lake's backdoor.
(I may have this slightly wrong, but, whatever).

And this is my backdoor way of posting some
photos during the wintertime
(which in Michigan is never ending)
of something that is almost BSL.
At any rate, it's most definitely Lake County.

Now, integral to this story is the part where
Dave & Ellen were not satisfied,
and so like the Tower of Babel,
they had to keep adding to their largesse.

As you may recall, Dave is a builder of boats,
and a collector of guns and a whittler of duck decoys
and a scavenger of cork-stoppered bottles of
Dr.Coffin's Tincture of Goat Saliva
and an owner of labrador retrievers that have been
red and yellow, black and not white
(I'm not kidding)
so where do you keep all this crap?
(dogs included)

Ta-Da!
You build an outbuilding.
This is a photo of Ellen saying,
"David, do not fall off that ridgepole!"


Next we will fast-forward
and show you what the building of the outbuilding
looks like near completion
and yeah, it's winter again
and that dog is a random dog that does not
belong to anyone we know.

Isn't that great!
So matchy matchy!
And a big shout out to Mark Kelderman!
So...
back to that Babel story again.

Erecting this big honking edifice was
kinda fun while it lasted but, what next Cheswick?

Well,
seeing how it always appears to be winter in this,
the winter wonderland,
or at least pretty dang cold most of the time,
Dave thought a real live sauna
would be just the thing.
And that's pronounced sow-nuh, BTW.


Let's get to felling trees, guys ....

This is Dave, Della the Dog, and Dale.
We are only missing Darryl and his other brother Darryl.


Coming along nicely with 3 gigantic
250 pound lincoln-log type crossbeams in place
and one still to go.
When the frame is completely done,
then this happens ....


See, you chop down all these trees that have
big fat trunks
until you have lots of round sections
that look kind of like wooden hubcaps.


Here is the cutting area
where lots of chopping and chainsawing
and things of that nature occur.
It all involves a lot of noise and engine revving.

Anyway,
the giant wooden hubcaps get piled one on top
of the other, just like in the picture,
and then you fill in the gaps with some goopy stuff
and VOILA, you have an extra thick wall
and no rainforests were destroyed in the making
of this sauna!


I just threw in this photo
to remind me of sunlight!
and fresh vegetables!
and green branches through the window!
and D & E's hospitality!
and why I like summer better at the cabin,
though it is toasty warm and peaceful-like
with the new wood-burning stove
(which was another project that we won't even get into)
and thankfully the resident bear is hibernating
and no longer leaving monster claw marks on the deck
mere inches from this table
after bending the birdfeeder into a giant letter "S".

The End.

P.S. I will keep you updated on the progress of the sauna.
P.S.S. And the bear.

BSL Mysteries #6 and #7 ....

.... Or, A Sleuthing We Will Go

We had such a good time at BSL this year

and, as you can see,
I'm pushing my previously set, 5 week deadline
from my last blog entry
to the absolute limit.
Deja vu of every homework assignment and course paper I've ever written.


We had a gazillion people up at poor Billy's cottage,
so Arthur William, if you noticed your water bill
skyrocketing for the month of August,
please forward it to us.


Dave VH built another boat (I know! Just call him Noah)
and he took us on a tour of BSL that rivaled all the
pontooners we see putzing by everyday pointing and gawking at us.
We tried to do likewise, and commented extra loudly
because voices carry so well over water, don't you think?
We said things like: "Look at that monstrosity!
It's as big as a country-club.
How can these people live with themselves?
Children are starving and dying the world over.
Obviously they're not Christian Reformed
or they would've drowned in their Calvinist guilt."

Or "drownded" as my kids say.

Seriously, though,
it's kinda sad to see all the little log cabin
or clapboarded cottages pulled down
(sometimes 2 or 3 in a row) to make elbow room
for huge McMansions that aren't really "cottages" at all.
And no one ever seems to be staying in these things!
Such a mystery,
but READ ON mefrouws and mijneers,
for two more riveting mysteries.


Mystery #6: Oddfellow & Rebekah Camp
We motored by Oddfellow & Rebekah Camp.
Yes, you heard me right.
Odd ( as in weird) fellow (as in man)
and Rebekah (as in Jacob thanking God it wasn't Leah).
Now, wat is dat een naam!
Don't you just love it!
Here it is in days of yore.
(Kudos again to Don Hamilton of Flickr)

The mystery is ....
just what exactly goes on in there.

I realize Oddfellows (and I suppose Rebekahs, too)
belong to the Freemasons and in general are totally normal people that
simply have an unhealthy attachment to intricate rituals.
Just like you, I've read Fried Green Tomatoes
by Fannie Flagg, or maybe it was her other book Daisy Fay,
when Fannie and her friend Pickle
were thrown out of the Order of the Eastern Star
because they were simultaneously overcome with hilarity
during a Very Somber Pledge.

Well, when we've driven into the camp for the annual
BSL Ski Shows
(see below, courtesy of bigstarlake.org)everything LOOKS pretty straightforward:
your basic semi-rundown summer camp,
little white cabins, check
a mess hall, ball diamonds, check check
a tether ball and swingsets and beach, check check check
sooooo .....

where are they hiding all the good stuff?
The swords, the coffins, the eastern star?
Where are the chanting Knights of Templar,
ala The DaVinci Code?
This particular Oddfellow sword was manufactured in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
It seems to say, in no uncertain terms,
"Yo! Don't be messin' with my oddfellows, y'all."


Sue VH drove over to the camp to visit her sister
who was there at the camp as a chaperone
with the Calvin Christian High School Football Team
who in turn were there
for their punt kicker training or male bonding or whatever.
Now how spooky is that? (rhetorical question, people.)
What a letdown.
They found no skeletons that we know of.
Or swords.
Or even a templar
which is kinda like a template or maybe a temple.

Hanyvey .... back to our excursion around the lake.
We did see a wedding in progress on the beach at Snug Harbor,
that was nice,
and several people fishing, ditto,
but otherwise it was All Quiet on The Big Star Lake Front.

As we rounded our bay and headed back home
we were struck with how "our" cottage seemed to pop out from the others
due to the inordinate amount of
rummeltje all over the beach and lawn.
In other words we were struck with what slobs we are.

I said, "Good grief, we're as bad as
The Beans of Egypt, Maine."
a book about a spectacularly trailer-trashy family
and Dave VH responded,
"or as bad as the Van't Hofs of Benjamin and Bemis."
(our ghetto home address).


Then, due to a little inclimate weather
we went on 2 other reconnaisance missions:

Yes, yes, Bumstead Ponderosa in all its dilapidated glory
was calling out to us, like the sirens in the Odyssey.


So we capitulated and prowled around
and stuck our camera lens inside,
periscope-style,
to take a look.

Knotty pine! A fireplace!
An aersol can of Lemon Fresh Pledge!
Bumstead needs a loving owner
before it totally disappears under the
Michigan version of kudzu vine.
But, tangent alert!, this really isn't my second mystery
(other than the fact that no one seems to want to buy this place).

No, the other mystery brings us to our second recon mission,
Mystery #7: Finding the Nook in the Woods

(Postcard contributed by Jack Laansma on bigstarlakehistory.org)

Long story short,
we didn't find it.
Now where could it have gone?
The collective VH memory remembers
turning left off of Big Star Lake road shortly after passing
The Blue Horizon if you were heading away from the Chapel.
In other words, it was on the same side of the road
as The Blue Horizon.

We remember the log cabiny look,
the wagon wheel,
the unpaved dirt or gravel road to get there,
and Dave snarkily calling it "Crook in the Woods".
We fondly remembered all the totally unnecessary
but tantalizing things bored people with money could buy:
miniature fake medicine bottles,
beaded leather belts that lost their beads as you walked out the door,
tiny mailboxes that really opened but alas! could never be used,
Gwen Frostic cards that confused us because they were
painted by a "blind" person.

So, if anyone can weigh in on this puzzling disappearance of
an otherwise fairly substantial building,
here's the place to do it.

Well, all of this detecting and sleuthing
and katootalie business made us
sort of hungry so we went to Dave & Ellen's
and feasted on this:


Pork to the left, venison to the right,
mushrooms and peaches in the middle.
Strange but strangely good.

Tomorrow we will be doing this ....

Relaxing, reading
sunning,
and
eating

We'll report back in 2 weeks
(Okay, maybe 3 or possibly 4,
but definitely in 5 weeks)

Mucky Harbor

An interesting fact:

I Googled the name "Mucky Harbor" and I found
not one single place or body of water in
the whole wide world
with this particular name,
EXCEPT,
our Mucky Harbor, which linked me right back to this blog.

In a way, this makes sense.
Why would anyone want their watery retreat or stretch of sand
to be known as a harbor called "Mucky"?

Which beggars the question:
Why, in fact, did we?

Don't know, kids.
It's all in the (literally) murky past.
The Hofman's murky past, that is,
with our increasingly unreliable memories
and also in the geological murky past,
because much of Mucky Harbor has now been dredged out
and is currently a pretty little "hoekje" appendage
on the west side of the lake
with well maintained cottages
and sloping grass lawns rolling down to the water's-edge.

But back-in-the-day,
you definitely needed one of these ....

(the canoe, not the car)
to penetrate the Harbor and to
plumb the depths of what
it had to offer.

This is a Bullhead Lily and these grew there in abundance,
second only to the Fragrant Water Lily (below)
which were even more abundantly abundant.


And .... there were LOTS of these ....

Painted Box Turtles


as well as these ....

your basic Green Frog.

To enter Mucky Harbor
you had to leave behind the lake proper.
As the drone of boat motors subsided
and shrieking sunbathers retreated in the distance
the bow of your canoe would make a V shaped parting
through swaths of this stuff ....

We called it snakegrass.
You can pull it apart and reassemble it however you like,
kind of like Tinker Toys.

Mucky Harbor always conjures up for me
a place of intense stillness.
A place where you could almost see
the fermentation process unfolding as you sat in your canoe,
paddles lightly parting the water behind you.
Except for the plop of turtles belly-flopping off logs
or birds calling to each other from opposite shores
there was very little sound.


Long ago the only "cottages" in this
wrong-side-of-the-railroad-tracks area were ancient cabins
in various stages of disrepair
quietly succumbing to the onward march of nature.
Someone would set out a saltlick for deer every year
but we never actually saw him, or her.
(We saw the deer, though).

Early morning or evening dusk seemed to be
when we most often paddled over to Mucky Harbor;
hence, the landscape would be strangely sun infused in an
etherealish kind of way.
Coming into the gloaming, definitely.

Puts you in mind of this John Muir quote:
"The grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never dried all at once;
a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.
Eternal sunrise,
eternal dawn and gloaming ... "


The whole area had a very eerie, other-worldy feel to it.
Very beautiful yet somewhat sinister.
Think Ted Kasinsky
(or Al Capone).

Just ignore that screaming bloody murder sound.

We'll "pass" on this theme song

When I was at Baxter Christian
there was a morning ritual called
the sentence prayer that was very much in vogue
(remember, this was the 60s).
The idea was to include the students,
and what a novel idea since we were,
after all, in school.

This is how it usually unfolded ....


Teacher: "Teddy, will you begin our sentence prayer today?"

Teddy: "Sure, Mrs. Vander Schmandersma"

Teddy prayerfully intones,
"Dear Lord, please be with our boys in Viet Nam"
Sally (who sits directly behind Teddy) adds,
".... and all the starving children in Biafra"
Freddy, who's next in the row, contributes,
".... and all the starving children in China"
Betsy likewise intones,
".... and all the starving children in India"
Ricky whispers in a strangulated voice, "pass"
Davy, future missionary, Calvin Sem 1983, pleads,
".... and all the starving children in Outer Mongolia"
Patsy barely gasps, "pass"
and etcetera etcetera etcetera
(all the names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Well, that's kind of how I feel about This Song.

If Mrs. Vander Schmandersma let's us pass on this song
I think I'll take her up on it.

And, if nothing else, this video proves
once and for all
that white people cannot dance.
Please, Dutch white people, do not even attempt to
move with music!
Take it from someone who grew up in the ghetto.


Photo courtesy of Holland Chamber of Commerce

KEEK US and KATOOTLE !!

Katootle is a Hofman word that we use
in place of dang or rats
or for cryin' out loud!

If some event or occasion or procedure
is hopelessly confusing and muddled up
Hofmans exclaim, "What a katootalie business!"

At least,
I think that's what we exclaim
because both of these words are of uncertain origin,
vaguely Dutch sounding,
and used by no one else but us.
I don't even know how to spell them.

but ............

that's what I thought about other Hofmanisms, too,
such as luppee, feese, bahnout, poppetje,
ferfailent, keek us, and last but not least, the heavily used
"Stop your seussing and sonicking!"

and then, y'all,

I discovered that these are REAL WORDS

all of them

and not Hofmanisms or some weirdly mutated
bastardized form of the Teutonic slash Saxon language.

Regardez!!!!

Luppee = lapje, a small piece of cloth.
Feese = vies, meaning filthy or dirty
Bahnout = benauwd, meaning stuffy
Poppetje = poppetje!, little doll
Ferfailent = vervelend, annoying and unpleasant
Keek Us = kijk es, to look
and ... and .... and .... AND

Seuss and Sonic = zoesen en zanikken, meaning to worry, bore, tease,
and to unnecessarily talk about the same subject over and over.
(Insert young child whining, repetitively, "Mama, mama, mama, mama...")

Now,
harken back and
remember how Grandma and the aunts used to whisper,
"Keek us!",
sotto voce,
when a little poppetje was doing something naughty
like getting really vies by jumping in mud puddles,
but you didn't want the little seuss and soniker
to know that you'd noticed
so you went all default language instead?

Yup. I thought you'd remember.

Yes Yes.
I do have a point and
this is it:

KEEK US and KATOOTLE !!

Here we have Sandra Vermeer and Barbara Hoogstrate
and
"KEEK US"
Barbie has a Boa Constrictor Around Her Neck
and Sandy is just really very copacetic with that.


Now we are going to fast forward
and Keek Us a little more.
Here is Barb with her grandson, Donovan,
not really encircling her neck but
kind of clutching at her bosom
and, as you can clearly see,
Barb stills weighs the same as she did
when she was 16
which is just ridiculous
but isn't that little poppetje sweet?

Donovan is the son of Barbie's son Steve,

although in the photo below
I'm pretending to be his mother
(notice pained expression on Steve's face)
with my sister Karen "keek ussing"

Here is Steve a few years later,
free from my clutches

and here he is again
just a couple of decades later
with his andere poppetje, Olivia,
and even though he is a doctor in Oregon
brownie points for wearing that Tiger baseball hat!

Finally, we have the entire Phelps family:
Andree, Donovan, Steve & Olivia
and nobody is seussing or sonicking
but Donovan looks like he just realized
he lost his luppee!

And P.S.
this is really kinda cool because
Donovan & Olivia are the FIFTH GENERATION
of Hofmans at Big Star Lake.