Alpena: Dairy Queen and mini-golf

In this excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, the kids and I make ourselves at home at a funky hotel in friendly Alpena, Michigan:

"You are an intrepid woman!” said Susan, as she pushed her chair back from the desk in the small office of her Water’s Edge Motel to get a better look at me and the kids. We liked each other instantly. She was a 50-something pistol with firecracker-red hair. She talked fast when she wanted to, slow when she wanted to, and she looked you right in the eye. Her drapy cotton clothes- loose trousers and shirt in a turquoise print more Maui than Michigan – were the sartorial equivalent of downtown Alpena’s crayon-colored homes and businesses.

Susan sized us up and rented us a room, the $60 end unit closest to Lake Huron, with a bench outside. She wanted to know where we’d been, what we’d seen. She asked the kids what they thought of it all and smiled knowingly at the “It’s okay,” and “I like it. It’s good.” She looked back up at me and nodded. As I signed the credit card slip, she pushed her chair back again, and looked at the three of us. Then she looked Adam and Dana in the eye. “These are times you’ll never get back with these kids,” words aimed at all of us.

The Water’s Edge sat at the water’s edge, on its own stretch of sand, and right next to the public beach at Mich-E-Ke-Wis Park. We saw Susan all the time, as she lived in a green cinderblock bunker-like structure to whose rear was attached the straight line of modest motel units, of which ours sat closest to Susan’s personal space, closest to the lake. Susan’s house, which looked homemade, was a beautiful thing to me. The funky bunker sat right on the beach and had a killer view of Thunder Bay, and Susan had a big rectangular window from which she could watch the moods of Lake Huron at all hours, in all seasons. I imagined a conversation between Susan and her husband 10, 20, or however many years ago, after they’d tapped the last cinderblock into place and nailed down the roof. Susan would probably have started the conversation.

“We should paint it.”

“What color?”

“Green.”

“Dark green?”

“No, something wild and sea-foamy, like Huron all whipped up. I’ll go find something.”

And then, I imagined her in the paint store, passing the quiet greens, and emerging with gallons of something called, maybe, Tropical Great Lakes Green, like the color of the Maui-Michigan pantsuit that worked so well with her blaze of orange hair.

We made the Water’s Edge and the spaces and places near it our little universe. The kids were free to roam around, up to but not including stepping into Huron unless I was with them. There was plenty to keep them busy while I brought my journal up to date and did laundry. The park, the beach, a Dairy Queen, and, the mini-golf that I could see from our room’s bathroom window.

Every half hour or so, Adam, Dana or both would burst into the room (made into a commodious accommodation by the keep-door-open-park-New-Paint- right-outside method) and ask for more money for golf and video games. Adam spent a fortune in quarters in the arcade, trying to win a free round of golf. When they were all golfed out, we went to the beach, just as the lifeguards were calling it a day and packing up the rescue surfboard. At 7 p.m., it was still over 70 degrees, and a big ball of orange sun the color of Susan’s hair still lit the calm, indigo water. “You can wade out there for quite awhile,” she’d told me, “before you have to make any decisions.” Dana, who’d been our official Great Lakes water temperature tester, pronounced Huron, “this part of it, anyway,” the warmest of any she’d sampled.

Susan’s big, logy dog had pooped all over the little patch of grass that separated the motel parking lot from the beach, grass which served as a parking lot for her motorboat, the Susan. We picked our way carefully around the boat and the dog droppings as we came and went. Susan took note of our comings and goings.

“You have great kids.”

“I do. Thanks for saying so. They are pretty cool. The kind of kids you can live in a minivan with for a whole summer. We’ve made it to Michigan, and we still like each other.”

“I wish they’d gotten to see the turkey vultures we’ve had lately. Or the deer. I get deer on my lawn sometimes. And a great blue heron my husband calls Mister Blue. And, I hoped you’d be lucky enough to see a freighter. They call regularly, and it’s quite impressive as they come into the bay.”

I wished we’d seen all those things, too, and said so, but added, “The Dairy Queen, the mini-golf and the beach were enough for the kids. Just what the doctor ordered at this point in the trip. They had a lot of fun.”

“The mini-golf is a good neighbor. Nice and quiet.”

I told Susan I loved Alpena and felt lucky we’d come upon this fine place as we came into the homestretch of our American journey. It was a perfect near-ending, an ideal finishing touch. (Had we invoked the interstate escape clause when we’d reached the mitten, we would have missed it.) “I’ll always remember Alpena. It’s the kind of place I could live in.”

Susan smiled and looked out at Huron. “People say kids from Alpena spend their first twenty years thinkin’ about how to get out, and the next twenty years thinkin’ about how to get back in.”

Other people think about getting in, too. “We get lots of retirees movin’ in, because it’s cheap. They’re all snowbirds. Drive their RVs to Arizona in the winter.” She shook her head. “I can’t see sittin’ around in a lawn chair.” No, Susan’s ideal winter is spent right there in Alpena, watching out her big rectangular window for the Great Lakes freighters that anchor close to Thunder Bay to wait out the freeze in Superior. An ice cutter could make Alpena’s Huron port accessible, but they don’t bother, because “the water starts to flow again in February.”

In the morning, I sat on the bench outside the room and laced up my sneakers in the still-dark, and, by the time I’d stretched, a glorious red-orange sun had started to ascend from the watery horizon. I ran to the orb’s rising and watched it gain height, degree by degree, splashing magnificent shafts of colored light across Huron’s surface as it climbed, slowly turning dawn to day. I watched it detach itself from the horizon and become a full and colossal tangerine, a blood orange hanging great and ripe over the gentle swells of the vast lake.

After the run, Susan caught me leaning against New Paint, stretching. “My, what a fit specimen.” That made an old chick feel good. I’d loved her when she’d called me intrepid. Now, I wanted to take her home. She asked if we’d slept well.

“Slept well, and rose well. I just watched a magnificent sunrise.”She turned to the lake. “That’s why we could never leave.”


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Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel: The $10 Porch

From Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

We said goodbye to Judy and boarded the Arnold Ferry that took us out into Lake Huron and delivered us in a half hour to Mackinac Island. The place was gorgeous, privileged, and overflowing with history and tourists. We rode big, fat-tired Schwinns, ate ice cream, bought postcards, and walked the streets, marveling at the boys whose summer job it is to shovel horse crap from the streets of this auto-free island into yellow plastic wheelbarrows. Where do they put it all? The great blooms that blossom all over the island, in gardens and window boxes, must be helped along because tourists ride horses and horse carts through the roads and lanes of Mackinac Island, a beautiful fake fairyland, so stunningly perfect and impeccable that it hurts. Teams of Belgian draft horses delivered Pepsi, Fruit Loops and bottled water to the island’s inns and hotels. Hotel valet boys pedaled bicycles, piled high with luggage precariously perched in baskets, from the docks to the inns.

At the Grand Hotel, grand in this case being understatement, I tsk-tsked all the travel writers I’d read who’d written about this place, because they’d all left something out of their stories. The Grand Hotel, built after the Civil War in the opulent manner of resorts and refuges for the movers and shakers of the gilded age, boasts the world’s longest front porch. I’d read about and seen photos of the porch for years, and Dana, Adam and I walked up the loftier than thou hill the hotel commands for the sole purpose of sitting in a rocking chair and looking out over the Straits.

But a quick rock in a wooden chair on the world’s longest front porch costs 10 bucks a head if you’re not a Grand Hotel guest, something the travel writers failed to report. The approach to the Grand is regal and, if you’re not chic, moneyed, or willing to blow a chunk of your children’s inheritance on a few nights in this place, intentionally and successfully intimidating. American flags and mango-yellow awnings lined the broad, tree-lined, uphill approach which was dotted with signs that, among other genteel but firm directives, told ladies they weren’t allowed to wear “slacks.” (Yikes! The planning of a trip here involves the packing of skirts!) The horse carriages of the rich and wish-they-weres clopped by, the carriage inhabitants wearing a hint of smile as they looked down on those of us on foot. The ye-who-do-not-belong-amongst-us-must-pay-10-dollars-to-sit-on-our-porch signs started early, so you had the chance to hang it up, declare yourself a poor boor, and turn around, to forever wonder what lays at the top of that hill.

We made it, unimpeded, to the top of the driveway. The Grand truly was. We looked down on the garden lawn at the topiary and the registered guests playing croquet, the green Mackinac Bridge sitting beyond the lawn in the Straits, looking like the ultimate croquet hoop. We looked up at the great porch, most of the chairs empty and lined up, waiting for someone to sit in them and keep them company.

I saw two people in matching polo shirts. They were not smiling. I kept walking, looking at the superlative porch. I wanted to sit on it. I geared up for a challenge.

A polo shirt stopped me.

“Excuse me. Are you guests of the hotel?”

“No. We’d just like to sit on the porch for a minute.”

“If you’re not registered guests, there’s a ten dollar per person fee to enter the property.”

“Do you mean I really have to pay thirty dollars for my kids and I to just take a quick walk up there to the porch?”

“Yes.”

“When I saw the signs along the driveway, I wondered how close we’d be able to get before someone stopped us. This must be the spot. From this point on, it costs ten bucks a head to walk on the hotel property?”

“Yes.”

“So, this is the official line of demarcation. You’re the border guards. On this side of you, free. On that side of you, ten bucks a head.”

“Yes.”

I laughed. We left. I loved and hated Mackinac Island.

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Of Oliver Ames and oredocks

I have a book reading and slide show next week (Wed., March 14 at 6:30 PM) in my hometown, Easton, Massachusetts. The venue is the Ames Free Library, one of the half dozen buildings in town designed by renowned 19th-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson. The North Easton Historic District is rich in art, architecture and landscapes created by Richardson and contemporaries like Frederick Law Olmsted, John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White and Fletcher Steele. These treasures exist because of the Ames family, which, under the leadership of Oliver, who came to Easton in 1803, amassed a fortune making the shovels that helped build, among other works and movements great and small, the transcontinental railroad. The family used part of that fortune to commission the gracious structures, sculptures, stained glass and open space enjoyed today by Easton's residents and visitors. The Ames philanthropic legacy is everywhere in Easton, from the historic village core to former family estates at Sheep Pasture, Borderland and Stonehill, now a conservation area, state park and college, respectively. Easton plays a role in Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. An excerpt:

For 9,900 miles, I’d been keeping a list in my head. A list of communities I held as special. These towns had, for different reasons and in different ways, especially touched me. When I thought of them, I smiled from the inside out, and that’s what they had in common. New River Gorge, Lexington, Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans, Santa Rosa, Acoma, Santa Fe, Bluff, Lee Vining, Fort Bragg, Bend, Boise, Red Lodge, Sundance, Belvedere, Duluth, Ashland.

I added Marquette, Michigan to the list. She sat on hills above Superior, her old neighborhoods collections of trim, fresh-painted, wooden workingman houses set amongst mature trees, streets undulating up or down depending on one’s orientation to the lakeshore. Her downtown was a wonder of fire-red stone and brick.

If Ashland had been beautiful red sandstone, Marquette was beautiful red sandstone on steroids. Marquette’s historic districts brimmed with Classical Revival, late Victorian, Gothic, Italianate and Romanesque buildings, and these last called loudest.

I live in a town whose past and current beauty owes almost everything to one family whose fortune from shovel manufacture allowed the commission of works, all within blocks of my home, from such artisans of their day as Frederick Law Olmsted, John LaFarge, Fletcher Steele, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White and Henry Hobson Richardson. It was Richardson’s magnificent Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, an architectural poem in glowing red stone that sits around the corner from my house, which made me want the house to begin with. The house needed work when we found it, but if Richardson had rolled up his sleeves in this neighborhood, how could we walk away? And so, I loved Marquette on sight because I was primed to. I’d lived 13 years daily drinking in the beauty of H.H. Richardson’s sandstone.

I could make another possible connection between my town’s streets and Marquette’s, a link forged by old steel rails. The Ames shovels, fortune, and family that brought Richardson to my town played key roles in the building of the transcontinental railroad. When rail became king, Richardson would design ornate railroad stations, one of which sits two blocks from my house. In the late 19th century, as rail moved the goods and grains and ores of the nation, stations from Detroit to Chicago were built in Richardson’s Romanesque style. And, great Richardson-inspired buildings of colossal sandstone appeared in the downtowns and civic hearts of railhead cities in the Upper Midwest. Perhaps the builders of Marquette’s imposing, beautiful downtown had looked on photographs and plans of the buildings that grace my little village before they erected their own crimson halls and churches.

I’d fallen under the spell of Marquette’s architecture and undulations and hilltop setting above the bay. By the time we laid eyes on the oredock, Marquette had already shown enough treasures to make it hard to leave. We checked into the Super 8, $45, with indoor pool, Jacuzzi, free breakfast, and a view of Superior at the end of the long Route 41 downhill run to the lakefront. We’d play, swim, eat and rest, and give the oredock our full attention in the morning.

I figured God put him there on purpose. We’d driven down to Matson Park at Lower Harbor, eye level with the oredock. The kids ran around and did kid things while I eavesdropped on two old men discussing pike. Seagulls buzzed my head while I shot pictures. I turned around to check on the kids, and there he sat. A twenty-something guy with spiked yellow hair and blue-tinted sunglasses sat inside the trunk of his car listening to music pulsing from speakers that should have been on a living room floor. He stared out at the oredock. He had to have been purposely sent for me to talk to, because it was too early for someone that age, unless he had to get up for work (it was Monday, so a possibility, although he didn’t seem to be going anywhere) to be out of bed.

I approached the trunk and introduced myself. He turned down his music and began telling me about the oredock, which he clearly loved. He spoke with passionate intelligence.

He was from Ishpeming, a gray place we’d passed through. He sat in the trunk and told me how everything had once worked. He described an ore loading, from the train’s approach, to its screeching crawl out over the water to the end of the dock, to its dumpers opening wide, to the pellets screaming down the pockets into the ship’s hold, to the freighter sitting lower and lower as its load mounted.

And then he turned to today. "The Marquette dock closed down about 10 years ago, maybe more. The only working dock in the area is at Presque Isle."

"Is the Presque Isle dock busy?"

"Yeah, pretty busy. The Chamber of Commerce should have a ship schedule, but if you spend the better part of a day there, you should see a ship."

Presque Isle was north, and we had to head south, so I asked him to tell me more, to paint more pictures of what it was and is like to live here.

"Cheap foreign steel is flooding the economy, and it’s a real pain in the butt." He said there were only two operating ore mines in the area, Tilden and Empire, both run by the giant Cleveland-Cliffs corporation.

"Ishpeming’s mine is closed down. They’re thinkin’ of makin’ it into an amusement park."

There were more old ore mines around than working ones.

"Ya know Negaunee?" he asked, looking at me through his blue lenses.

"Yes. We drove through it. Pretty lake. Had a gorgeous brown stone church with mint green and white trim. My daughter said it looked like a cake. Like a gingerbread house."

"Yeah. Well, there’s an old mine there, on school premises. Negaunee High School’s built over an old mine shaft. You can still go down in it."

"What about Marquette’s oredock? What’s happening with that?"

"They’re deciding whether to tear it down. Public safety. For now, they show fireworks over it on the 4th of July."

I thanked my friend for his time. He shook my hand, said to have a good trip, and turned his music back up.

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