During our recent trip to my old home town at the edge of the woods in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, da U.P., I was reminded of why I left the Democratic Party — wood ticks. The swamps and woods there are full of wood ticks. They get under your pants leg and crawl up your back and penetrate your skin and live off your blood and can leave you diseased. I used to be on the State Central Committee of the Nebraska Democratic Party, but left the Party after it started morphing into something more like a Back to Nature movement, with its own rituals. They wanted me to hug a tree covered with wood ticks.

This past week, I got to meet and chat with the chair of the Arapahoe County Democratic Party. It’s a big job, 652,000 people live in the county. I met her on the sidewalk in front of our house. She was handing out campaign literature for Democratic candidates for seats on the Aurora City Council.

I told her why I had left the Democratic Party. She’s originally from Detroit, a lawyer, of the next generation after mine and knew about the U.P. and, so, I thought she might have visited there and, so, might understand about wood ticks.

There are things growing up over which we have no say, like being Catholic and a Yooper and a Democrat.

Dad was in charge of religion and politics around the house. Mom had been raised Lutheran but converted and we were raised Catholic. Dad voted for a Republican, once, Eisenhower, 70 years ago. When my Swedish grandfather, who lived with us, ran for county drain commissioner on the Republican ticket, Dad voted against him.

Dad was a union man at the factory. He took me to picket lines where he and the fathers of kids I knew in the neighborhood warmed their hands on cold winter nights standing around trash can fires, their grim, determined faces reflecting a smoky, revolutionary red. It was there that I began to associate the word “scab” with Republicans. The bosses were Republicans. They had the biggest houses in town. They wanted to bring in the scabs.

So, of course, I was a Democrat. A portrait of FDR hung on the wall of grandma’s kitchen. To this day, Roosevelt’s image brings to my mind the smell of yeast bread rising and pea soup. Great grandma Thibault called him Franklin as if he were still alive. A Democrat, crippled by polio, he had saved the family during desperate times… work for all in New Deal projects, new dams and bridges and pipelines and schools, like almost overnight a vast land mass was lit by electric light.

So, of course I was a Democrat, like I’m Catholic and my eyes are blue. In the late 80s, after getting run out of Detroit, I ran small town weeklies in Nebraska and was elected to the State Central Committee of the Nebraska Democratic Party. I shared a few late-night drinks with Governor Bob Kerrey and his girlfriend at the time, Debra Winger. After a few too many, I'd get worked up into my big spiels about my big schemes. I was for building things, just like FDR. Big things with new technologies — a tunnel beneath the Bering Sea, a land bridge connecting the two great land masses of the world. I was for fusion and fast breeder reactors and the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), canals to Alaska to water the western deserts. I was for NASA and SDI. I was for a new international economic order, one that nourished development and did not take it as a threat to an imagined pre-established order. I was being a good Democrat, just like FDR, like Kennedy building rockets to get us to the moon.

By the late 80’s, however, me and my big ideas were not as welcome at Democratic Party functions. I learned that behind my back I was considered a crackpot. So I left the Party, or the Party left me by becoming more like a movement Back to Nature where, according to their logic, everything was in perfect balance, and I was a disrupter.

I first became acquainted with the movement in its infancy during my college days in the late 60s. Silent Spring and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful were required reading. Baba Ram Dass posters hung on dormitory walls — “Be Here Now.” “All is One.”

It was more mystical in its early stages, like a new religion with its own cosmology and godhead and rules for living. It even had its own Gospel with its own name, the Aquarian Gospel. In the old Gospel, people had Dominion. In the new Gospel, people followed the rules of Nature delivered from on high by the new godhead in town, the one with a preferred pronoun. She was perfect. To be One with. A virginal forest. But to touch was to desecrate… and all that kind of stuff.

I didn’t buy into the new religion when I was in college or even ever after that. Nature, to me, remained full of wood ticks and 20-below winters and was something to overcome. I wanted to transform Nature into something more livable. They wanted me to be One with wood ticks that carry disease. So I left the Party, and they were glad to see me go.

That, in a nutshell, was the story I told to the chair of the Arapahoe County Democratic Party standing out on the sidewalk in front of our house.

The next day I sent her an email with my telephone number and said: “Let’s talk.” She called me right back.