Me and the U.P.
In Search of Paradise on the
Upper Peninsula of Michigan

by Izora Firelands

1. Yoopers' Delight
For as long as I can remember, whenever I looked at a map of the United States my eye would fall immediately on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Why, I would wonder.

I would get a more detailed map and look closely.

There's not much there. Only a bit of one Interstate highway right at the tip. Otherwise, nothing. Several state parks, even one National Park (Isle Royal) but further investigation reveals that Isle Royal (which really is an island) is a place for only the hardiest backpackers.

One thing I've learned as a traveller: when in doubt, follow your heart. Sure, your head can tell you lots about what you'll find at this or that destination, but when your head is empty and your heart is shouting, "Go there!", the wise traveller starts packing and goes there.

From Houston the most direct way to the U.P. (I had read enough to know that's how the locals refer to their mysterious locale) is to go due north until you get to where if you go any further north you'll be in Canada and turn right. Then you drive another 300 miles and, lo, you're there.

Two days out of Houston I got to Duluth where I turned right. Hours later found me alone with a million pine trees of that lucious dark green that they get only as your near the North Pole, and an occasional glimpse to my left of Lake Superior, itself of that lucious dark blue that deep water gets only as you near the North Pole (viz. the fjords of Norway, e.g.).

Otherwise, only the occasional (very) small town and the occasional 34-wheeler (I'm not kidding--when they haul cut trees in the U.P., they haul a lot of cut trees).

The village of Munsining, which prides itself on being the "Gateway to the U.P.", gave me my first opportunity to do some U.P. shopping:

Typical U.P. strip center, Mishining, Michigan.

And I encountered my first real welcome to the U.P.:

Tourist greeting in the Gateway to the U.P.

As you've no doubt figured out, persons who live in the U.P. refer to themselves as "yoopers."

Paradise Enou
After days and nights of driving through the very heartland of the homeland--north, north, north (always aware of keeping the Big River on my right), then east, penetrating from the rear the phallus (so to speak) that is the U.P. (good grief! was this why I had come? [so to speak] Was I on some kind of kinky American psycho-sexual odyssey? I don't think so), I arrived at last at my destination: Paradise.

The beliefs of certain of our Middle Eastern brethren to the contrary notwithstanding, 10,000 virgins did not await me. In this tiny village at the uttermost eastern end of the phallus, only Curly's Motel awaited me:

A dark, moonless night had fallen by the time I pulled into Curly's and inquired about a room. Ma Kettle quoted me a price that I thought outrageous but here at World's End I had little choice. As her modem beeped my credit card info into the system, she added, "Your room's around on the backside."

O.K. Feeling the complete city slicker taken in by the Yooper rubes, I drove through the pitch-black night around to the back, staggered into my roomlet, and, still wondering why I was here, fell asleep.

No muse, no god, no goddess visited my dreams--or if they did, I failed to honor them with memory when I woke up next morning. I stumbled to the pictured window to see where my geographic obsession had brought me, pulled the 1950s orange nylon curtain... and there, not a hundred feet away, was the splendor of Lake Superior out of whose plumbless purple depths the sun was rising.

Oh faithless City Slicker! Oh sweet Ma Kettle! Unbeknownst to my devious urban mind, she had done right by the weary traveller. I gaped and stared, gaped and stared, aware that my nature-starved soul was greedily devouring the glorious sunrise.

Such is the sustenance you find in Paradise, Michigan. I'll take it over 10,000 virgins any day.

Outside on a rock shore that a sign assured me was in fact a beach, I basked (or tried to) in the limning rays of this sub-arctic sun as it shamelessly painted water, sky, "beach", and me with shades of purple, blue, violet, pink, yellow, and red that no Renaissance muralist had ever dared imagine.

Oh faithless digital camera! Whatever your other wonders, the miracle chiplet that is your heart fails miserably, miserably in capturing what was there!

An hour later, the sun fully up and the color spectrum back to what we humans think of as normal, I returned to the mundane. Here was my unlikely doorstep to Olympus:

Click on the thumbnail if you want to see the backside of Curly's Motel in panoramic context.

Other U.P. Adverturelets

1.
Breakfast in Paradise presents a limited choice of restaurants: one. I walk into a room of starched white table cloths and plastic flowers in tiny vases (what do you expect in Paradise?). As I wait for my own order, another customer comes in. The college-kid waiter, who looks like he might be a second-string tackle for the down-state Spartans, takes the order and, without the least hint of irony, says, "Will that be with hashed browns or freedom fries?"

2.
Naturally there would be a waterfall near Paradise. Twelve miles to the west one comes upon:

Michigan proudly bills the Tahquamenon Falls as the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi. There are in fact two, the Upper Falls and the Lower Falls. One chooses the more spectacular Upper Falls and sets off down the lovely walk to paradise garden:

Note the lush aub-arctic greenery, and this in early October, mind you. Praise be to global warming. Note also the lack of tourists. Praise be to the utter remoteness of the U.P.

Two hundred feet across, a fifty-foot drop. The brown is not pollution but the tannin leached from the cedar, spruce and hemlock in the swamps drained by the river.

Sitting here alone with the sound of the falls obliterating all forest murmurs, I think I understand my long-standing cartographical obsession with the Upper Peninsula.

There's still plenty of wilderness left in the United States in spite of our continuing, rapacious carelessness. But consider a map of the Interstate highways:

Pick just about any wilderness area and if you think about it you'll realize that the area is either overrun by tourists (Yellowstone, Yosemite) or may look and feel like remote wilderness but just over the next hill or two not all that far away is an interstate highway. In most American wildernesses, you're either lost in a crowd or in an illusion of remoteness.

But look at the U.P. There's that little squiggle of I-75 way over at the right-hand end. Otherwise the nearest Interstate is far to the west in Wisconson. The U.P. not only seems remote. It is remote. And as for tourists, well, who's going to come this far off the beaten path just to experienience 300 miles of pine trees, a fifty-foot waterfall, a couple of Great Lakes (if you've seen one Great Lake, you've seen them all, right?). and a little town called Paradise?

Unique American remoteness, that's what drew me here. Trying to taste what Thoreau could gorge himself on just by walking an hour away from town.

3.
I'm here to report that remoteness is alive and well in the U.P. It even has its own version of Land's end. Twelve miles north of Paradise you come to Whitefish Point, on its own little peninsula jutting northward into Lake Superior. Whitefish Point is there mainly because of its lighthouse, which lives in maritime infamy because it didn't do much to keep the Edmund Fitzgerald from joining hundreds of other ships on the floor of stormy, hungry Lake Superior.

Whitefish Point also sports a pricey Shipwreck Museum for the more touristically inclined where you can view dioramas of ships in distress manned by tiny frightened sailors who look like nothing so much as put-upon Mormon missionaries.

4.
Headed south again, I must pass once more through Paradise. The previous night's motel-keeper had assured me that the town's only bar served the best hamburgers on the U.P. from its short-order menu. I stop in at the slightly ramshackle wood structure with tiny windows across the street from where Mr. Freedom Fries plies his off-season trade.

Here are no starched white table cloths. Here, upon well-worn benches and bare tables, in the baleful rainbow neon light from a dozen beer logos, is where serious sub-arctic drinking happens. I settle in, order my burger, and realize I have plunged into a novel by Steve Hamilton.

In this very bar, maybe on this very bench, is where his much-put-upon characters come to escape the rigors of implacable fate and the merciless U.P. winters. I can imagine Alex Knight, Hamilton's hardy protagonist sitting here, beer in hand, staring at the window (In the U.P. you don't look OUT a window in February, you look AT the window; with ten feet of snow there's nothing to look out of), pondering the imponderable ways of man and nature.

If you don't know Hamilton's mystery series, set RIGHT HERE, you have a treat in store. He tells a good story and, most important, communicates a strong, vivid sense of place. Reading the Alex Knight books is the next best thing to visiting the U.P. For best results, read them in order:

The titles are linked to Amazon:

A Cold Day in Paradise 1998
Winter of the Wolf Moon 2000
The Hunting Wind 2001
North of Nowhere 2002
Blood Is the Sky 2003
Ice Run 2004

END

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