MICHIGAN DAYS 4: SIDE TRIPS



Lake Manistee, where I wanted to be. (Photo by Thomas Harvey)

A week each summer was such a short time to be in northern Michigan, especially when I would gladly have stayed all summer long. And I wanted to cram all of the living I could into those seven days.


Though we may have balked a bit a first

because we didn't want to miss out on lake time

my sister, brother and I would turn ecstatic

once we got to our side-trip destinations.  

Still, I was in two minds about our side trips—always the same ones, one to Traverse City, and the other to the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes—since both involved a lengthy are-we-there-yet car ride that took up precious early morning and late afternoon time at Lake Manistee, where I could have been fishing or swimming or enjoying the woods or running around trying to find my backwoods idol and Buckeye Rustic Resort owner Morris Butcher. But once we got to our destinations, my sister Darla and I (and later our little brother Jim, when he grew old enough to join the fun) would turn suddenly ecstatic. These excursions generally came about mid-week, one after the other. In Traverse City, we usually lunched at a sandwich shop of my thrifty father and even thriftier grandfather’s choosing. But for the dunes, my mother and grandmother would get up early and pack a picnic, which never lacked a large supply of pressed ham and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread liberally slathered with delicious butter, potato chips, potato salad, a thermos of coffee and another of Kool-Aid (grape, if I had anything to say about it) and some homemade cookies (usually peanut butter or chocolate chip).

Traverse City wasn't more than 17,000 people, but seemed like a big exotic

port city to us.

Traverse City. Although the population of Traverse City couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen thousand back then, it seemed to us, who came from a small Ohio farm town, like some bustling exotic port city, especially since we were usually there about the time of the yearly Cherry Festival when the city came alive with thousands of visitors. Traverse City is known as the cherry capital of the United States and at that time of the year, it was always peopled—in addition to the very “Middle-America” local population and American tourists—with colorfully dressed, Spanish-speaking migrant workers, whom my Grandma Alice referred to as “Gypsies” (even referring to the language they spoke as “Gypsy”, so that for years afterward, whenever I heard Spanish spoken or heard the word Gypsy, I immediately imagined the migrants I had seen year after year in Michigan).



Grand Traverse Bay. (Photo by Joel Dinda)

Traverse City took its name from the eighteenth-century French trappers and explorers who called the long voyage across the mouth of the huge bay on which the city would later be built “la grande traverse” (the long crossing). The first settlers in the area, then, referred to the body of water—separated by a peninsula from the vast freshwater sea of Lake Michigan—as Grand Traverse Bay. And the village that they would erect on its shores in the mid-nineteenth century would eventually be known as Grand Traverse City, later shortened simply to Traverse City.

Traverse City coastline, seen from the Bay.

It began, humbly enough, as the enterprise of a ship’s captain from Illinois named Boardman, who bought land at the mouth of a river where it flowed into the western branch of the bay and founded a sawmill there, obviously with the idea of shipping lumber on the great lakes. He gave his surname to the river on which settlers were to build their homes, attracted by the sawmill and the excellent surrounding land. Besides being the cherry capital, the area has long had abundant other farming and is a major Midwestern vineyard region as well.

Captain Boardman would later sell his sawmill to the progressive partners of Hannah, Lay and Company. The firm invested strongly in the lumber operation and it was around and fueled by that business, in the 1850s, that Traverse City began to grow.

The city grew from humble origin on the

Boardman River.

For us, it was just a pleasant outing, walking around the city, buying tiny souvenirs, saltwater taffy and baskets of shiny red and scrumptious black cherries—some of which we were allowed to eat as we walked (“but not too many, because they’ll make your belly ache”), and the rest of which were saved for making pies back at the cabin. We gaped at the stunning views of the bay, with its turquoise strip of water in the shallows along the shore that sharply contrasted with the navy blue of the sudden drop-off.

Drop-off! That word on my father’s lips had a mesmerizing effect on me.  When you swam in a place like that, he warned, you wanted to swim parallel and stick close to the shoreline, in the “green” waters, because it got deep “right now” at the drop-off.  The sound of the word conjured up images of lost ships and deep-sea monsters, of dark places the sun couldn’t penetrate and of hidden whirlpools that would suck you down to unknown depths from which there was no return. As I got a little older, I sometimes imagined mermaids with the dark, pretty faces, flashing eyes, long dark tresses and pierced ears of the “Gypsy” girls I’d seen in the port, saw them take me by the hand and lure me to the drop-off where I would gladly follow them, at the risk of mortal peril, because their beauty was so irresistible. The colors of the water kindled my imagination and filled me with wonder since it was hard to believe that something so Technicolor-beautiful could exist in nature.

Thirty years afterward I would wonder if Grand Traverse Bay had ever really been as spectacular as it had looked to me as a small boy. Probably not, I figured, because nothing is as big, as awesome, as indescribably wonderful when we grow older as it was back then, is it? But on going there on a whim when I was already past forty, I proved myself wrong. The contrasting turquoise and navy blue waters of Grand Traverse seemed just as incredible then as when I was nine or ten. I couldn’t help thinking it must surely be one of the most beautiful bays in the world.

Aboard "The City of Petosky": Reba Mae, Grandma Alice, Whitie,

Darla and Danny.

Only once did we vary from the dual-destination Traverse City/Sand Dunes side trip and go on a different kind of adventure: a Mackinac Island ferry boat voyage on Lake Huron. The great Mackinac Bridge—the world’s third longest suspension bridge, which today links Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas—was still on lead engineer David B. Steinman’s drawing board at the time, so ferries were the only way to get across the Straits of Mackinac between the non-contiguous peninsulas, if you didn’t want to drive all the way around. So a fleet of nine ferries was constructed with a total capacity of nine thousand vehicles per day, which signified major progress in northern Michigan land communications. But we just went for the ride.

The lake journey was part of one of our earliest Michigan trips. I must have been three or four at most. But I still recall the strange, scary sensation of our driving the cars on board the boat, and then the exhilaration of standing on the nodding deck, the breeze in our hair, the sky so blue and clear and the spray of the waves misting our faces. I also recall an old man with very long, very white and carefully parted and combed hair and a face like a leather mask, who held aloft pieces of bread in his gnarly fingers for the lake gulls that, amid their excited screeching, would swoop down and deftly snatch the offered treat from the man’s hand. It was a beautiful day and it remains in my memory as a real adventure, as exciting as any trans-Atlantic voyage.

Vintage souvenir postcard from the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

The Sand Dunes. Before the days of the white man, before the times of written history, the Annishnaabeg people told the story of a great forest fire on the sunset side of the great freshwater sea that they called meicigama. It was so intense and extensive that many animals perished. But a mother bear was determined that she and her two cubs would survive. She pushed her cubs into the great waters and the three of them began to swim toward the shore of the rising sun. But the way was long and arduous, and though the mother bear called to her young as she herself struggled to make the great crossing, the exhausted cubs lagged ever further behind.



Photo by Kerry Kelly.

Eventually, the mother bear arrived on the opposite shore, and there, looked anxiously back hoping to see her babies right behind her. After a while, she climbed up onto one of the high bluffs beyond the shoreline, and there settled down to wait and watch, but her cubs were nowhere to be seen. Still, she waited, never giving up hope, and finally, she slept, a sleep so deep that nothing could awaken her. And so, there rose a wind, that gently began to cover her with a blanket of sand until the land took on her shape and paid homage to her love, determination and bravery. And witnessing all of this, the Great Spirit paid tribute also to her cubs, causing two islands to rise from the great waters of meicigama.

This was how the region’s Native Americans (dubbed Chippewa by the French) explained the formation of the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Lake Michigan islands of North and South Manitou, which, since 1970, have formed part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Park. 

Photo by Kerry Kelly.

Back when we used to go there, it wasn’t yet a Federal park, nor was it yet the huge natural tourist attraction it is today—even more so after being declared Good Morning America’s 2011 pick as the “Most Beautiful Place in America.” It was never crowded, but there were always people there who knew the area and never missed a chance to go and enjoy a day of climbing and the magnificent views to which you were treated once you reached the summit. Back then too, you could still make out the bear where she slept under a grassy knoll overlooking Lake Michigan (a landmark that, so I’m told, has since eroded to almost unrecognizable remnants of the natural effigy). The “infrastructure” was pretty much limited to a parking lot and a wooden building where souvenirs were sold. Everything else was the incredible natural beauty of the dunes towering more than 400 feet above us and inviting us to explore them.

You climbed the dunes barefoot, digging in with your toes, the sun-kissed sand scorching the soles of your feet. Dad, Mom, Grandpa and Grandma, my brother, sister and I, all of us, were suddenly children on the dunes, laughing and panting and scrambling as we made the strenuous climb. We kids would always climb to the top two or three times over, just for the pleasure of the descent—a descent that was sheer abandon, since these were mountains of sand unbroken by rocks, or other obstacles, so that getting back down was a simple matter of throwing yourself off of the top and rolling, sliding, tumbling back down to the bottom.  But on the last ascent, we would linger in the desert-like dream world of sand and razor-sharp grasses at the top, taking in the awesome landscape below with its peacock blue inland lakes and the huge, horizon-less, deep-blue expanse of meicigama (the big waters).

I never can recall a drive back to Manistee from the Dunes. After such an amazing and exhausting day, we kids always fell fast asleep in the backseat of the car and stayed that way until we once again turned in at the Buckeye Rustic Resort.

The Post-Side-Trip Side Trip.  It was after just such a day, when I was, perhaps eight or nine that we arrived back at the resort an hour or so before sundown. I didn’t wake up until Dad pulled the car in next to our cabin. I was sleepy and grumpy and my hair, ears and clothes were full of scratchy sand. I dawdled outside the cabin for a while, dumping sand from my pockets and picking it out of my ears, vaguely depressed that the following day would be our last full one at Lake Manistee.

But just then Morris Butcher pulled up in his dusty, battered Ford station wagon. The tailgate was open and the backend was loaded with garbage cans into which he had been depositing refuse from the different cabins. Seeing me standing there, he took his ever present corncob pipe from his mouth and spontaneously asked, “How’d you like to come with me to the dump and see the deer?”

“Deer?” I asked.

“Yep. That’s where they hang out this time o’ the day.”

I nodded and smiled enthusiastically.

“Well, all right, Danny, then go quick and tell your mom. Tell ‘er we’ll be right back...maybe an hour.”

I started to go, but he stopped me: “But listen up now, son, whatever you do, don’t tell your granddad! Why, hell, if Mairel goes along, the way he runs his mouth, there won’t be a deer for miles around. Scare ‘em off just like he scares all the fish!”

I ran and asked my mother if I could please (please, please, please, please!) go, and since it was Morris I was going with, she finally acquiesced. So off I went, sitting up front with Morris, on the bench seat of his station wagon.

After a short drive on the main dirt road, we turned left onto a much narrower one—more a track than a road and so hidden in the underbrush and forest that you would never have seen the turnoff if you didn’t know where to look. We wended our way back through the birch and pine forest, made magical by the slant of the waning sunlight that filtered through the trees and highlighted this bit or that of foliage while casting the surrounding areas into penumbral gloom. The Ford pitched and jostled over the rutted, unkempt lane, the garbage pails clunking and clanking in the rear, until we finally pulled to a stop beside a large, open garbage tip. The smell of rotting fish heads, innards and other organic debris was overpowering. I held my nose, a gesture that drew a chuckle from Morris. When he’d finished emptying his pails and stowing them back in the station wagon, he took his Missouri Meerschaum from his mouth, tapped the tobacco out of it against his heel and shoved it into the hip pocket of his well-worn dungarees.

“Okay, Danny,” he said, “from here on, we go on foot, and quiet as Indians, okay?”

Morris led and I followed, trying to show just how quiet I could be and attempting to walk, as I’d been assured Indians walked, with one foot placed straight in front of the other. We negotiated a path so faint that I’d never have seen it without this old woodsman as my guide. At one point, Morris turned to me and placed a finger to his lips to indicate complete silence. Then he histrionically shoved his short, thick index finger into his mouth to wet it, held it up, pointed in the direction the wind was blowing and then indicated, with that same finger, the opposite direction. We were going to head upwind, his hand signals were saying.

We hiked briefly along a short ridge. Through the trees, I could see the sunset reflected in an irregularly shaped lagoon, the edges of which meandered in and out of the forest and were lined with dead trees that had rotted at the roots over the course of a hundred flood seasons but remained dramatically upright, colored stark grayish white, like bleached bones. Finally, we came to a kind of blind,    crudely erected using tree boughs and brush, that afforded a clear view of the lagoon shore, and there we hunkered down to wait.

“Where are they?” I asked in a barely audible whispered.

Again, Morris touched a finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of the lagoon. As if on cue, a family of white-tailed deer made their cautious way down out of the woods to the edge of the water to drink: first an old stag that stood alert, head raised, sniffing the air and twitching his long, mule-like ears, massive antlers spotlighted in the sun’s last rays. Then with a snort he seemed to let the others know the coast was clear, and along they came too, a younger buck with less elaborate antlers, a young doe and a little fawn. Warily, they waded a few steps into the shallows, stretched their long necks downward and began to drink.  

It was a magical moment, an almost religious experience of communion with nature, in which we had faded into the surroundings and were thus privileged to share this intimate day’s-end moment with these stunning creatures. It was a Michigan experience that would remain with me forever, a place to go in my mind whenever all else failed to convince me that life was beautiful. 

MICHIGAN DAYS 2: WHITIE’S SWIM

For my father, the real vacation never started until he’d had his swim. On the trip up to Lake Manistee in Kalkaska County, Michigan, he was always still tense and accelerated, pushing himself, driving straight through as if it were a duty with a life or death deadline to keep. There were minimal stops, but only when he couldn’t stand us nagging him anymore. Had he been alone, they would only have been pit stops to gas up. For him it was all about “getting there”.

 The Swim, however, was a sacred ritual, and it was as if God and Nature knew how badly he needed it, because I can’t remember a single year on which it rained, even if it had been raining all the way up, on the first morning after our arrival at the Buckeye Rustic Resort.

The Buckeye Rustic Resort 

I refer to it as The Swim, because it was, indeed, unique. He wasn’t nicknamed Whitie for nothing and he detested any activity that meant exposing his skin to the sun for long periods of time. He was so blonde and so red-complected that he burned like a moth in a candle flame whenever he dared take off his shirt outdoors for more than a few short minutes in summer. In the privacy of his own home, his “lounge wear” consisted of boxer shorts and a t-shirt (or just boxer shorts if the weather was hot). But outdoors, he was always fully dressed in long trousers and shirt (short-sleeved if he could avoid the sun, but long-sleeved if not), since back then there were no sun blocks, and Coppertone only served to butter him up for frying. So The Swim, for him, was just that: a single, ritual swim in Lake Manistee each year when we went for our also almost ritual week there.

Oddly enough, however, Whitie was an incredibly strong swimmer. As a boy, he had been somewhat put off by certain activities because of his extremely poor eyesight—the fault, everyone said, of a bad and ill-cured case of what was known back then as “old fashioned” measles. He wore thick spectacles from a very young age. But he later learned to make his peace with the glasses and became as rough and ready a lad as any other in his rugged neighborhood in the South End of the highly industrial town of Lima, Ohio. His older brother, Red (Bob to his family), was the toughest guy on the block in their two-fisted South Lima neighborhood and wherever Red went, Whitie followed—and glasses be damned. But poor sight was a hurdle he had to overcome and his mother always said that it was what had also made him such a highly strung, hyperactive little boy.

Official poster for the

1933 Chicago World's Fair

by Weimer Pursell

“The only thing that calmed him down when he was a little kid was to sit on the back steps and play his harmonica,” my Grandma Alice used to recall. “And he got so he was pretty darned good at it.” So good, in fact, that in 1933, when he was eleven years old, he traveled with a harmonica band called The Harmonicats to Illinois, where they played at the Chicago World’s Fair (A Century of Progress 1833-1933).

Swimming—like baseball, football and streetfighting—was something he learned with and from Red (who would later test some of these skills as a World War II Navy frogman, and as an instructor for the predecessors to the élite Navy SEALs). Red’s methods were less than orthodox but seemed, in the end, to work. When their mother asked Red and the boys’ Uncle Dale (my grandfather’s younger brother) to teach little brother Norman to swim, Dale drove the two boys out to a pond he knew. The three of them walked out to the end of a wooden boat dock and as little Norman stood there awaiting instructions, Red and Dale (who was never noted for his maturity or responsibility) snatched him up and heaved him into the drink. As he hit the water, he heard big brother Red shout the instructions he had been awaiting: “Sink or swim, Normie!”  Lesson One was over.  

When he complained to his uncle that he might have drowned, Dale just laughed, took his pricey green-wrapper cigar out of his mouth and said, “Hell, Norman, I can’t swim a stroke, but I knew Bobby could pull you out. Stop whining, you’re fine!”

Despite this less than auspicious beginning, however, Whitie took to swimming like a Labrador retriever and mostly learned by imitating his big brother. That was how he started swimming at Long’s Quarry, for instance.   Long’s was a scary-looking, steep-sided, worked-out stone quarry that had long since filled with water. The water was said to be eighty feet deep—deep enough to be a dark greenish-blue, anyway—and its cubicle shape meant that there, you really did sink or swim. Nobody who didn’t know how to swim and swim well had any business being there. Similarly, if they didn’t know how to dive, they had no business diving at Long’s either, since the “diving board” was a tall tower off of which the best high-divers in the area practiced their most daring stunts, with no pesky lifeguards to give them any grief.  

Big brother Red would later

apply some of those skills as

a Navy frogman during WWII

There, Whitie got some of the worst sunburns—but also did some of the best swimming—of his life, just trying to keep up with Red. And it was there too that he discovered that the more you stayed underwater, the less you burned, and quickly became a really powerful underwater swimmer. Later, during his first year in the Army, before he was shipped overseas to fight the Nazis, he did his company proud by winning a trophy for underwater endurance swimming: At the time, from a standing dive, he could swim the entire length of an Olympic-size pool and return nearly the whole way under water, without ever coming up for air. Needless to say, he wasn’t just good at holding his breath, he was also right fast.

So anyway, like I say, for Whitie, vacation only really started with The Swim—a long swim...

Like much of the rest of Michigan the rolling drumlins and valleys around Kalkaska with their crystalline streams and lakes were formed by ancient glaciers and remained as pristine witnesses to another age. Manistee was no exception: a breathtaking dimple gouged in the wild landscape by the painstaking creative process of glaciation. I would stand there on the shore watching as my father prepared for his ritual in the chill of Michigan morning. He was half-afraid, I think, that I might follow him, so he would give me a duty.

“Now, you watch my stuff for a little bit so nobody takes it,” he would say.

I would look around at the unpopulated surroundings as if to ask, “Who?” But he would say, “Make sure, now, okay?” and I would nod and look down at his trousers, t-shirt and socks neatly folded on top of his Florsheim oxfords. My mother wasn’t there, of course, because he never wanted to alarm her. She couldn’t swim and worried herself sick every time he pulled this stunt. But it was bigger than he was—something he promised himself all year. So he would slip out while she and my grandmother were still washing the breakfast dishes, and my grandfather was still busy with his morning preparations that included—former barber that he was—carefully shaving with a straight razor.


I didn't want to miss a single second of lake time.

I, on the other hand, was out of the cabin as early as I was allowed, because I didn’t want to miss a second of lake time, and was, then, an unavoidable witness to Whitie’s Swim. It was a rite, a sort of cleansing of mind and body, ablutions for the soul. All year long he worked day after day in the restaurant—twelve, fourteen hours or more, always on his feet, always under stress, always worried and harassed. All year long he smoked his non-filter Pall Malls and his R.G. Dunn cigars. He did no regular exercise, didn’t have a hobby, didn’t have a sport. His work was his workout, he said, and you almost would have thought it was true by looking at him, because he always remained at the same trim “fighting weight”, a middleweight with Popeye forearms and biceps as hard and round as baseballs, his belly flat and legs powerful just from never sitting down. Nor was there any training for the Manistee ritual: He never visited the Y in nearby Lima, Ohio back home, never went to the municipal pool, never swam in any of the local lakes in Ohio either. And yet, when he arrived in Kalkaska County, Michigan and stood on the shore of Lake Manistee, he seemed to be gripped by an irresistible urge.

And so the rite began. I watched as he gingerly made his way into the clear, silvery-blue waters near the boat ramp, wincing a little at the cold and at the pebbles that challenged his tender, unaccustomed feet, wading in until the lake lapped at the bottoms of his trunks, before diving in head-first in a quick, determined plunge. And then, with the natural grace and physical resistance that characterized him, he would start to swim, pulling easily through the water, barely making a wake, until he was parallel with a floating dock that marked the usual limit for swimmers. It was then that he began to show his real prowess, by diving repeatedly and swimming incredibly long stretches under water.

With each dive of my father’s, I would hold my own breath to see how long I could stand it, which proportionally heightened my concern for his safety because long after I had turned purple and had to gasp for air like a docked fish, he would go on and on until I worried that he had surely drowned. But then, way further out than I could have guessed, I would see his head bob to the surface and he would swim for a bit in a perfect crawl, before drawing another deep breath and submerging once more, until, finally, he was way too far out in the lake for me to see him any longer.

Then, I would sit down cross-legged in the sand to wait by his clothes. From the other shore, I would hear the faint sound of a bugle play breakfast chow call at Camp Tanuga and kept trying to imagine Whitie arriving there, maybe even being greeted by the campers as if he had just crossed the English Channel. And as I worried, I kept trying to imagine that scene, Whitie triumphant, rather than drowned.

Whitie and Danny.

In my head, I would hear his words when I would say, “Sure looks like a long way to the other side, Daddy,” and he would answer, “Naw, not more than a quarter-mile, maybe half...Your ol’ man can do that easy, Danny.”

And eventually, Reba Mae would worry about the silence and come down to the beach to ask a rhetorical question (since she already knew the answer): “Where’s your dad?” And in response, I would point to the wide open waters. Then we would be two there worried on the beach—I, sitting cross-legged next to the property in my charge, silently praying over and over for the owner’s safe return, and she, wringing her hands by the water’s edge, gazing into the distance, trying to see Whitie’s head bob up somewhere on the horizon.

And finally it would, like that of a distant whale, coming up, blowing and breathing, and again going under for an agonizingly long time, before popping up again, ever closer to the shore. Once we could see him well and relax a little, my mother would dash up to the cabin for a towel. And then she’d be there receiving him at the water’s edge, saying, “Norm, you idiot! You don’t do a lick of exercise all year and then you have to do a marathon swim. Just look at you! You’re blue! You must be frozen!”

And he would answer, “Aw now, Mother, no cause for alarm. I could swim this in my sleep,” as she wrapped the towel around him. “Come on up to the cabin and get warmed up, you big idiot!”

“You go ahead, honey. I’ll be up in a second. I’m going to stay here with Danny a minute and dry off.” Then as Mom left and walked back up toward the cabin, shaking her head, he would ruffle my head and put on his shirt, before sitting down on his towel. He would shake his pack of Pall Malls and book of matches out of his shoe, tap one from the pack and light up. And then we would just sit there for a few minutes watching the water.

“Was it cold?” I’d ask.

“Only at first, then you get used to it.”

Whitie’s ritual was over then. It was as if he were a new man. And vacation had officially begun for all of us.

(To be continued)

MICHIGAN DAYS 1—WHAT’S IN A NAME?

When I was a little boy, from the time I was about four until I was twelve, Michigan was a name that plunged me into instant joyful reverie. It was the place and the dream I longed for. I wanted to awake one morning to find that I was there and that it was to be my life from then on. Anywhere that I saw water with the blue sky and white clouds reflected in it—even in large puddles after a sudden summer downpour—the word that came to mind was Michigan and it never failed to fill me with an instant sense of yearning.

Michigan, to my mind, wasn’t a vast state with some of the major, smoke-laden industrial towns of the American North. It was, rather, whispering pine and birch forests, crystalline lakes, sandy dirt roads, cold mornings and warm lingering afternoons with Technicolor sunsets. It was a land of tawny deer and multi-colored snakes, of herons and cranes, of pumpkin seed sunfish, bass and bluegill, of perch, walleye, and the great northern pike.  It was the smell of pine pitch and wood smoke, the scent of twenty coats of dark varnish on log cabins in the afternoon sun. It was a place far from where my father was often worried sick, a place we went just for fun, a place where I felt there was nothing to interfere with our happiness. Michigan, for me, was synonymous with bliss, and Michigan was also synonymous with Lake Manistee and the surrounding area.

I should clarify that when I speak of Manistee, I’m not talking about the better-known lake in the county of the same name that opens onto that great freshwater sea that is Lake Michigan, the Manistee that has been so poisoned by years of heavy industry on its shores—logging, paper pulp mills, salt-mining, steel foundries, etc.—that consumption restrictions have been long in force for the different species of fish that still manage to survive there. No, I’m referring to the 860-acre inland lake located over a hundred miles further north, in Kalkaska County, which, when I was a boy, was about as close as you could get to the wilds.

From the time I first saw Lake Manistee and its dense and dazzling wilds, I thought of myself as being part of it, as being from rural Ohio, but also as being from Michigan—that Michigan, the one of my dreams. That landscape was mine. It belonged to me by right of enduring love and loyalty to it. And indeed, some of my most lasting memories are of the precious few vacations my family spent there.

Nor was it as if we ever “summered there”. At the time, my father and two of his brothers owned a family restaurant in my hometown and for the twenty-five years that he remained in that business, Dad never felt as if he could take any more than a week off each year. A week your “regulars” might stand for. Shut down for two, and you’d lose half of them to the competition. That was his logic. I despaired that the time we spent at Lake Manistee was so short, and counted “the days left” on my fingers each night before I fell asleep in the cabin, with a pinewood and birch fire still crackling in the potbellied stove, junebugs buzzing against the screens and the drowsy murmur of the adults still playing five hundred rum at the kitchen table. But then again, perhaps it was how limited the time was that made it all the more precious to me.

Grumpy Old Men. Most years we went with my Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice. That was how we started going in the first place. Grandpa had been a life insurance salesman for many years, but I think the occupation he cared most about in his life was fishing (or “feeshing”, as he referred to it). His insurance debit was partly located in the area around Russells Point and Lakeview, both towns built on the shores of Indian Lake (originally known as the Lewistown Reservoir), in Logan County, Ohio. So he never went to work without rod, reel and tackle in the trunk of his car. Murel was one of the company’s top salesmen in the area, but he was also a cantankerous, quick-tempered and rebellious man, who had never let anybody tell him how to live his life or do his job. So it wasn’t at all unusual for him, in the middle of a workday, to stop for a little while to see “if the feesh was a-bitin’.” Also in his trunk were other essentials for the well-prepared angler: a see-through plastic mac in case of rain (when the crappies bit best), a battered and stained everyday greenish felt hat, a galvanized catch bucket with a lid (in case he got lucky), a pair of rubber galoshes to protect his fancy two-tone shoes, a square boat cushion to sit on so that he didn’t get the seat of his suit trousers dirty, and an old plaid woodsman’s jacket with worn-slick suede elbow patches to protect his white shirt and replace his suit coat, which he would leave in the car while he tested the waters at places with such enticing names as Sassafras, O’Connor’s Point, Turkeyfoot, Blackhawk and King’s Landing. Everyone knew him over there and he could fish just about wherever he liked undisturbed—unless it was by a Fish and Game warden, since he never was convinced of the need to buy a fishing license.

Now, for a while, Murel had a workmate at the Western and Southern Insurance Company who was even more enthusiastic about angling than he was. The man’s name was Morris Butcher, and Morris and Murel spent a great deal of their time together talking (vociferously debating, actually, since never were there two friends more like Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon in Grumpy Old Men than Morris and Murel) about the best methods for catching a wide variety of freshwater fish.

Morris was a wiry, leathery, piercing-eyed, corncob pipe-smoking man, with a sardonic gold-toothed grin, who looked like anything but a life insurance salesman. And clearly, that wasn’t what he was cut out to be. It was simply a job where a savvy judge of character, which he was, could make the money he needed to do what his heart really desired. Anyway, there came a time before he reached retirement age when Morris reckoned he’d had enough of pounding a debit trying to sell life insurance and decided he wasn’t waiting any longer to start doing what he’d always wanted to do: live on a lake and fish whenever the spirit moved him. So he bought a nice piece of land on a lake he’d discovered in Kalkaska County, Michigan, and, with the sweat off of his brow, built a summer resort there—the Buckeye Rustic Resort, on the shores of Lake Manistee. It was on Morris’s invitation that Murel had first decided to try the fishing on Lake Manistee and found he loved the place—plus, thrifty Scot that he was, the discount he always managed to wheedle out of his friend couldn’t have hurt his decision to go there year after year. Then one year he talked second son Norman (Normie, as my mother called him, Whitie to his childhood friends) into going, and a fleeting family tradition was born.

Getting There. My excitement would crescendo to an almost unbearable pitch in the days leading up to our Michigan vacations. It was always well into summer, late July or early August at least, before we could get away and the waiting was agonizing after the first year we went and I could picture Manistee in my mind. It was always there, like Shangri-La, beckoning me in the mist of memory. I remember my unmitigated sorrow and disappointment the year Dad announced that we wouldn’t be going anywhere on vacation because the restaurant needed painting and remodeling and there would be no time or money for going to the lake. They would close down for ten days and use the time and money entirely for reinvestment in the business. I was devastated.

The years we did go, I started savoring Michigan before we ever left the house, watching my older sister Darla neatly lay out the clothes she wanted to take, following my mother, Reba Mae, from room to room as she retrieved the suitcases—with their wood frames, tan fabric covering and brown leather and brass trim—from the spare closet and started to fill them, and getting together my own sparse fishing gear (the first years, no more than a section of a bamboo cane pole, a bit of line and a yellow and white cork bobber that my grandfather had given me).  Murel equipped us all since Dad always said he was “no fisherman so why buy a rod and reel,” but he would go out in a boat and drown a worm or two while in Michigan just to appease his father. However, he was such an obsessive over-achiever that if the fish started biting, it could be pitch black out, so that you could no longer see your cork in the water, and Normie wouldn’t say die until his father forcibly grabbed the oars and rowed us back to shore. And since one was as competitive as the other, that usually didn’t happen until we were chilled to the bone and half-eaten by mosquitoes.

For the trip up from Ohio, we would steal away like thieves in the dark of night, at three or four o’clock. Though the trip back then, on two-lane roads through towns and cities, took all day, Dad had a theory about “making time” that hinged on pre-dawn departure. Which was okay by me, since The Night Before Michigan might just as well have been The Night Before Christmas: There was no way I was going to go to sleep and maybe be forgotten and left behind. But Darla sometimes had to be wrapped in a blanket and carried to the car once everything else was packed because she flat refused to get up so early.

I particularly remember a trip when we left in the middle of a fierce electrical storm. It added to the excitement since I could feel Reba Mae’s tension even from the back of the car. She was always game for a trip—though, if she’d had her druthers, it wouldn’t have been to a log cabin in Michigan and it wouldn’t have been with her father- and mother-in-law—but she had an innate dread of wind and thunderstorms. Knowing this, Dad kidded her as he drove by saying things like, “It’s raining cats and dogs, Honey!” or, “If this keeps up we’re gonna need oars!” or, “Damn! Did you see that lightning? It’s rainin’ pitchforks!”

That was the first time I’d heard this last expression and it stuck—rather like a pitchfork—in my brain. It was cozy in the backseat, wrapped in an old Army blanket, Darla slumped on the other side of the car fast asleep under what was known then as an “Indian blanket”. (The first couple of years it was just she and I, then came our little brother Dennis—whom we called Jimmy—who traveled between us in back, or up front on our mother’s lap). And now I had this new image of some angry god hurling trident-like pitchforks at us from on high. But here in our car, we were immune. Dad wasn’t scared. He knew we were untouchable. He wouldn’t let anything happen to us. He deftly maneuvered us through the world’s dangers. So while Reba Mae fretted up front and chewed her Juicy Fruit to keep calm, I raised my half-closed eyes to the bottom of the window and, in a semi-dream state, watching the flashes of lightning over the cornfields, trying to imagine them as fiery-blue tridents that were barely missing our speeding supercar and grounding themselves out around us, rendered harmless by our special powers.

Dad underscored that image since for him, trips were serious business with numerous performance factors to be taken into account: the “time you made”, “what kind of mileage you got”, and “what you spent on the road” before you ever got where you were going. So stops were minimal, speeds were as steady as possible and gasoline was only purchased where it “wasn’t high as hell” (a penny or two more a gallon was enough to qualify, so that we were often dangerously close to the Empty peg before he would give in and stop). This meant that by the last leg of that long, stressful trip in the midst of a tri-state storm, he began to resemble a mad Captain Ahab, lashed to the wheel, indefatigable and invincible, forging on despite mutinous calls for stops to pee, to eat something, to, for-godsake-get-a-cup-of-coffee-at-least-Normie.

Northern Pike, our Moby Dick

Being There. And then, like magic, the landscape began to change as we headed into the north on the Peninsula. The pitch was rolling, the air turning cool, the late afternoon sky clearing with dark storm clouds now shredded and blown out against a clean azure field. The berms turned sandy. Oaks and maples gave way to yellow birches and trembling aspens contrasting with the deep green of pines and hemlock. Log and varnished wood structures along the road replaced sawn and painted lumber and brick houses that were the norm back home. There was an outback look to everything so different from the regimented tidiness of Ohio farming communities, an individualism that rendered one house or store completely different from another and each with amusing accessories everywhere: toy windmills and pinwheels, colorful birdbaths, a plethora of garden gnomes and painted plaster stable boys, wind chimes of metal, glass and bamboo, shacky stands along the road selling watermelon, wild cherries and berries, Indian souvenirs and live bait and tackle. And then...nothing. Nothing but hills, forest and the road stretching like a ribbon before us, already drying in a stiff breeze.  I rolled down the window part way and breathed Michigan—that crisp northern air on which you could smell the clear water of a thousand lakes and streams.

After what seemed (to me) like an eternity, we left the narrow two-lane pavement and hissed almost silently along a narrower still sand road, now packed and firm from the rain. And finally, we came abreast of the red-shingled cottage where Morris and his wife, Ines (which everyone pronounced aye′-ness), made their home, and turned into the Buckeye Rustic Resort on the opposite side of the road.

The car had barely come to a stop when I was already out and running down to the edge of Lake Manistee, with my mother’s words of warning about not getting too close to the water on my own, lost on the wind behind me. The air was chilly from the storm and the crystal clear water was freezing cold. But shivering in the late afternoon air after the warmth of the car, I kicked off my Redball Jets, rolled off my socks and waded in just over my ankles. Smiling to myself, I gazed down at my little-boy feet through the clear water against the tawny sand and round greenish lake stones and heaved a sigh of relief. I was at home again, in Lake Manistee.                      

(to be continued)