Once again I managed to spend my "rest day" running around town doing errands - which included getting my rear wheel trued, rigging up a new bell after breaking my old one the other day, doing my laundry & getting my hair cut (at the same time! what a great mini-mall that was) - and wishing Camilo a happy birthday. It feels ok to be this far away on such an important occasion, but a little weird at the same time... and I've been remembering the night he was born - probably the most important night of my life!All this jolly nattering has sort of gotten in the way of explaining how deeply sentimental I feel being here - in Michigan, and specifically in Escanaba. My family used to come here every summer; we would spend a week at a cabin about 50 miles away, on Lake Michigan, and come to Escanaba once during that time to do laundry (!) and I guess grocery shopping. I don't know if this was a big painful chore to my parents, or a break from the hard work of "vacationing" in a small cabin with five kids, one bathroom, electricity supplied by a generator that was constantly in need of repair (which my dad had to fix) and plumbing dependent on the pump running on the same not-very-reliable generator.
To me the whole thing was a huge adventure - and so, even though my adult self can empathize with how hard our vacation might actually have been for my parents, just being here evokes so much joy and so many memories. (Like getting to drink Tang all the time, probably because my mom didn't like the metalic taste of the water, either. And spending nearly the entire day swimming around in Lake Michigan, til our lips would turn blue and shivering we'd insist "But I'm not cold!" and resist coming inside...)
When I was in high school I would come up to the U.P. on these nutty road trips with my friends Clare, Kenny & Ken - including one winter trip that found us sleeping in Kenny's dad's Suburban (old-style: this was 1977) at the point in the road they stopped plowing the snow, and we simply couldn't drive any farther. I won't go into any more details since this blog is rated PG-13 (on account of the disgusting road-kill and diaper-rash situations) but suffice it to say: The U.P. is where my sense of adventure was cultivated - and it remains a thrill to be here.
Today I made a point of talking to people who live here to get a better sense of what's happening in town now. All along the road I've noticed that many small towns are becoming more ghostly - so many of the shops and restaurants are either boarded up or for sale. In Wisconsin earlier this week I found a spot marked on my map as a town w/many services was completely boarded up. Escanaba is fairly big and has both an old downtown (with some thriving small businesses like bike shops, restaurants, and other sporting goods stores - but also a fair number of empty store-fronts) and a commericial strip along US Route 2, with fast-food restaurants & Walmart and the like, which serve the surrounding area but are obviously also part of the tourist trade.
And that's something I've seen across the country so far: where there are tourists, there are espresso shops, neat little stores, nice parks and places to walk, etc. But away from those areas it's hard to find groceries, let alone thriving community businesses... (or pie - pie seems to have become a tourist commodity... at least good homemade pie has. Which makes no sense!)
What really struck me here is that among the five people I had deeper conversations with, three of them were artists! Including a guy working the tech counter at Staples; a woman named Dany who teaches art in middle school in Grand Rapids (and who bought me a beer - thanks again!) and a guy named Ed who's a sculptor... Ed said it's because studio space is so cheap here; people get jobs doing whatever and can afford to do their art too. I asked the guys at Staples if they wanted to stay here or get out - one is heading to art school but would stay if there were more opportunities here; the other one just wants to travel. (Imagine that!) They all said this is a great place to grow up and to live in - just somewhat limited. It made me wish I'd taken the initiative to have these kinds of conversations along the way, and I mean to make the effort from here on. (I've been talking with lots of people, but usually answering their questions re: biking, and asking where they're from - but not going very deeply into anything.)
So: Here are this week's pictures - starting out in St Paul Minnesota, crossing Wisconsin, and hitting the U.P. I've been amazed at the number of off-road bicycle paths I've encountered along the way... the funny street signs... and the rolling hills of this landscape. (Also the humidity and biting insects - but those didn't show up in the photos so well.)
The picture of my tent was from a night I cowered between mobile homes in an RV Park because "severe" thunderstorms were predicted - I know, I know, they're tornado magnets, but it was my only option. (There was a big storm but it veered around us - I could see the lightning but it was a few miles away.)
Summer memories!!! Following along has brought a huge wave of nostalgia for those summer times in the UP. In addition to the Tang (we kids thought it was so cool to be drinking it all day long instead of water), I remember having to wear old sneakers to get down the path, along the beach and into the water (the beach wasn't sand it was rocks - lots of rocks, of all kinds and sizes); and staying up late playing Canasta under a Coleman lamp for light.
ReplyDeleteHave a great trip across the rest of the UP and across the Mighty Mac. See you soon!