It’s the summer of 1950 and Rose Rita Pottinger is adamant about one thing: she’s
not going to summer camp. She doesn’t want to be a Girl Scout or a Campfire Girl or any of that and she doesn’t want to sit around campfires and roast marshmallows or sing songs or....
Well, even though she’s not attending camp, Lewis is. He’s off to Boy Scout Camp, something John Bellairs did a number of times, too, when he and his friends from Marshall attended Camp T. Ben Johnston, outside Augusta, Michigan, itself about 8 miles west of Battle Creek.
The camp that Rose Rita doesn’t want to attend is Kitch-itti-Kippi [4] (also Camp Kitchi-Itti-Kippi [The Specter from the Magician's Museum; 64]). While nothing is written about the camp, it shares a name with the Kitch-iti-kipi, part of Palms Book State Park in Michigan's Upper Peninsula - close to 7 hours away from Marshall.
Two hundred feet across, the forty foot deep, bowl-shaped Kitch-iti-kipi is Michigan's largest natural freshwater spring, whose name translates to “big cold water” and is often referred to as “The Big Spring.” 10,000 gallons of water gush from its fissures every minute at a constant 45° Fahrenheit. The clear, spring-fed pond has self-operated observation rafts, allowing visitors a look into the underwater world below.
The spring was discovered by John I. Bellaire, a resident of nearby Manistique, who could have purchased the beloved property for himself. Instead he wanted the land preserved for all to enjoy and in 1926 the State of Michigan purchased the land for $10, with the stipulation that the land "be forever used as a public park."
To capitalize on his find, Bellaire came up with a back story: Kitch-iti-kipi was supposedly a young chieftain whose girlfriend got the best of him. As a test of his devotion, the maiden declared that he must set sail in his canoe on the pool and catch her from his canoe as she leaped from an overhanging bough. While she returned to camp and laughed with others about this silly quest, the young chieftain's canoe tipped over in the spring, later renamed in honor of the young Indian who went to his death in the icy waters. The name is thought to have numerous other meanings in the Chippewa language: the Great Water; the Blue Sky I See; or the Roaring, Bubbling Spring.
Oddly enough, near the Spring are picnic areas but camping is not permitted in Palms Book State Park. We suppose Rose Rita couldn’t have really camped here, anyway.
Gert Bigger is the owner of a small rural grocery store near Petoskey, Michigan. She is described as a "big rawboned woman in a shapeless sack of a dress" with an angry face [
The Letter, the Witch and the Ring, 31-2].
Background
Next to nothing is known about the young Gert, or Gertie, Bigger, other than that as a teenager around the turn of the century she had a crush on a boy named Mordecai Hunks. Hunks was also being wooed by a then eighteen-year old Florence Zimmermann who eventually won Hunks over, if only for a few weeks or months. This alienated Bigger, who held a life-long grudge on the woman she felt ruined her life.
Her life after Mordy appears to have been fairly miserable and though she eventually did marry, she noted, "the old fool I was married to used to beat me [153]." That said, it is unclear whether Bigger was her maiden name or the name of her abusive husband, who's own history is also unknown.
Feeling of hatred and revenge danced in her mind over the years, eventually turning to witchcraft as a way to find her own twisted solace. Retreating to libraries in Ellis Corners and other surrounding communities, she checked out every book she could find on the subject, sometimes sitting for hours in reference rooms with books that couldn't be removed from the premises, and always keeping books she checked-out well past their due date. She finally found a way out of her dead-end life via her neighbor, Oley Gunderson - also Zimmermann's cousin. Gunderson had found a small ring on his farm, bragging to his neighbor how he felt it was a magical talisman. Once Gunderson was dead, Bigger stole the ring and began learning its power: transformation, invisibility, teleportation, and the ability to summon Asmodai and grant any wish.
Zimmermann: Round Two
Gunderson's death brought Zimmermann - and her friend, Rose Rita Pottinger - back to her old stomping grounds and slowly she became victim of Bigger's experiments with the ring. Believing the ring is now the famed Ring of Solomon, Bigger startles Florence with old pictures of her and Mordecai, mysteriously appears in bedrooms and in the back of cars, and uses its shape shifting capabilities to spy on - and alter the shape of - her enemies. Rose Rita is lured back to Bigger's store and placed under a death spell, while Bigger calls forth Asmodai, requesting the demon change her: "I want to be young and beautiful, and I want to live for a thousand years. But I don't want to get old. I want to stay young, all the time [157]." Upon making the demand, she vanishes.
"What kind of tree would you be?"
After Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmermann reunite in the forest behind Bigger's Grocery Store they spot a young slender willow tree, standing alone amid the tall pines, its leaves trembling though no wind. Told of Bigger's last wish, Zimmermann notes that if "a witch is changed into something else - a tree, for instance - then she isn't a witch any more and all her enchantments are broken [172]."
Bellairs words the dialogue of the characters and narrator in this scene to never come right out and say the obvious. We're reminded of a 1990 article where John said, "...for me, horror is suggestion and what might happen and the old-fashioned haunted house movies." By strong hints readers can let their imagination connect the dots, thereby solving the puzzle. This effect is somewhat lost when Strickland wrote briefly of the Zimmermann/Bigger account by noting their conflict ended when "the evil witch was herself transformed into a tree" [The Whistle, the Grave and the Ghost, 32].
The surname Bigger seems to be a funny, descriptive name, seeing the lumpy-looking woman in the book's various illustrations. Thumbing through Richard Carver's History of Marshall book we find that one Mrs. Gertrude Bigger was, in 1924, the Most Excellent Chief of the Knights of Pythias Women's Auxiliary [500]. One can only guess at the connection, if there is one.
In The Whistle, the Grave and the Ghost she is referred to as Gert Biggers.
Mordecai (Mordy) Hunks
A boy who lived near Petoskey, Michigan [The Letter, the Witch and the Ring, 34]. He was the subject of a feud between Gert Bigger and Florence Zimmermann. When Zimmermann was 18, both she and Bigger fought to have Hunks as her boyfriend. Though Zimmermann won, her fling with Hunks was very brief, but Bigger held a grudge the rest of her life.
Nothing more of Hunks is known, though photos of the mysterious suitor appear during Zimmermann's visit to the Petoskey-area in the summer of 1950: in an unnamed town in the upper peninsula, Zimmermann and Rose Rita find a photograph dated from the summer of 1905:
It showed a woman in an old-fashioned floor-length dress. She was standing by the bank of a river, and she had a canoe paddle in her hand. Behind her a canoe was pulled upon the bank. A man in a striped jacket was sitting cross-legged next to the canoe. He hand a handlebar mustache, and he was playing a banjo. The man looked handsome, but it was impossible to tell what the lady looked like. Someone had scraped the face of the lady away with a knife or a razor blade [48].
On the back of the old photograph was written: "Florence and Mordecai. Summer, 1905." Later at Bigger's grocery store, Rose Rita finds another photograph of the same man with the handlebar mustache [98].
Hunks, like Bigger, is another descriptive name (that of an attractive man); had he married, can you imagine either "Gert Hunks" or "Florence Hunks" as their names?
In the Bible, Mordecai was the cousin and guardian of Esther, as seen in the Book of Esther. However, knowing Bellairs' penchant for baseball, one cannot help think of famed pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown.
Such a Charming Thing
Patrick Cuff tells us that the charm Rose Rita discovers at Mrs. Bigger's store [101] "shows up in The Book of Divination by Ann Fiery, 1999, Chronicle Books, Page 140. It states that the talisman is used to prevent against sudden death and accidents causing sudden death on Saturdays."
