The Lost Continent (26 page)

I drove north and west across Michigan, lost in a warm afterglow of pleasure from the museum. I was past Lansing and Grand Rapids and entering the Manistee National Forest, 100 miles away, almost before I knew it. Michigan is shaped like an oven mitt and is often about as exciting. The Manistee forest was dense and dull—endless groves of uniform pine trees—and the highway through it was straight and flat. Occasionally I would see a cabin or little lake in the woods, both just glimpsable through the trees, but mostly there was nothing of note. Towns were rare and mostly squalid—scattered dwellings and ugly prefab buildings where they made and sold ugly prefab cabins, so that people could buy their own little bit of ugliness and take it out into the woods.

After Baldwin, the road became wider and emptier and the commercialism grew sparser. At Manistee, the highway ran down to Lake Michigan, and then followed the shoreline off and on for miles, going through rather more pleasant little communities of mostly boarded-up summer homes—Pierport, Arcadia, Elberta (“A Peach of A Place”), Frankfort. At Empire I stopped to look at the lake. The weather was surprisingly cold. A blustery wind blew in from Wisconsin, seventy miles away across the steely gray water, raising whitecaps and wavelets. I tried to go for a stroll, but I was out for only about five minutes before the wind blew me back to the car.

I went on to Traverse City, where the weather was milder, perhaps because it was more sheltered. Traverse City looked to be a wonderful old town that seemed not to have changed since about 1948. It still had a Woolworth’s, a J. C. Penney, an old-fashioned movie theater called the State and a timeless café, the Sydney, with black booths and a long soda fountain. You just don’t see places like that anymore. I had coffee and felt very pleased to be there. Afterwards I drove north on a road running up one side of Grand Traverse Bay and down the other, so that you could always see where you were going or where you had been, sometimes veering inland past farms and cherry orchards for a couple of miles and then sweeping back down to the water’s edge. As the afternoon progressed, the wind settled and the sun came out, tentatively at first, like a shy guest, and then stayed on, giving the lake bright patches of silver and blue. Far out over the water, perhaps twenty miles away, dark clouds dumped rain on the lake. It fell in a pale gray curtain. And high above a faint rainbow reached across the sky. It was inexpressibly beautiful. I drove transfixed.

In the early evening I reached Mackinaw City, on the tip of the oven mitt, the point where the shorelines of southern and northern Michigan pinch together to form the Straits of Mackinac, which separate Lake Michigan from Lake Huron. A suspension bridge, five miles long, spans the gap. Mackinaw City—they are fairly casual about how they spell the word up this way—was a scattered and unsightly little town, full of gift shops, motels, ice cream parlors, pizzerias, parking lots and firms operating ferries to Mackinac Island. Almost every place of business, including the motels, was boarded up for the winter. The Holiday Motel, on the shore of Lake Huron, seemed to be open so I went inside and rang the desk bell. The young guy who came out looked surprised to have a customer. “We were just about to close up for the season,” he said. “In fact, everybody’s gone out to dinner to celebrate. But we’ve got rooms if you want one.”

“How much?” I asked.

He seemed to snatch a figure from the air. “Twenty dollars?” he said.

“Sounds good to me,” I said and signed in. The room was small but nice and it had heating, which was a good thing. I went out and had a walk around, to look for something to eat. It was only a little after seven, but it was dark already and the chill air felt more like December than October. I could see my breath. It was odd to be in a place so full of buildings and yet so dead. Even the McDonald’s was closed, with a sign in the window telling me to have a good winter.

I walked down to the Shepler’s Ferry terminal—really just a big parking lot with a shed—to see what time the ferry to Mackinac Island would depart in the morning. That was my reason for being here. There was one at eleven. I stood beside the pier, facing into the wind, and gazed for a long time out across Lake Huron. Mackinac Island was berthed a couple of miles out in the lake like a glittering cruise ship. Nearby, even larger but with no lights, was Bois Blanc Island, dark and round. Off to the left, Mackinac Bridge, lit up like a Christmas decoration, spanned the strait. Everywhere the lights shimmered on the water. It was odd that such a nothing little town could have such a wonderful view.

I ate dinner in a practically empty restaurant and then had some beers in a practically empty bar. Both places had turned on the heating. It felt good, cozy. Outside the wind beat against the plate-glass windows, making a
woppa-woppa
sound. I liked the quiet bar. Most bars in America are dark and full of moody characters—people drinking alone and staring straight ahead. There’s none of that agreeable coffeehouse atmosphere that you find in bars in Europe. American bars are, by and large, just dark places to get drunk in. I don’t like them much, but this one was OK. It was snug and quiet and well lit, so I could sit and read. Before too long I was fairly well lit myself. This was also OK.

In the morning I awoke early and gave the steamy window a wipe with my hand to see what kind of day it was. The answer was: not a good one. The world was full of sleety snow, dancing about in the wind like a plague of white insects. I switched on the TV and crept back into the warm bed. The local PBS station came on. PBS is the Public Broadcasting System, what we used to call educational TV. It is supposed to show quality stuff, though because it is always strapped for funds this consists mostly of BBC melodramas starring Susan Hampshire and domestically produced programs that cost about twelve dollars to make—cookery programs, religious discussions, local high-school wrestling matches. It’s pretty well unwatchable most of the time, and it’s getting worse. In fact, the station I was watching was holding a telethon to raise funds for itself. Two middle-aged men in casual clothes were sitting in swivel chairs, with a pair of phones on a table between them, asking for money. They were trying to look perky and cheerful, but there was a kind of desperation in their eyes.

“Wouldn’t it be tragic for your children if they didn’t have ‘Sesame Street’ anymore?” one of them was saying to the camera. “So come on, moms and dads, give us a call and make a pledge now.” But nobody was calling. So the two talked to each other about all the wonderful programs on PBS. They had clearly been having this conversation for some time. After a while one of them had a phone call. “I’ve had my first caller,” he said as he put the phone down. “It was from Melanie Bitowski of Traverse City and it’s her fourth birthday today. So happy birthday, honey. But next time you or any of you other kids call in, why don’t you get your mom or dad to pledge some money, sweetheart?” These guys were clearly begging for their jobs, and the whole of northern Michigan was turning a blind eye to their pleadings.

I showered and dressed and packed up my bag, all the while keeping an eye on the TV to see if anyone made a pledge, and no one ever did. When I switched off, one of them was saying, with just a hint of peevishness, “Now come on, I can’t believe that
nobody
out there is watching us. Somebody must be awake out there. Somebody must want to preserve quality public television for themselves and their children.” But he was wrong.

I had a large breakfast in the same place I had eaten the night before and then, because there was absolutely nothing else to do, I went and stood on the quayside, waiting for the ferry. The wind had died. The last sleet melted as it hit the ground and then stopped falling altogether. Everywhere there was the
tip-tip-tip
sound of dripping, off the roofs, off branches, off me. It was only ten o’clock and nothing was happening at the quayside—the Chevette, dressed with sleety snow, stood alone and forlorn in the big parking lot—so I went and walked around, down to the site of the original Fort Mackinac and then along residential streets full of treeless lawns and one-story ranch houses. When I returned to the ferry site, about forty minutes later, the Chevette had gained some company and there was a fair crowd of people—twenty or thirty at least—already boarding the boat.

We all sat on rows of seats in one small room. The hydrofoil started up with a noise like a vacuum cleaner, then turned and slid out onto the green bleakness of Lake Huron. The lake was choppy, like a pan of water simmering on a low heat, but the ride was smooth. The people around me were strangely excited. They kept standing up to take pictures and point things out to each other. It occurred to me that many of them had never been on a ferry before, perhaps had never even seen an island, not one big enough to be inhabited anyway. No wonder they were excited. I was excited too, though for a different reason.

I had been to Mackinac Island before. My dad took us there when I was about four and I remembered it fondly. In fact, it was probably my oldest clear memory. I remembered that it had a big white hotel with a long porch and banks of flowers, positively dazzling in the July sunshine, and I could remember a big fort on a hill, and that the island had no cars, but just horse-drawn carriages, and that there was horse manure everywhere, and that I stepped in some, warm and squishy, and that my mother cleaned my shoe with a twig and a Kleenex, gagging delicately, and that as soon as she put the shoe back on my foot, I stepped backwards into some more with my other shoe, and that she didn’t get cross. My mother never got cross. She didn’t exactly do cartwheels, you understand, but she didn’t shout or snap or look as if she were suppressing apoplexy, as I do with my children when they step in something warm and squishy, as they always do. She just looked kind of tired for a moment, and then she grinned at me and said it was a good thing she loved me, which was very true. She’s a saint, my mother, especially where horse shit is concerned.

Mackinac Island is small—only about five miles long, a couple of miles wide—but like most islands it seems bigger when you are on it. Since 1901, no cars or motorized vehicles of any type have been allowed on the island, so when you step off the boat onto Main Street you find a lineup of horse-drawn carriages waiting at the curb—a fancy one to take customers to the Grand Hotel, open phaetons to take people on expensive tours of the island, and a kind of sledge to deal with luggage and freight. Mackinac village was just as perfect as I remembered it, a string of white Victorian buildings along a sloping Main Street, snug cottages climbing up the steep hill to old Fort Mackinac, built in 1780 to defend the strait, still standing guard over the town.

I wandered off through the town, picking my way around little piles of horse manure. Without cars, the silence was almost complete. The whole island appeared to be on the brink of a six-month coma. Almost all the stores and restaurants along Main Street were shut for the season. I expect it’s awful there in the summer with all the thousands of day-trippers. A brochure that I picked up by the harbor listed sixty gift shops alone and more than thirty restaurants, ice cream parlors, pizzerias and cookie stalls. But now at this time of year it all looked quaint and restful and incredibly pretty.

For a while, Mackinac Island was the biggest trading post in the New World—John Jacob Astor’s fur trading company was based here—but its real glory dates from the late nineteenth century when wealthy people from Chicago and Detroit came to escape the city heat and enjoy the pollen-free air. The Grand Hotel, the biggest and oldest resort hotel in America, was built and the country’s wealthiest industrialists constructed ornate summer houses on the bluffs overlooking Mackinac village and Lake Huron. I walked up there now. The views across the lake were fantastic, but the houses were simply breathtaking. They are some of the grandest, most elaborate houses ever built of wood, twenty-bedroomed places with every embellishment known to the Victorian mind—cupolas, towers, domes, dormers, gables, turrets, and front porches you could ride a bike around. Some of the cupolas had cupolas. They are just incredibly splendid and there are scores of them, standing side by side on the bluffs flanking Fort Mackinac. What it must be to be a child and play hide-and-seek in those houses, to have a bedroom in a tower and be able to lie in bed and gaze out on such a lake, and to go bicycling on carless roads to little beaches and hidden coves, and above all to explore the woodlands of beech and birch that cover the back three-quarters of the island.

I wandered into them now, along one of the many paved paths that run through the dark woods, and felt like a seven-year-old on a grand adventure. Every turn in the path brought up some exotic surprise—Skull Cave, where, according to a sign beside it, an English fur trader hid from the Indians in 1763; Fort Holmes, an old British redoubt on the highest point on the island, 325 feet above Lake Huron; and two mossy old cemeteries out in the middle of nowhere, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both seemed impossibly big for such a small island, and they consisted mostly of the same few names going back generations—the Truscotts, Gables, Sawyers. I happily wandered for three hours without seeing a soul or hearing a sound made by man, and only barely sampled the island. I could easily have stayed for days. I returned to the village by way of the Grand Hotel, quite the most splendid and obnoxiously hoity-toity such institution I have ever come across. A rambling white wooden building with the biggest porch in the world (660 feet), it is indubitably swish and expensive. A single room at the time I was there cost $135 a night. A sign in the street leading down to the hotel said, G
RAND
H
OTEL
—P
ROPER
D
RESS
R
EQUIRED
AT
THE
H
OTEL
AND
H
OTEL
-O
WNED
S
TREET
. G
ENTLEMEN
A
FTER
6
P
.
M
. M
UST
B
E
A
TTIRED
IN
A
C
OAT
AND
T
IE
. L
ADIES
M
AY
N
OT
B
E
A
TTIRED
IN
S
LACKS
. This is possibly the only place in the world where you are told how to dress just to walk down the street. Another sign said a charge would be levied on anyone coming into the hotel just to gawp. Honestly. I suppose they have a lot of trouble with day-trippers. I walked stealthily down the road towards the hotel half expecting to see a sign saying, “A
NYONE
P
ASSING
B
EYOND
T
HIS
P
OINT
W
EARING
P
LAID
P
ANTS
OR
W
HITE
S
HOES
W
ILL
B
E
A
RRESTED
.” But there wasn’t anything. I had it in my mind to put my head in the front door, just to see what life is like for really rich people, but there was a liveried doorman standing guard, so I had to beat a retreat.