The Upper Peninsula is cold,
rugged and often uncomfortable.
But its pristine beauty impels you
to answer the call to return.

By Lori Hall Steele
PARADISE, MICH. — I don’t really like the Upper Peninsula. It’s a memory of cold waters and sloppy pines, a long drive through nowhere to the curb of a country. I try to stay away, I really do, but it keeps pulling me back, reeling me up into its landscape of damp brush and black rock. And for that, I blame the men in my life: my husband Brian and brother David.
      Cloverland -- that rabbit-shaped peninsula that makes up a third of Michigan -- calls to the men in my life, bidding them to visit and revisit. To them, the ragged geography is a True North, a lower case version of Montana or Alaska. They believe in Nick Adams, that we reconnect to our essential selves by eating cold canned beans in wilderness. Each year they try to lure me over the bridge. I say no. I picture the burned-black Seney flats and state-issue outhouses.
      Then I remember the blue herons and dancing in yellow butterflies. And I almost say yes.
      It was July 1995, and as we canoed down the Two-Hearted River toward Lake Superior, dipping our oars in the rusty river water, the sky blackened. Lightning flickered and crashed and flashed. It began to rain. Hard. Thunder boomed over the big lake, echoing across the waves. In the middle of this electrical storm, two blue herons appeared downriver in the pines. These little spirit guides waited for us to near, then flew around each bend to wait again, over and over, until the storm blew past.
      That’s just like the U.P. It is a land of isolated poetry. A place where ravens decorate dumpsters and blue-eyed wolves stare from sandy roadsides. Where Keweenaw monks pick tiny wild strawberries and make God’s finest jam. After the lightning storm, we stopped for firewood the camp’s general store and as I lifted a log from a pile, a cloud of small lemon-yellow butterflies flew up and encircled us. Like magic.
      But still, the water is very very cold.

      Approaching the U.P. from the south, the white bones of the Mackinac Bridge rise, a five-mile tether to the busy world down under. This is the entrance to the land of Yoopers, the far-away country that immediately defines itself as, well, separate. The landscape shifts, and rocks jut from the earth. Black signs hand-lettered with Day Glo orange promise Paul Bunyan-sized whitefish and the Queen’s Best Pasties -- the region’s trademark dinner pies filled with rutabuga, potatoes and chopped meat. Jacuzzi-suite resorts haven’t yet displaced the post-war kitsch: travelers can sleep in tee pee hotels and tiny log cabins. And still visit The Mystery Spot.
      My first trip to the U.P. was accidental. My husband-to-be and I took college book money for a rainy autumn road trip to find the sun. He was driving, so we went north. When we hit Lake Superior’s shoreline I knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore. It is a haunted lake, full of black rage and human bones. I’d grown up with the flat taupes of Lake Huron and majestic blues of Lake Michigan. Superior was dark. It could crack ships.
      We drove to Paradise, a shoreside collection of nondescript buildings, and we drank gin with the bartender at the Yukon Inn. We were the only visitors in town, the only people who came into the bar, which was the only open place in town. We played pool. Smoked cigarettes. Listened to the bartender talk about working Texas oil rigs before things there went south. A cat pawed at the window. Did we know it was the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald? the bartender asked.
      “...The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitchigumi.” We sang Gordon Lightfoot together. Whitefish Point, down the road from Paradise, is the vanishing point for scores of ships. Exhibits at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Museum tell of the freighters and frigates eaten by the violent border waters. We sang louder, maybe to dispel some of the encroaching sense of vulnerability: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead...”
      Tannic acid -- not some innate wickedness -- makes the water look black. It’s everywhere in the Upper Peninsula, leaching into rivers and streams and puddles. Nearby Tahquamenon Falls -- one of 200 waterfalls in the peninsula -- puts on the peninsula’s best tannic acid show. In summer, the 50-foot upper falls roar down in a russet-gold veil, and in winter, its waters freeze into mammoth golden icicles. Beyond the falls is a 40,000-acre state park that’s home to moose and pine martens. My in-laws honeymooned here, and my terrified mother-in-law walked beneath the falls in the river gorge. “She had to prove herself,” my husband says, laughing.
      But like everywhere in Cloverland, civilization has crept in. Nestled against the Tahquamenon wilds is a microbrewery. Tourist traffic flows through nearby Sault Ste. Marie to the Kewadin Casinos -- one of seven U.P. Native American gaming operations constructed since the 1980s, including the nation’s first at Baraga. Boats take vacationers for stunning glimpses of the Pictured Rocks.
      The U.P.’s centers of civilization, its bigger cities, seem to resemble one another with downtowns built during the late 1800s boom of logging, mining and shipping. These are frank structures, built with cut granite and rust-colored stone in a solid Romanesque style. It’s like the food in U.P. restaurants: generous and honest. Though similar, the cities each bear birthmarks: The Sault’s mechanical locks and shipping lanes testify to its maritime identity. Houghton’s hills, iron bridge trestles and co-ops hint at mining shafts and academia. There’s a sense of suspended animation here, coupled with a gritty determination to survive as economic outposts after the booms ended.
      But the Upper Peninsula isn’t really about cities. It’s more about their absence. In the Hiawatha and Ottawa national forests alone, there are close to 2 million acres of untrampled lands. Down U.P. two-tracks everywhere are secret cabins, places where people can howl into the wind and be heard only by annoyed deer. Several years back my husband and I helped a buddy reroof his cabin near the Yellow Dog River. That night, the boys tossed an old couch on the fire. “It’s not a good year unless you’ve had a sofa-burning,” our friend philosophized.
      That was the closest I’d been to the Keweenaw Peninsula. My preparation for the state’s iron and copper mining region was a story from my husband’s youth featuring a cold rainy week, four boys in a station wagon, a car-sick pooch and hours at a laundromat. I wasn’t prepared for the terrain’s ruggedness or the disturbing sense of exodus.
      After a rainy night with a wet dog in a tent, we bought bread from the famous jam-making monks between Eagle Harbor and Eagle River and then pulled into a ranch house driveway where a hand-lettered sign advertised homemade thimbleberry jelly, a delicacy of the region. We walked into a foyer, and a man watching soap operas rose from his La-Z-Boy to sell us a jar. The sun appeared when we arrived at the base of the Porcupine Mountains, Michigan’s largest state park, and we climbed up a mountain range to rival parts of Appalachia, a misty rocky terrain with Swiss meadows and a view from the top where you couldn’t see a soul.
      Near Michigamme is Craig Lake, part of the state’s most remote park, and our U.P. home away from home. For about seven years, my family has rented a rustic 14-bed cabin built by Frederick Miller, president of the Miller Brewing Co., in the 1950s as a sportsman’s getaway. It’s a serious work getting there: seven miles down a gutted Mead Corp. logging road, a quarter-mile portage to the lake and a mile-long hike through a rugged landscape.
      I keep asking my husband and brother not to make reservations. Then I remember the joy of cooking French food in the cabin’s massive fieldstone fireplace, laying in tall grass looking at an undisturbed Milky Way, climbing granite cliffs in the summer sun. The water is too cold to swim. But it is possible to row a boat at dawn through steam rising off the lake. And there’s something to that, a silence and purity that can’t be had in waters plied by motorboats and trafficked by tourists.
      My husband says he returns to the Upper Peninsula because it’s the edge of something. Maybe that’s what takes me back too.

Published in HOUR Detroit.