I'm sitting on my duff on Mackinac Island and fussing about the heat. With no newspaper, no TV and a gummy-slow Internet, I'm in a news vacuum.

I now understand how George W. Bush got to be the way he is. If you don't read the news, and only occasionally step off the shady porch to slash brush, you can pretty much avoid knowing that the world is blowing up around you. You get the most peripheral take on things, little glimpses of trouble spots, which prompt you to mutter inane things about who oughta stop doin' what to whom. Just the other day I said to my husband, "Whassup with Israel?" That's about as deep as it gets when your daily news intake has the nutritional value of a marshmallow.

Back home in Minneapolis I start the day with the media equivalent of bran and hardtack. My teeth grind, my stomach knots and the little needle on my rage meter pings over to the red zone.

Up here I take my coffee looking out at Lake Huron, a sweep of clear, fresh water that shimmers over the distant horizon like the world's biggest infinity pool, which in a way it is. After the religious wars and the oil wars -- if there is an after -- they say it'll be the water wars, which puts those of us situated in the middle of the five Great Lakes sort of in the catbird seat. Or in a war zone.

Every year hundreds of sailboats race up Lake Huron to Mackinac Island, a trip taking anywhere from one to three days, depending on the wind and the size of the boat. The 80-foot turbo yachts finish first, looking like something out of a bad Kevin Costner movie with their sinister high-tech ash-black sails, and then the smaller boats with old-fashioned white sails straggle in, crisscrossing the straits like flittering moths.

It's all very pretty, except for the TV news choppers whirling overhead and the cannon that fires as each boat crosses the line.

These sailors come ashore with an all-too-familiar swagger of privilege, claiming dehydration and sexual deprivation from their weekend ordeal on the open water. Unlike their less lucky counterparts stuck in, say, the 115-degree heat of Iraq, these guys have free Bacardi rum and a whole slew of sturdy Michigan Girls Gone Wild, bare midriffs and breasts billowing like spinnakers, to slake their various thirsts.

As I write I can hear them partying on the lawn of the hotel below. The sky blazes blue overhead, the soft breeze smells of balsam trees. The band is playing an old Edgar Winter rock song called "Free Ride." Well, that's over.

Even those of us still coasting on the top know that the free ride our dunderhead president promised us is now -- and in reality always was -- a free fall, and at this point no one knows how to stop it. I'd rather be left home alone with Macaulay Culkin than with our bring-it-on kid in the White House. Note to Mom and Dad or any grown-up out there: Please come home.

Eventually the anesthesia of oblivion wears off and you feel the pain, even as the crazed surgeons continue to slice up the world and there's nothing you can do to stop them. Vacation is over.

I'll go home and dip my puny oar into the political waters of the midterm elections and pull toward that little sandbar of hope, though some days it feels like bailing a lake with a thimble.

But if those with oars pull together and those with thimbles keep bailing, maybe we can still get there.

Susan Lenfestey, Minneapolis, writes at the clotheslineblog.com.

© 2006 Star Tribune

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