He Lived by His Lights as Long as He Could: Requiem for Phil Thiel
Photo: Rob Serbin (right) once came home to find his new roommate, a caftan-wearing Phil (left) next to a half-full trash can, ransacking the cupboards, reading pack- age labels, and chucking items with artificial ingredients.
By Stephanie Mills
Sun contributor
A posthumous portrait is hard to draw, particularly if it happens to be of one’s first and only, if long since ex, husband. But capturing the likeness and spirit of any person is a challenge. The more complex the person, the less the whole truth of their being can be described. Phil Thiel, recently departed, was in some ways mystifying. His life comprised several eras. He won fast friends in each. In his all too brief 65 years Phil was an altar boy, an Eagle Scout, a college dropout, a world traveler, a cooperatives advocate, a bioregional organizer, a hippie carpenter, an environmental activist, a writer, editor, and publisher, a champion of renewable energy, a caterer, a shopkeeper, a gonzo sports fan, a connoisseur of wine and liquor, a gourmand, and Cedar Michigan’s Mardi Gras King, circa 2014. This past March 8 he was felled by a cardiac event outside the Long Lake home his mother shared with him.
After a death, your grief crystallizes around things you suddenly miss: Phil’s hilarious, idiomatic eloquence is gone silent and the workings of his wonderful mind stilled. Politically astute, he knew surprisingly much about surprisingly many things. As our nation and our world get crazier and shakier, I wish I could know his thoughts about a multitude of issues close in and far away. As one of his fellow Wheatland Festival CACC (Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination) kitchen volunteers put it, “I’m gonna miss his rants.”
Said a friend of Phil’s from the early days of the Oryana co-op, and his sometime carpentry colleague, Suttons Bay antique boat restorer George Powell: “He just had such a take on things. He could summarize a whole complex situation with a nickname or a one-sentence answer. I was so blown away by his grasp of all the complexities of social interactions. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.” What’s more, Phil Thiel had a great sense of humor and an uncommon capacity for fun. “Every time I saw him I knew I was in for a good time,” said Powell. Times with Phil were “pure joy” recalled high school chum Mark Leslie.
This past June first, longtime friends—realtor Rob Serbin, steady sidekick and movie buddy Daryl Jacques, Jeff Anderson, and David “Grips” Krumlauf—threw a memorial bash befitting Phil Thiel at Telford Farms. Scores of people came to share memories, reconnect after decades, partake of the gargantuan potluck anchored by a heap of Pleva’s hot dogs, and toast the departed with his favorite Manitou Amber Ale. There was jumping music by K. Jones and the Benzie Playboyz and some heart-wrenching songs by another of Phil’s lifelong compañeros, Victor McManemy.
The people at the event were strikingly healthy and handsome, a vindication of the natural foods preference of the local counterculture, which Phil had long led. The visible decline of Phil’s health on the long downslope from his perch on the stool behind the Cedar City Market counter was a sad irony.
Born in Grand Rapids January 15, 1954, Phil was the first of three children adopted by Leo and Lorraine (nèe Tremain) Thiel. His dad died when he was nine years old. Phil grew up on Third Street in Traverse City, attended Immaculate Conception grammar school and Traverse City Senior High School. There he became fluent enough to crack wise en Francaisin the back of the classroom with fellow Francophone Leslie.
At the memorial Leslie mentioned that, just for the hell of it, Phil decided to get an E in honors Math, dinging an effortless 3.9 GPA. Apart from that gesture, he was a good student. He played football, basketball, and baseball but according to his brother Jim, never really exerted himself. “He didn’t have that killer instinct. That was just his nature.”
Phil then had a year at the University of Michigan where, said another high school friend, Dave Whiteford, “I’m not sure he knew what to do with that brilliance.” Apparently, the U’s educational benefit was finding a traveling buddy, Jack Fairbanks. The two headed off to vagabond in Europe and North Africa for a year or so. Phil chronicled his travels through Greece, Rome, Algiers, Tunisia, and Morocco in letters home to Jim, who said “I’d imagine in those days he was kinda homesick and staying in touch with his little brother.” In a thatch-roofed hut on Agadir’s shore Thiel and Fairbanks “hippied right down on the beach,” said Jim.
Still knocking about on return from his wanderjahr, Phil went into sales and made for the Caribbean seeking customers for sailor and sailmaker Tom Babel. Finding no success there, he returned to “Tragic City” and did a stint selling furniture. Such were the seventies. Joint households and recombinant tenancy were the [dis]order of the day. Friendships were struck and landlords’ patience tried. At the birth of one such mènage, Rob Serbin came home to find his new roommate, a caftan-wearing Phil next to a half-full trash can, ransacking the cupboards, reading package labels, and chucking items with artificial ingredients. “If it’s not real food, why are you eatin’ it?” Phil quizzed the dumfounded Serbin. It was “a revelation,” said Serbin. “The start of my food evolution”—and the beginning of a solid friendship.
By the early eighties, Phil, Rob, Bob Russell, and Phil’s “personal Jesus” Kerry (“Kapt’n”) Krcek all wound up living in The Hovel, a fixer-upper farmhouse south of Maple City. They threw legendary parties, including an anti-Cherry Festival featuring a festooned parade of beater cars cruising through the old field down a two track and back. Frisbee golf, soy barbecues, and getting high were all on the menu. For most of the rest of his life, Phil would throw great feasts and parties. For his fiftieth birthday bash he took over both floors of the Maple City Lion’s Club. K. Jones & co. played then, too.
Phil Thiel’s embrace of the countercultural lifestyle was intelligent and heartfelt. Putting his back into the natural foods movement, he’d schlep fifty-pound bags of whole grain flour up the stairs to Oryana’s original store on West Front Street, and he served on the Michigan Federation of Food Cooperatives Board. Though many Leelanau residents knew him in the aughts during his tenure as philosopher-proprietor of the Cedar City Market, in the eighties and nineties, Phil was a consequential environmental organizer.
Phil Thiel knew that nature is primary: We need to adapt our lives to the living Earth rather than coercing it to our designs. He grasped the seriousness of the ecological crisis and knew that nothing less than a transformation of our way of life would answer. He was a visionary bioregionalist. Yet as Ann Hunt, CACC’s treasurer, observed “Phil was a practical person in a lot of ways. He looked for practical ways to address the issues, and bring them to the common people in a way they could understand.” Thus, in the 90s he would work on promoting “negawatts” (conservation and efficiency) and renewable energy generation.
Phil mounted the first three Great Lakes Bioregional Congresses and was a local leader in organizing the second North American Bioregional Congress (NABC), held in 1986 at Camp Innisfree.
In an invitation to one of the congresses, Phil neatly voiced the movement’s politics:
“Our bioregion…is primarily defined by the Great Lakes drainage basin, although it holds no fixed borders,” he wrote. “Great diversity is found within the…Bioregion as reflected in its flora and fauna, climate and landforms, and its culture and need…The variations in each locale call for strategies that are often independent, yet always interdependent. Many decisions for our Bioregion are made without adequate consideration of their effects downwind, downstream, or down the road.”
Phil and I met in May of 1984 at the first North American Bioregional Congress, held in rural Missouri. Like many another alert female, I couldn’t help noticing how very articulate, witty, perceptive, and, oh yes, handsome he was. His mind, so completely intertwined with his heart, was the sexiest thing about him, though.
We fell in love on the spot. When the Congress ended, I went back to San Francisco, he to Maple City, both of us desperate to get back together. In a state of erotic, spiritual exaltation, envisioning a partnership of healing the world through homesteading and bioregional organizing, we corresponded daily by mail, costly long-distance phone calls, and tape-recorded monologues sent to each other. Phil chronicled days working construction, being broke, worrying about car repairs, analyzing policies for the Michigan Federation of Food Cooperatives, and doing skits at the Cherry Festival with the Northwest Michigan Environmental Action Council (NMEAC) players.
After I visited in July of ’84, and began to learn Phil’s nicknames for all the locals, I made plans to become his Hovelmate. By June 29, 1985, we were hitched in a storybook wedding with all the trimmings at Grace Episcopal Church. We flunked marriage, alas, but not before we’d survived a head-on auto accident and built, with the help of dozens of friends and some parental loans, a snug little home.
Four months after the wedding as we were driving downstate for the Third Great Lakes Bioregional Congress, with Phil behind the wheel, we got into a godawful crash. He’d had a sketchy driving record, with citations for driving while impaired, speeding, and driving without a valid license. In this instance, the state police declared no blame. Phil was nearly killed in the smashup. His ribs were fractured on both sides, his jaw broken, and there was a puncture wound in his neck. His carotid artery was injured, causing permanent circulatory damage to his central nervous system. My right leg was in smithereens, but that’s another story.
Phil hovered, intubated, on the critical list in the Munson ICU for a few weeks. Vascular surgeon Carl Benner performed two harrowing operations and nicknamed Phil “Durable Goods.” Amazingly, Phil was out of the hospital by early November and proceeded to rehabilitate himself by helping to organize the second NABC. He was quite a formidable guy to have recovered as much and as well as he did. He’d go toe to toe with the Grim Reaper several more times before Death took him down.
Further homegrown occupational therapy found Phil, with fledgling attorney Grant Parsons, NMEAC, and a local Deep Throat intervening to head off a development that would have irretrievably marred downtown Traverse City.
Parsons, whom Phil would recruit into some notable environmental battles credited Thiel with being the “activist wing” of NMEAC in those days. First, there was an intervention to prevent MDoT from clearcutting an alley of maple trees to widen a stretch of M72 east of County Road 653. Phil, Kathleen Dodge, and Bob Russell jumped out in front of an MDoT road improvement juggernaut. Phil also involved the serene, gracious, expert man of the trees Clarence Kroupa in the campaign. Phil, said Parsons, got the “damn good idea” of having each intervenor adopt an individual tree. Phil’s was a big cherry tree. By expressing the identity of “the resource, or the spirit of what you’re trying to save” the public conversation was changed from being about a clear cut.
“Environmental cases in a small town are always hand-to-hand combat,” said Parsons. “Phil was aware of that…. He was really funny and very vivacious,” and those are disarming qualities. That 1986 intervention in the Traverse City fathers’ attempt to sell what proved to be entailed city parkland for a buck, Parsons thought, marked “an inflection point; an historic pivot for Traverse City.” The land in question, bounded by Cass and Union and the Boardman River and the Parkway, now hosts the Sarah Hardy Farmer’s Market. “It ought to be the Phil Thiel- NMEAC-Sarah Hardy Farmer’s Market,” Parsons said.
Back then, the block-long multistory mall proposed for the site was, said Parsons, “viewed as theeconomic existential question for TC.” Governor Milliken, said Parsons, “turned the first shovel of dirt.” To intervene, Phil obtained a “smoking gun.” He’d learned from an anonymous source within the city government that the land title stipulated it couldn’t be sold without a public vote. He investigated ’til “he got the information that was rockf***ing solid” and wanted to head to court. “You gotta do it,” Thiel said Parsons. They needed an organization to file the suit, so Bob Russell, active with NMEAC, was persuaded to get involved.
Those pesky environmentalists asserted, and Judge Forster’s ruling in effect secured, the right of the people to vote, per the city’s charter, on a crucial environmental matter. It was a narrow, 200-vote victory that, said Parsons, “destroyed the idea that economic development required a downtown mall.”
“On a good day, this beautiful little farmer’s market with a bay view is a cornerstone of Traverse City,” said Parsons, and was a precursor of the locavore culture. “Winning that lawsuit resulted in a whole new history where people’s voting rights and quality of life became important in Traverse City.” Phil “loved a fight,” said Parsons. “He really had the spark needed to create a strong, community-based sense of place and the environment.”
While all that was going on Phil and I started building our own Hovel next door to Rob’s. We moved in Christmas eve of ’89 and split up the following spring.
Without Phil Thiel’s activism, the Traverse area would be a starker place. In addition to keeping the downtown stretch of bay front open, and some trees lining M-72 for a while longer, in 1989 Thiel assisted NMC students and Bill Bustance to protest clearcutting old growth pines out to Munson Avenue to make way for the Dennos Museum.
“He really showed me how to work the people process,” said Bustance, a boxing coach. “He made me effective.” Thiel also helped Bustance and other citizens head off, again by getting it to a public vote, the imposition on the Civic Center of a second hockey rink.
As I was completing this writing, Phil’s second wife, Megan Watson, came over. The two were married in 1991 and divorced in 2002. Megan brought a basketful of Thiel archives: camera-ready paste-up pages from the NMEAC newsletter, and Soft Paths, the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association (GLREA)’s publication, along with a photo album documenting the years of constructing their energy-conserving house. Together they accomplished a lot, helping launch the GLREA, building an innovative home, and running Bay Area Design, a two-person publishing service producing newsletters for several local organizations. They were also peripatetic caterers for events large and small.
In 1999 they bought the Cedar City Market, which would become a mecca for hippies, foodies, and oenophiles. (Retired attorney Mark Messing, who worked there for the love of Phil, called it “a health food-booze store.”) Other overqualified clerks included poet Holly Spaulding and Penny Krebiehl, a prolific artist and permaculture activist. The store’s counter became an updated version of the old-time country store’s cracker barrel, focus of lively, if sometimes vociferous conversations about macro and micro politics and sports of every ilk.
While they were building their house Phil’s luck survived another brush with Death. Watson shuddered to remember Phil’s being stung by a bee and going into anaphylactic shock. “He said ‘I don’t feel well’ and fell over and started choking.” One of her kids called a neighbor, another 911. Phil’s hard-working Guardian Angel, in the guise of an off-duty Coast Guardsman with some knowledge of what to do in such an emergency, heard the call on his CB radio and happened to be nearby on M72. He “headed right up Bright Road and administered the shot,” said Watson.
Like many another Leelanau County homesteader, Phil grasped that kicking the fossil fuel addiction through energy conservation (dubbed “negawatts” by energy pundit Amory Lovins) and renewable energy generation was not only crucial, but practical. In 1990 shortly after they got together, the pair, along with other energy-woke locals—environmental consultant and off-the-gridder Tim Johnson and pioneering solar homesteader Krcek—went to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair in Wisconsin. “It was fabulous,” Watson said. “The farmers and the hippies and everybody came together.” This was long before the Green New Deal was a glint off a solar array. The crew soon decided, recalled Johnson, “We could do that, too,” and founded the GLREA, which with mainstream support, held four Renewable Energy Fairs, starting at the Grand Traverse County Fairgrounds. There, said Watson, they “rattled around” in a very big venue. All the Fairs featured workshops, vendors, and solar home tours.
The GLREA also brought Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and an expert on renewable energy strategies to town to lecture and consort with local mavens. In order to present a respectable appearance while fundraising for Lovins’ visit, Thiel sacrificed his long hippie tresses. “He was always encouraging us to give our all,” said Randy Smith, another Phil GLREA actor.
Afew years after Phil’s remarriage, we had a chance to facilitate an activists’ meeting in Glen Arbor about a developer’s threats to the Crystal River. As Phil was husband to one of the lead organizers of the Friends of the Crystal River, he was fluent in the issues. He personally knew just about everybody involved and had an accepting sense of their group dynamics. His humor kept the meeting moving in a good spirit, and his irreverence made us a little bolder than we might otherwise have been. At that point I remembered exactly why I fell in love with him and it was pretty clear why so many others loved and valued him as well.
Also in the nineties, Phil and Megan began helping in CACC’s “ecotarian” fundraiser kitchen at Wheatland. The non tax-deductible CACC is one of the largest food vendors at the popular old festival, preparing and serving thousands of meals. All that cooking takes a small army of volunteers, most of them culinary amateurs who throw themselves into the work for “a good common purpose,” said Ann Hunt, treasurer of the diehard activist organization. Hunt dated her close friendship with Phil from those days, although, she said, “It seems like I’ve known him forever.” Hunt, a formidable organizer, approached Thiel and Watson to work the Sunday morning breakfast shift, cleverly initiating a friendly rivalry between their crew and hers. Thiel “would emerge from the kitchen just soaked with sweat,” Hunt remembered.
By and by, she said, thanks to Phil’s liberal sharing of vintages and libations from the Cedar City Market, behind the kitchen there was a hospitality tent where volunteers could hang out, kick back, and solve the world’s problems over absinthe and kava cocktails. It was a place, said Hunt, where those workers could “feel comfortable, get connected, and make friends.”
Hunt also valued Phil’s prose. “He was a good writer, spot on, and didn’t get enough credit,” she thought. In his multipurpose roles with NMEAC, including its executive directorship, and the GLREA, Thiel wrote much of the copy for their newsletters. He was always cogent and witty, deftly taking his readers a few steps beyond the conventional wisdom.
It was hard to witness Phil’s physical deterioration in recent years, for he began as an Adonis. Some of the changes may have been the long-term consequences of the auto accidentinjuries, others from the sedentary position behind the counter at the Cedar City Market. Ages ago, not long after our Phil and I first met, the subject of alcoholism—mine and his—came up. He gave AA a brief try. When we were together he didn’t drink. Drinking was important to him, though. “It was sad to watch him get into the throes of diabetes,” said Hunt. “We worried about him a lot,” but he “had a way of making light of it.” Over the last decade, he had some severe health crises.
Phil was wonderful and widely loved, but many of his friends were troubled by his self-disregard. “He should have taken better care of himself,” said Watson. “How can you care about your surroundings if you don’t care about yourself?”
Megan Watson is warm, keen, down-to-earth, smart and funny—a strong, persevering, sensible woman. We laughingly, immodestly agreed that Phil Thiel had great taste in women. Of the half-dozen of his female partners known to me, each has intelligence, humor, vision, social conscience, and a good heart. If you can tell a man by the company he keeps, Phil Thiel was a star albeit ultimately “unavailable,” as his last candid, bodacious girlfriend Toni Hill said at his March wake. His many male friends would see it differently. Rob Serbin and Phil were friends to the end. “I could absolutely count on him,” said Rob. “He was there.I’m glad to have shared over half my life with him.”
His seeming squandering of gifts was confounding. Phil Thiel was a risk-taker. Some of those risks, like confronting the City Fathers over the Bay View Mall, andthe launch of the Energy Fairs, demonstrated leadership and moral stamina. But his apparent inability to act in his own behalf when love of wine and food began to destroy his health risked everything. He suffered a succession of hospitalizations for problems related to his diabetes, and some severe depression likely caused by the auto accident injuries. Towards the end he was broke, lost the store, and was getting by with help from friends and family.
But here’s the thing: Phil Thiel was a true friend, and a true friend of the Earth. He devoted the prime of his life to smart steady work on a whole array of issues far more pressing now than they were a generation ago when Phil and his posse took them on. Independently, he strove for positive change. At the Cedar City Market, he built community, established a kind of nexus where silverback hippies and longtime locals could meet and mingle and exchange views as they bought their pints or tasted the wines. He was a big person, in every way. His life’s arc curved down early, but always bore light.
All is forgiven. Time and death wash away the dross. Some may come late to fully appreciate the incomparable souls, like Phil Thiel, whose walk enhanced this place in so many ways. He walked on too soon. Still,what we remember lives.
Light rain falls, cleansing, healing, nurturing light—
Rain falls, each droplet God’s gift. Light
Clouds ride light winds, soothing shades
Of light.
Light leaves through spaces between light leaves.
Light moves through fields of heat in waves, light waves
Through wild grasses.
Eyes light, sparking, Skies light, harking,
Visions of hearts, light
In love.
—Phil Thiel, 1984
