Dust to Dust

Call it a twist of fate or more likely, call it simple coincidence, but not half way through my last read, Bruce Catton's history of Michigan, our state Library released the 2013 List of Notable Michigan Books. This annual list presents a fantastic mix of adult and children's fiction and nonfiction written by Michigan authors or set in our wonderful state. And in yet another... twist of coincidence we'll call it, it just so happened that one of the listed books that most intrigued me, Benjamin Busch's "Dust to Dust," was currently displayed on our new nonfiction shelf. So I grabbed it. Then devoured it.

And indeed, "Dust to Dust" is a book for devouring, digesting, and breaking down to its elements. For that is precisely what Busch does. His memoir does not simply present the recollections of a life lived according to the strictures of time but instead, bends and blurs a life of memories around a series of elements of his own - arms, metal, water, soil, bone, stone, blood, and ash. Busch uses these constituent particles to tie together his memories but also to get at the core of life and more specifically, the impermanence of life. 

For instance, in discussing his childhood in upstate New York, a location and temporal period that a large portion of the book is focused on, he details at one point, his attempt to overpower nature and a river by building a stone damn across it only to eventually watch his days work wash away.

Impermanence, power, and of course nearly all of his elements including dust, blood, and ash are key players in what is another central role in Busch's life and book, that of a Marine serving two tours in Iraq. Much like Busch's childhood that was spent alone digging and building forts in the woods, his adult Marine life finds him doing the same as the ideal soldier yet still isolated and now, wondering what it is all about.

Finally, after his tours and then years spent reprising his combatant role as an actor on shows such as the Wire, Busch brings his family to Michigan and it is here we come to both Busch's final waypoint and our reason for its inclusion on the Michigan Notable Book List. As a current resident of the state, Busch ends his book spending his time cleaning up the detritus from an old farm in the heart of lower Michigan as well as cleaning out the same from his now dead parent's home. 

If all of this sounds a tad depressing, it is. Busch's book is truly a pensive rumination on a life slowly returning to its very make-up. But, like many great warrior poets before, Busch spins a story that is as much elegy as memoir and it is this poetic elevation of the basics and decay of life that is "Dust to Dust's" greatest strength.