I’ve heard from my friend in Gaza. She’s 23. She says she's still alive. She says things there now are worse than ever before, if that’s even possible. Critics of the war are being rounded up. We’re being told to look the other way. I don't know what to say, what to think, what to write.

A friend of mine in my circle of Denver writers tells me all the time to write about what I know. Socrates said something like the first step on the road to wisdom is to know you don’t know. I don't know what's going on.

So, I’ll write about what I know I know.

I’ll write about the U.P.

I know the U.P.

It’s where Yoopers live and where I grew up.

It’s different there. People talk different there. They say: “Da UP.”

We’re planning a family trip up there, late spring, early summer, before the wood ticks and black flies get bad.

You can hide in the woods up there. It’s where Capone went when things got too hot in Chicago. It’s where Hemingway went to escape his nightmares of the war.

Thousands of years ago, it was at the edge of the continental glacier that formed the Great Lakes. To this day, it’s a land at the edge. From Iron Mountain, the small town where I grew up, you can walk north a hundred miles through hardwood forests and cedar swamps until you get to Lake Superior, and then swim across that to Canada and keep walking, over the North Pole and then south down across Siberia and over the Caucasus and all the way to India before encountering another settlement the size of Iron Mountain.

My family has lived up there for generations. My French and Swedish grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there. And a younger brother who died a crib death before I ever got to know him. I’ve never been able to mention his name in print. And I don't know why.

My folks are still doing pretty good. Dad’s 97. Mom’s not far behind. They’re in a retirement home where meals are taken communally. Dad still plays poker with old buddies. There’s lots of family around who visit and take them places.

Both of my younger brothers and sister are still up there. I was the oldest. I was the only one who took off. Like it was my job. Like it's what the oldest is supposed to do. Somebody has to take off to see what’s approaching from beyond the edge of town, and I was the oldest.

My father was an oldest, too, and he took off across the Pacific. He was off the coast of Okinawa fighting Kamikazes when the bombs were dropped. And then he went back home to Iron Mountain. He’d seen enough.

But I never went back. Not really. I tried a time or two, but everything was too familiar. My kids were born all over the place… in a hippie/logger town in the Pacific Northwest, in Detroit and in Grant, Nebraska, a village on the High Plains of America.

For the time being, my own tribe of kids and grandchildren and dogs and cats are all now pretty much settled in Colorado. We’ll all be heading up to the U.P. together. It promises to be a logistical challenge. No problem. My tribe has been out on the road all their lives.

I’ll show them around the old neighborhood where I grew up on D Street. I’ll show them the house where Tommy Izzo grew up a few blocks away; you know, Tom Izzo, the famous head basketball coach for Michigan State.

We’ll climb to the top of Pine Mountain ski jump to get a lay of the surrounding land; spend a night or two at the hunting camp deep in Pine Creek country at the end of a two-path road; take a trip to Marquette on Lake Superior where I went to college during another war and decided to take off to see for myself what was approaching from beyond the edge of town.