SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 80
Yoop Dreams, Part 1.
“We talked then about how we think of ourselves as Americans but there are many worlds in the United States if you stray very far from freeways and stay away from television.”
— JIM HARRISON, TRUE NORTH
My favorite of the cardinal directions is north. When the compass points to 0° I am headed the right way — US 41 towards Marinette, or 75 to Sault Ste. Marie. Perhaps it’s because I was born in the cold that I feel most at home in the Northwoods among the pine, maple, and spruce, elderberries and chokecherries, the odd moose, wolf, and black bear, and the hardy people whose air of geniality often masks ruthless reproval. Neither hunter nor angler, nor even snowmobiler, I find myself drawn nonetheless to the deep and once-great forests of the Upper Midwest. And so in the first golden days of September, I climbed 41 past Green Bay towards the western base of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The remote and rugged wildness of this territory enthralled me, shorn as it may be of its native glories which once inspired descriptions from early 19th century explorers as some of the most beautiful, foreboding land on earth.
Back home in Chicago the summer lingered on, but flares of red and yellow had burst onto the canopy alongside Highway 141 approaching Iron Mountain, a once-booming mining town just north of the Wisconsin border where I had booked a cheap room in an old woman’s attic. (“Come and enjoy the Northwoods with Helen, my Russian Blue, and I.”) But first, dinner at Bent’s Camp, a 129-year old sportsman’s camp on the edge of Mamie Lake whose log cabin restaurant served walleye seven ways. Inside the walls were papered with century-old birch bark and maximally decorated with familiar Northwoods trappings: vintage Hamm’s signs casting their enchanting azure glow, waxen muskie mounts the length of Labrador Retrievers, a giant moose head gazing stoically over the salad bar. I ordered an old fashioned and some walleye (potato-crusted and fried) and settled in for the last quarter of the fall’s first Packers game.
The shouts of drunken Cheeseheads mingled with the babble of video poker games and the patter of commercials: “Sign up now for Verizon’s premium plan. New and existing customers get a three-year price lock guarantee…” A 400-pound man in a tent-sized Jordan Love jersey offered a rebuttal from the stool beside me: “Take your premium plan and stick it where the sun don’t shine!” Through the panoramic windows overlooking the lake, I watched three burly hunters dock their camo duck boat in the evening’s fading light. Monitored keenly by a solemn chocolate lab, they hitched the dock line in their matching balaclavas and Realtree Max-5 waders, triangulated so that for a moment they appeared as a Norman Rockwell painting for the end-of-empire era.
Lately I’d found it difficult to answer people’s questions regarding what I even did on my “reporting missions,” which I could admit bore some resemblance to what others might call “weeklong benders.” Worse luck still to those who wondered what my book would be about. “Well, basically,” I’d stammer, “I drive around the Midwest, looking for, uhh, wonder, intrigue, trouble…” Beyond that, there was the issue of my patriotic wanderlust, whose staunch nonpartisanship was becoming hard to square amidst the endless and increasingly demented culture wars. Later I’d find an answer in a book I’d bought at random, Richard Dorson’s Bloodstoppers & Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from 1953. A chronicle of Yooper lore as told by its then-living residents, the folklorist gathered its tales by simply paying attention in what he called “one of the richest storytelling regions in the United States.”
“I went to the Peninsula believing that one could uncover many kinds of living folk stories in America, in a limited time and area, and need not dream them up or copy them out in the library. The quest succeeded most happily,” wrote Dorson in his introduction. “I heard creation myths, fairy tales, tall tales, occult tales, legends, romances, exploits, jests, anecdotes, noodle stories, dialect stories, told by Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Sioux Indians; by Finns, Swedes, Poles, Germans, Italians, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Englishmen, even by Luxemburgers, Slovenians, and Lithuanians; by farmers, lumberjacks, copper and iron miners, fishermen, sailors, railroaders, bartenders, undertakers, authors, county officials, newspaper editors; by the senile and the juvenile, the educated and illiterate; by family circles and boarding house cliques in full blast and by solitary old-timers in tar paper shacks. I never spent a day in the Peninsula without collecting tales, even when several hours went in driving, and although I literally knew not a soul in the area.”
To think that no one had believed me when I said that I was spending my nights in far-flung taverns in hopes of writing the next Great American Novel by osmosis.
The next morning was embellished with beads of cold dew and ribbons of fog as I drove north from Iron Mountain towards the Keweenaw Peninsula, nearly mowing down a rafter of wild turkeys as I watched the sunrise dance on the dewdrops on the windshield. The leaves were changing faster as I neared Keweenaw Bay, heading into Copper Country. Here in Michigan’s northernmost tip — “the ends of the earth, and beyond the boundaries appointed for the residence of man,” or so the explorer Henry Schoolcraft described the Keweenaw in 1820 — ancient volcanic activity produced native copper deposits unlike anywhere on earth. The Natives mined the region for millennia until the 1840s, when the Ojibwe signed away their land to the feds. Soon the peninsula was flooded with European immigrants who’d come to the U.P. for work in the commercial mines, and by the turn of the 20th century, the Keweenaw was ethnically diverse to the point where Copper Country residents took pride in being foreign. Identifying as a Yankee was for those pussies downstate.
“THE WORLD NEEDS MORE YOOPERS,” declared a billboard just past Baraga on Highway 41 above an image of a sleeping fetus whose lips curled in the suggestion of a smile. Along the roadside, homemade signs advertised bags of apples and bundles of firewood for sale on the honor system. Between signboards waged a war of feminine whimsy and rowdy masculinity: ads for homemade jams and quilting stores, fireworks and firearms, and in the Peninsula’s Finnish tradition, endless offerings for hand-built wood-burning saunas. Investigating some disturbance, a bald eagle hopped along the shoulder, rendering the scene as perfectly clichéd as a Thomas Kinkade painting.
I was heading for Copper Harbor, the very tip of the peninsula, having booked a room for two nights at a log cabin bed and breakfast “by the shores of Gitche Gumee,” to use Longfellow’s parlance, or gichi-gami, as the Ojibwe call Lake Superior today. The morning sky was pale over the inland sea — the world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area, whose silvery expanse shared none of the inviting features of Lake Michigan back home. Instead, it projected a clear-cut cosmic message regarding the disposability of human life. With the windows down, I could almost hear the waves whispering “NO LIVES MATTER” as they curled impassively to shore. My phone had stopped working miles ago, though it hardly mattered, there being just one road that led to the Keweenaw’s end. It seemed fair to say that I was in the bonafide middle of nowhere, a place where only the profoundly lost could wind up by mistake. Here and there appeared an empty tavern or abandoned gas station, a giant gauge that marked the area’s historic snowfalls (390.4 inches between November 1978 and April ‘79), and a building on whose red brick walls a painted message located me squarely in “THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH.”
Behind the bed and breakfast, three miniature donkeys stared balefully at the intruder interrupting their lunch of hay. The seaside log cabin inn doubled as an antique shop and overflowed with local taxidermy — beavers, bobcats, and an especially charming albino raccoon — ornate wood-carvings, and what looked to be some 200 terrifying Victorian dolls. Greeting me in the lobby was the elderly Dutch owners’ son, whose stringy hair and baffled demeanor gave the impression of a man who’d just awoken from a Rip Van Winkle slumber that began around the time of Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All. “Any cool dive bars around here?” I asked as he fumbled for the key to the America Room. “Aw, man, wish I could help you,” he said, gently shoving from the desk a 15-pound tortoiseshell cat. “Unfortunately, when I was young, I drank myself psychotic. Haven’t touched a drop in 20 years. Can’t say I really get out much these days. Don’t mind Peanut, she’s friendly.”
“Long ago I misplaced the list I used to keep of writers I knew who had to quit drinking to stay alive. I remember the number had reached nineteen and it must be nearly double that by now,” said Jim Harrison, the greatest writer ever produced by the state of Michigan, in his memoir Off to the Side. “Perhaps it begins with alcohol dispelling the essential loneliness of a solo art, and then for many the habit gets out of hand and swallows the life.” For me, it was hard to say whether the opposite was true — that it was writing which distracted me from my calling (shooting the shit) — or if that whole song-and-dance was, in fact, a massive cope. What did it mean that every writer I admired had drank themselves to at least temporary ruin — Denis Johnson, Lucia Berlin, Marguerite Duras, to say nothing of Hemingway, in whose hometown I was born? And was it delusional to say that twenty years of drinking had given me a lot more than it had taken away?
Anyway, never take advice from people who hate life. Jim Harrison, who died in 2016, appeared to love his. Born and raised in rural Northern Michigan, where a childhood accident left him blind in his left eye, he became best friends in college with fellow Michigander and SCSG hero Thomas McGuane, with whom he would spend much of the early ‘70s loitering Key West amidst the drug smugglers, acid freaks and other exotic charlatans, plus a few artists and writers who dabbled in the above. Another was Jimmy Buffett, who wrote a sweet remembrance a few days after Harrison’s death, recounting cross-country road trips from McGuane’s ranch in Montana to Harrison’s home in Lake Leelanau: “The unforgettable drive across country, just the two of us in his Ford Cortina, taking turns at the wheel, as we crossed the heartland from Montana back to Michigan, sharing our vision of America to each other and the cows we passed along the way.” As for Harrison’s indulgences, which persisted past the lawless ‘70s and well into his later years in Palm Beach, Montana, and Arizona: “We were all still terrified at his refusal to quite smoking and cut down on his drinking, but that was his choice, and he always knew the consequences. It was his life.”
“Drinking causes drinking. Heavy drinking causes heavy drinking. Light drinking causes light drinking,” continued Harrison in his memoir. “The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit, thus losing a pleasure that’s been with us forever. We don’t have much freedom in this life and it is self-cruelty to lose a piece of what we have because we are unable to control our craving. In drinking, as in everything else, the path is the way. What you get in life is what you organize for yourself every day.”
Absent the innkeeper’s advice, I went with my gold standard: find the oldest bar in town and pull up a stool. Operating more or less continuously since 1890, Shute’s Saloon still stands in the same stately brick building on the main street of Calumet — once the center of Michigan’s copper mining industry, now a town with a population of just under 700 to which locals referred by the nickname “Calu-meth.” This I learned from a pretty bartender named Thunder, whose bracelets jingled as she uncapped my High Life and began regaling me with stories of the area’s infamously, well, familiar genetic makeup. “I swear everybody from Lake Linden has the exact same face,” she said. “I was trying to describe this place to my grandmother in Florida. She thinks it’s just a frozen version of The Hills Have Eyes.”
Beside me at the bar, whose 135-year-old walls were painted with a mural of Copper County’s mining heyday, sat a man of maybe 30 with sleep still in his eyes, nursing an unctuous Bloody Mary swimming with pickles. It was his day off from his job as an engineer aboard the passenger ferry which traveled biweekly from Houghton to Isle Royale, the remote island in the northwest of Lake Superior — and the least-visited national park in the lower 48 states — where wilderness seekers go to camp among the moose and wolves. He asked me about my job, and I answered as best I could. “So you just do what you want, whenever you want,” he said. “Sounds like the dream.”
“I guess so,” I conceded. “But you work on a boat! That’s a different kind of dream.”
“Well, there is romance to it,” he agreed, telling me about the days when he lived and worked on freighters hauling limestone and taconite across the Great Lakes. “It used to be a non-stop frat party. But those days came to an end. Rules and regulations. The Wild West is over.”
Sometimes when especially hungover, he liked to ride his Harley with no destination in mind. “I don't know what it is... a sense of impending destiny?” he wondered aloud, then launched into a story of the night in early fall when he’d left Calumet some hours before sunrise. “Next thing I know, I’m at the Wisconsin border. So I kept going. Next thing I know, I’m in Duluth. So I kept going again. Next thing I know, I’m at the Canadian border and the lady’s grilling me ‘cause I've got no bag, no clothes. ‘What do you do?’ ‘I work on ships.’ ‘Do you know anybody in Canada?’ ‘Just you.’ Finally the gate swings open. She’d had enough of me.” Two and a half days later, sleepless but for a nap in a Quality Inn lobby, he returned to the peninsula, looking like a hobo. “I like doing stuff like that,” he shrugged. “Problem is, you can never find anyone who wants to do it with you. ‘You wanna ride to Thunder Bay?’ ‘Nah, I think I’ll just sit here and watch TV. Think I’ll just do the same thing I’ve done every day of my life.’”
The loudest thunderstorm I’d ever heard rocked me to sleep in the America Room that night, while I dreamed myself inside the berth of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
