Mon. August 20, 2018
Spent and mentally exhausted today after a week home, fulfilling more social obligations in a week there than in a month in the UP. Nevertheless we are on the road again, traveling east across the UP towards Tahquamenon Falls for camping. Skies over the lake and across the countryside are drab and gray, this afternoon. I hope to God Tahquamenon is not swarming with tourists. Similarly-inclined graffiti artists beat me to the Seney rest stop, where the men's room stall displayed several anti-Trump slogans already. Today would be a great day for Donald the Dictator to keel over.
B & I finally hit the road north on Saturday afternoon around 4:00 p.m. after I slept in late. Because we had picked up my new lease on the trip down, we had to drive separately back up north, with B following close behind me. Ate McDonald's in Pinconning; all rest stops along I-75 fairly busy with Saturday traffic. Still not a bad drive, when cut in half. We stopped at the Indian River compound, which we arrived at precisely at sundown: blazing red-orange sun was sinking into the piney horizon just as we were getting off exit 310.
Dean & Mary Ann and their two big old dogs greeted us at the doorway, the air smelling nostalgically of pine needles. It was good to see them, like old friends, though still strange to me to realize I have an adult-to-adult relationship with them, now. They seemed genuinely pleased to host us. We sat, the four of us, in the screen room off the back porch, watching highlights from the Woodward Dream Cruise on local ABC, the light from Joel's memorial in the backyard increasingly-visible in the blackening night. Reminisced about old times back at the Burt Lake cottage -- my dad drunkenly ascending the wooden staircase there; Frankie breaking his toe on a rock in the shallows; Frankie & Patrick getting attacked by bees through the boardwalk, while I escaped, unscathed; Hoppies.
At night, the windows open in the sticky summer heat, we listened hysterically from the second floor boarding room to the shouts and curses yelped by drunken barhoppers stumbling from The Brass Rail to The Pinehurst down Lake Street.
Huber's were up early Sunday morning with the dogs, and they had coffee ready for us. Dean offered to take us out to breakfast, before our departure, to which I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to disappoint him by exclaiming that I hated breakfast. He drove us there in the golf cart, motoring through the side streets to a first restaurant, which had a thirty minute wait, a flood of tourists, then to a second restaurant, on the Sturgeon River, which also had a thirty minute wait. Waiting, we sat on the riverbank with Dean, listening to him tell stories, watching the tourists. When finally seated we all had coffee and ordered. B had the nutty french toast, and I got regular french toast. It tasted pretty good and I felt surprisingly awake. Following a cool golf cart ride back, we said our goodbyes to the Huber's and their lovable pups.
I started getting tired on the Mackinac Bridge. Praise the Lord we weren't headed south on a summer Sunday. The line of cars waiting for the bridge was four-five times as long as I had ever seen it; it backed up all along U.S. 2 going east towards the bridge, almost as far as the St. Ignace city limits. I stopped for a smoking break at one of the roadside pullouts just outside of the busy section of St. Ignace, but still there was a heavy tourist presence all around. Huge traffic clusters, driving east. Driving west, I laughed hysterically at the pickup truck warriors attempting to pass people in the east-bound lane -- "gonna be a long day for you," I muttered to myself, enjoying the schadenfreude. We made rest stop breaks at the junction between Newberry and Seney and in Whetmore, where we fueled up on gas and coffee for the home stretch. Arrived in Marquette in late afternoon, home sweet home on the big lake. Smoked and lounged, flipping between the Little League World Series and ID Discovery most of the night, listened to a couple hours of the Hitler biography by John Toland; Hitler has now invaded Yugoslavia, with a definite date set for his ill-fated Operation Barbarosa.
Woke around 7 a.m. to a chilly, damp fog outside the tent. Loaded a bowl, used the outhouse, then hit the trail solo. Because the campsites here provided little privacy, I've had to venture out a ways to find a secret smoking spot. There's a hidden trail that goes by Highway 123 before looping back towards the Falls, with a boardwalk consisting of two wood planks laid side by side that cuts through a clearing of beach grass and thorn bushes, a sort of bog area wet with mosquitoes.
Sitting in a spot near there, now, marked by two cigarette butts strewn among the pinestraw. Fog is thicker here, among the pines, veiling the sky in a gray misty haze above and between the jack pines. Mostly a pine forest, with younger oak trees and cedars a generation beneath the towering jack pines. Below that, there are dying, moss-eaten pines with sad, genuflecting branches. A few birds are chirping to life in the branches and pine boughs, with an occasional chipmunk or red squirrel chattering like a rattle.
Closer to my level, along the detritus, there's an endless layer of ferns that extends for miles outside of this campground area. Mostly, the ferns are a shade lighter green than the pines -- almost a lime green -- but in sun-strewn patches there are ferns revealing the first yellowing indications of autumn, ever faintly. Beside me, alongside my paperback copy of Burning Daylight and a cold cup of Holiday coffee, there are dead pine boughs that have turned the rusty color of the pinestraw. The ground is coated entirely in pine needles, forming a soft bedding I could sleep on, in addition to patches of reindeer moss, pine cones of multiple varieties, other twigs, and heaps of gray-brown sand. I hear some breed of miniature red squirrel gnawing pine cones to the forest floor, and the first rumblings of an eighteen-wheeler logging truck barreling through the silence. Sipping this bitter day-old coffee, I remember FBI Agent Dale Cooper, and my brother -- "Damn fine coffee".
Lower Falls
We found coffee at a little gift shop near the Lower Falls parking lot after hiking from the campground to the lower falls. Sitting on a boardwalk bench overlooking the falls and rapids, tourist-watching in the early morning rush and listening to the calming, steady whir of the falls, spraying mist. A sign here says this spot used to be part of the Munising Saltwater Sea millions of years ago, and I wonder what manner of foul sea dinosaurs existed in this wilderness, what raptors and magnificent flying dino-birds flew these Northern skies.
Whitefish Point Lighthouse
S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald memorial
No comments:
Post a Comment