Michigan, Day Three

In the interest of time, we started the following day with a breakfast at our hotel, which was included in our room rate. It was terrible – cold, gloppy and greasy, washed down with weak lukewarm coffee. It was also a bit surreal, held as it was in the hotel’s enormous, oak-paneled formal dining room, with a few guests eating in silence, no doubt oppressed by the unnecessary gravitas of the space, and one of John Coltrane’s less listenable recordings being piped in through the PA. I was really ready to leave Mackinac Island. Once again we caught the 9:00 a.m. ferry back to the mainland.

Our destination that day was the town Grand Marais, on the Eastern end of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. With every road in Michigan seemingly under a permanent state of construction, we finally arrived around 1:00, wolfed down a quick lunch of protein bars and trail mix and headed for the trail. The Eastern end of Pictured Rocks is home to Grand Sable Dunes, some of the largest in North America. We started at Log Slide, once really a slide that lumberjacks used to send freshly cut logs down to the waiting barges moored in Lake Superior. All of what is today’s Pictured Rocks, and in fact a majority of the entire UP, had been clear-cut in the mid- to late-1800s. It is said that UP timber made most Midwestern cities possible.

The trail wound its way along the edge of the dunes, mostly covered by a canopy of trees but with regular openings onto some of the most breathtaking views of the lake and the sand bluffs below us. The day had started out sunny and quiet, but by early afternoon a solid cloud cover had rolled in and a strong wind had picked up. The surface of the lake was covered with serious-looking white crowns. Every time we stepped through a break in the trees, the cold North-Easterly wind hit us in the face. Standing on one of those precipices high above the water, looking out at the turbulent lake, with not a boat in sight, really made us feel like we were at the edge of the world. We hiked to the Au Sable Lighthouse about two and a half miles away before turning back.

The lighthouse, which I had hiked to from the opposite direction two years ago, is exceptionally well preserved and is still in operation. Originally built in 1874 and powered by burning oil, it was converted to electric power by the Coast Guard in 1958 and completely automated. The original keeper’s quarters are occasionally open for tours, but were closed when we got there.

We returned to the car and drove back into Grand Marais. With a permanent population of about 200, twice that in the summer, it is a real backwater – perhaps the most remote place I have ever stayed, not counting the Twelve-Mile Beach campground, reached by 22 miles of dirt roads, where I camped two years ago. Tourism, such as it is, is Grand Marais’ only means of income. There is a large private campground with RV hookups in the middle of town along with two or three motels and a public dock. In the winter, it is a major center for snowmobiling. All this is not enough to give the town a sense of self-worth, however. It appears out of nowhere when you drive up to it – Michigan Rt. 77 simply ends, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of a town, and before you even get out of the car you realize that it is a place that has stopped caring about how it looks to visitors. Decrepit, though large, houses, line the main street, kids’ bikes and old chairs strewn about on lawns, a rusty trailer with a pair of old snowmobiles ogling the street with their gaping headlights. The sole gas station’s pumps still have rotary dials.

Our lodging for the night was the Beach Park Motel – a gray, barrack-like two-story building a block away from the center. Curiously, even though there are no telephones in the rooms, it claims to offer wi-fi. When we walked into our room upon check-in, we quickly discovered that it had not been cleaned. Thankfully for us, vacancy was plentiful, and Andy, the proprietors’ son who was on duty that evening quickly moved us to another room. Showered and changed, we left in search of dinner.

In a town like Grand Marais, needless to say, choices were slim, but Hunt’s Guide (an indispensable resource if you're thinking of going) claimed that there was an actual brew pub in town, the Lake Superior Brewing Company (no relation to the commercial micro-brewery of the same name in Duluth, MN). This proved to be a large house at the lake end of the main drag. It did not look like a restaurant, but a faded sign above the door claimed that it was, and once we stepped inside we were pleasantly surprised to find a clean and cheerful, in a rustic sort of way, dining room, with a long bar running down one side and a good number of customers seated around several tables made out of old pickle barrels. We sat at the bar whose décor was a bizarre combination of taxidermied minks and 80s-chic backlit glass tiles. The bartender, a dead ringer for Willie Nelson, informed us that despite the town’s sad appearance, the previous weekend witnessed an unexpected onslaught of tourists, causing them to run out of several things, including whitefish and all but two of their beers. Not all was lost, however, as their stout was still available, and with the temperature outside quickly dipping into the low fifties and the wind showing no sign of subsiding, it would have been my choice anyway. It looked and tasted home-made – yeasty and young, but deliciously fresh and clean – and both J. and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Whitefish being unavailable, we risked pizza, and were pleasantly surprised. It had too much bad cheese and too little of everything else on it, of course, but the crust was very decent and actually tasted like pizza, not flattened Wonderbread.

Looking about, I was not sure whether most of the clientele were locals or tourists, but eventually concluded that it being Monday, it was mostly the former. A pint of the local stuff was poured now and again, but the big seller seemed to be cans of Miller Lite. To our right, two men in trucker's caps, on a first-name basis with the bartender, drank Seagrams VO on the rocks and played cribbage (!). To our left, three thirty-something women, incongruently well-attired in dresses or slacks, kept up a lively chatter among themselves and with a steady stream of far less impressive-looking guys wandering in and out of the bar. By the time we left around eight, it was freezing-cold outside, but, it being the UP, still light. J. returned to the motel to keep warm while I wondered onto the wind-swept beach to watch the sunset.

I would venture a guess that most of us urban and suburban dwellers have not seen a sunset – a real sunset, where you see the sun descend over the horizon, not behind a highrise – in so long that we forget they exist. I was reminded of this two years ago right there in Pictured Rocks, when right from my campsite I watched the sun set over Lake Superior on a perfectly clear evening. The last time before that was when I was about ten. When I walked out onto the beach in Grand Marais, the sun was still high enough and bright enough that I could not so much as glance at it directly, even with sunglasses on. The wind was steady and strong, the surf making the lake sound just like the ocean. The sky had cleared up over the course of the evening, but there was still a thin layer of grayish-purple clouds hanging low over the water, adding to the drama. The sunlight refracted as it passed through them and acquired a spectral quality, forming a deep pink halo around the fireball. The sun itself was a deep but intensely glowing orange – imagine a slice of smoked salmon draped over a floodlight. When its bottom edge hit the water, for a few moments it still looked perfectly round, as if it would ooze over the surface of the lake instead of disappearing behind it. By the time it was a quarter of the way gone, I could look directly at it through a pair of twelve-dollar Target sunglasses. After the bottom half had disappeared, I could watch it growing steadily smaller and see the Earth's rotation in real time. When it was all gone, the sky retained the glow that to me was more heart-rending than the sight of the setting sun itself. Same color, but many degrees less intense, at the lake's surface, it morphed into the steely gray of the twilit sky through an infinity of intermediate colors that I am convinced have no names in the English, or any other, language. Walking away from the beach, I glanced at the house closest to the water -- shutters drawn, no lights inside -- and wondered whether the overwhelming experience of seeing what I had just seen would eventually dull if I could simply walk out onto my deck on any given night and casually glance at a sunset. In the parking lot, two middle-aged gentlemen in expensive hiking gear were perched on the hood of their car, enjoying the spectacle, with two goblets of red wine, the oversized Riedel kind, in their hands.