Nineteen Years Ago

What is written down and kept brings the past back to life.

I read a lot of books (over 150 in this year that is soon coming to an end), but now and again I look back and read my own words. For instance, on and off in my life I have carried around little dimestore notebooks filled with random jottings. This red-covered one from 2006 that surfaced recently begins with names of people met for the first time in my bookshop and in social settings. Nancy P., Michael H., Angela W. and Dennis S., Trudy C., all of them lasting friends, I first met that year. 

 

A few pages in, however, the jottings change character, because when the Artist and I traveled, I always kept notes, so I see that we left Leland on September 10^th that year, with the odometer reading 176,729. The day was sunny, clear, and cool, morning wet with heavy dew. East and north of Traverse City, it seemed to me that we entered a different world.

 

None of the elements is foreign to our own peninsula, but here they occur in unfamiliar configurations—not the hills, trees, fields we know but strange hills, strange pines, strange oaks, orchards, barns, subdivisions and business development.

 

That would be Antrim, Charlevoix, and Emmet counties going north. The September sunlight, I had written, was 

 

…soft and glaring at the same time, bringing every color forward—asters and goldenrod, the subtle lavender and plum and purple underlying green….

 

When we crossed the Mackinac Bridge, I spotted the firewood drop-off site and vowed to drop off “my worries and frets” at that point in our travels and leave them there. What was worrying me in 2006? Luckily, I don’t recall.

 

Crossing from the lower to the upper peninsula is always significant, but that September we were going farther, crossing into Canada at the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie). We stopped for gas on the U.S. side (12 gallons), and noticed a group of couples on motorcycles going in the same direction we were headed, searching for their passports to have them ready to hand, “so we won’t have to get off the bike,” as one of them put it.

 

In Ontario we stopped at the Visitors’ Centre to change money, then at a gas station to buy bottled water, and already I was “elated, giddy.” Everything was different! We were in a foreign country! I overheard a man at a pay phone speaking in a dialect of French so far from the French I had learned in school that I could hardly pick out a single word. Down the road at Bobber’s Restaurant (Bruce Mines, Ont.) was a trio of Germans conversing in their home language. A foreign country, a different Great Lake—not Michigan or Superior, our home lakes, but north Lake Huron, with pre-Cambrian shores and wild verges of tansy.

 

Next day: 

 

17-East is a road from heaven this morning. Traffic light. Fall color coming on. The bones of the Canadian Shield thrust up through a thin skin of soil. Old wooden fences surround pioneer fields, [and there are] small stone cairns on rock shoulders, glimpses of cool lakes and rivers, signs for trailer camping parks.

 

Sometimes all I write is a list of place names: Spruce Grove Cemetery, Iron Bridge (pop. 900), Iron Bridge Motel, Three Aces Restaurant, Elly’s Diner—“Mom & Pops,” I write. Then—“Mississagi River, big and beautiful, shining on its way.”

 

Finally, this list:

 

      patch of loosestrife

      iron bridge

      old board-and-wooden shingle house

 

with a note to self appended: “Picture these. Souvenez-les.” Remember them.

 

There were people congregated across the river at a rapids, many of them fishing, not many catching. Mississagi First Nation issues permits. And next came Blind River, pop. 3600. A float plane! Helicopter! Mixed yellows of tansy, butter-&-eggs, goldenrod, hawkweed, and coltsfoot.

 

Rocky points jut out, horizon filled with islands, sky with clouds, water with whitecaps and glints of reflected sunlight.

 

Next to the library (I remember the street and picture it today in my mind) was a real estate board listing 1000’ of shoreline, with 10 acres and year-round access, for $49,500. We were only in the market for lunch, though, and happy to find a Chinese restaurant and meet the proprietor, Ivy Chen, 16 years in Canada, over a year in Blind River, Ivy’s family including a husband and two children, 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl who sat with us while doing their homework. The soup was turkey broth with pork and pork wontons “and no MSG,” Mrs. Chen assured us. It was beautiful and delicious. I bought four books at the library for $1.25, and we were on our way again. Much later, when we were back in Leelanau County, I sent a couple books they had requested to the Chen children, who would be all grown up now. Looks like Blind River has grown, too, since we were there.

 

Serpent River … First Nation Trading Post … what I called “a sea of nothing but cattails in the sun, their seasons short-lived.” Above an outcropping, leaves were red and orange, “echoing the iron-stained color of the ancient rock surface.” Then I noted parenthetically, casting my mind back to the day before,

(Yesterday, somewhere, golden ferns and seedlings of red sumac on the ground looked as if the color had dripped down from the branches above.)

 

In Massy, Ontario (pop. 1,000), where we had stopped on a previous trip to photograph outdoor metal sculptures by Laval Bouchard, we decided to stay overnight at the Mohawk Motel, stopping while it was still afternoon. While the Artist rested from the drive, I sat outdoors with book and notebook, looking forward to exploring nearby Chutes Park and then, the next day, reaching Manitoulin Island, where I had arranged to rent a little cabin on a lake on the island for four nights. We decided we would come back to Massey on Saturday, after our time on Manitoulin, for a big street painting event. 

 

The Mohawk Motel was German-run and had a long list of written rules—quite a long list!—but the room was large and had “everything,” and the Artist loved it. Our cabin on Manitoulin would have no TV, so he was happy to have a movie channel for one night in Massey. Later we walked (1 kilometer) to Chutes Provincial Park and found our way through the campground to the waterfall before a light supper and well-earned sleep. Morning was coffee in our room, a dog walk, TV, then more coffee in the lobby, with toast, fresh muffin, and conversation with the owners, who were looking forward to the second year of their street painting festival. The wife had organized the event, and artists would be coming from Germany, the U.S., and other parts of Canada. Previous year’s attendance had been 10,000. Government funding had helped with a publicity campaign. I wonder if that festival is still going on…. 

 

And that is only a few pages in the beginning of a little notebook that goes on to recount our time on Manitoulin, the return visit to Massey for the festival, and finally a stretch of days in dear, familiar Grand Marais. It was one of our longer September getaways and one I love revisiting now, seeing those scenes once more as I flip the little pages.

 

Do you keep written notes on your travels? Sketchier or more fulsome than mine? Do your notes or diaries help you recall those earlier times?

Happy new year, if I don't write again until NEXT YEAR!