Where Is the "Real World"?

View zoomed from my favorite little house in Grand Marais

I’ve fallen away from Robinson Crusoe, not far from the end. If I were a 14-year-old boy (an extraordinary young teen, that is, one with patience for Defoe’s convoluted sentence structure; this is a challenging book to read aloud, I warn you), I’m sure I would be more excited by the plotting and shooting and killing. But would I, even then, accept Crusoe’s hunger for adventure, his determination to go to sea against parental wishes, as his original sin? Can this character really (let’s pretend, for the sake of the fiction, that he is a real person) have wished he’d stayed home and played it safe, as his father had urged? And to answer a question I’d posed for myself in an earlier post, no, he doesn’t seem to have seen his plantation slave-owning as sinful, and venturing off to sea again to buy slaves for other plantation owners he regrets only for the greed of it, not because of any other aspect of human trafficking. 

I’ll probably skim through the remaining chapters but feel no great pull. These days I'm much more pulled to be outdoors, soaking up September light.

“When we get back to the ‘real world,’” David began, as we stood by the door of the West Bay Diner in Grand Marais, on the point of departure.

“This is the real world,” Ellen interrupted, smiling but firm.

“I stand corrected,” David acknowledged handsomely, without argument.

View from the window of our room at the Superior Hotel

I thought back to a trip we made to Mackinac Island in the fall of 2007 (when we were “between dogs”) and David’s comment then that the island was not the real world. Surely it is, I had argued, for people who live there and work hard seven days a week, showing tourists and summer people a good time! That’s what Ellen and Rick do at the Diner, and it’s what Mary and Rick do a couple blocks away, running the Superior Hotel and getting out the Grand Marais Pilot. And they’re not the only ones.

Leelanau County, a beautiful Lake Michigan peninsula, is called “La-La Land” by some. They see it as a retreat for the wealthy, a land of leisure bristling with trust funds and fat investment portfolios, but that is only one picture from the county album. Other snapshots would show carpenters and waitresses, farmers and orchard workers, clerks, teachers, retirees (some but not all rich), millionaires and yacht owners (yes, a few), but also food pantry volunteers and clients, housekeepers, builders, lawn care workers, cooks, bartenders, plumbers, tech support people, disabled veterans, nonprofit volunteers (and paid directors), caregivers (paid and unpaid), artists and writers, small business owners (who wear multiple hats and perform many jobs), and minimum wage workers of every stripe.

 Beer at Garage Bar & Grill

Visitors who call this “La-La Land” don’t see it as the real world because they are on vacation, as we are when we go to the U.P. Vacationers can sometimes mistake residents' lives as residing in a dream. Well, I’ve said it before, but here it is again: Having a dream is easy. Living a dream takes work.

When I first moved into the little bark-covered building on the corner of Mill and Nagonaba in 1997 (already the third location of my business and currently the home of Nature Gems, an even older local business), I told my new landlord I was in it for the long haul. Visitors who haven’t been to Northport for a while find it hard to believe, as I do myself, that Dog Ears Books has been in its present location for a decade already.

In the real world, time sorts out the dreamers from the workers. No, that’s not quite right. Because if we weren’t dreamers in the first place, we would not have chosen this path! What time reveals is which dreamers are willing to put the work into living their dreams and which are not, which sounds like I’m tooting my own horn -- and in part, obviously, I am -- but fresh back from Grand Marais it’s Ellen and Rick G., Mary and Rick C. that I’m singling out for a special salute today.

View down Nagonaba Street to marina in Northport

A salute to Grand Marais is no snub to Northport! Both villages, the one on Lake Superior and the other here on Lake Michigan, have their share of hard-working dreamers, and that’s only one thing they have in common. Isolated, end-of-the-road locations; seasonal economies; struggling small schools; a shortage of summer workers, with that situation exacerbated by rising real estate prices; friendly locals; and beautiful natural settings are other features shared by the two sister villages.

Is it any wonder I feel so at home in my “home away from home” and can enter so sympathetically into the lives of my friends in that other very real world?

In Arcadia

So yes, we came home, but then almost right away we made a little day trip down the coast south, past Frankfort, through Arcadia and Onekama as far as Manistee, a town that seemed like a city to this pair of country mice. Gorgeous old buildings and a lovely riverfront walk! All along the way, too, we found people working. 

I’d mentioned to Ellen, up in sight of Lake Superior, that all summer long when I was indoors in my bookstore I tried not to envy vacationers running off to hike or swim or simply walk the beach, and then there I was, running off to swim in Sable Lake (once!) while Ellen and Rick slaved away in the Diner. I told her there was something about this in Wind in the Willows and would find the quote for her, so here it is. The Mole has just said to himself, ‘Hang spring cleaning!’ and emerged into a sunlit meadow to go off rambling cross-country.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘Whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.

That is just how it was again yesterday for David and me. Crews were out working on roads, men and women on lawn mowers busy on the grounds of homes and public places, cooks cooking and servers serving, bartenders pulling draft beer from taps – “busy citizens” everywhere, while we two “idle dogs” played hooky for one more day.

Messing about in boat storage yards....

Riverfront view, Manistee

Street scene, Frankfort

 

Back to Frankfort for dinner at Fusion

Appetizers

Soup

Sushi

We two “idle dogs” had a fabulous day, and now we're back at work. 

Also looking ahead to Leelanau UnCaged, a week from tomorrow. Come visit Northport for the big street fair on September 24!

Home Away From Home

Lots of people have a home away from home. For many downstate residents, Northport or some other part of Leelanau County is that place. Since I live in Leelanau Township and run a business in Northport, however, my home away from home is farther north, up on the shore of Lake Superior. There is the general region (the U.P.), the little village (Grand Marais, which is very much like Northport in countless ways but where I have no responsibilities), and specifically the Superior Hotel, where we have been staying for so many years.

Rick and Mary Capogrossa are our host and hostess at the Superior these days, and their "work in progress," as they call the hotel, grows cozier and more welcoming all the time. We are so happy they are there! And that we can continue to get away to the dear place that is so much like home to us!

Then there is breakfast at the West Bay Diner, cooked by Rick and served by Ellen. On our last day we shared a whitefish omelet, agreeing that it was the #1 best omelet either of us had ever had in our lives. I did not impose on Rick and Ellen to pose for pictures, since they are always super-busy in the diner (so busy one rainy morning that Ellen allowed me behind the coffee to pour coffee for thirsty customers while she waited tables in the other room), but here are a few scenes to give an idea to those not (yet) fortunate enough to have visited Grand Marais.

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After so many visits to our little home away from home, it is hardly surprising that my photographs tend to repeat images and themes over the years. Some are grand, sweeping views, and others small, colorful corners. I love them all. Here are – not all of them, but a few more to explain my love. As if any explanation can ever be sufficient to explain love.

Everywhere I look, the scenes are saturated with years of memories, and now these scenes, already, are memories, too.

Sarah: 9 years old!

Stumped Again?

H-58 isn’t the only road between Grand Marais and Munising with beautiful old stumpfields softened by time and vegetation. South of Grand Marais a few miles is the junction with the Adams Trail – always, by the way, the Adams Trail, never just Adams Trail. Forty years ago the old road was pretty miserable, dusty washboard, punishing to vehicles, drivers, and passengers. 

In the intervening decades, new growth has grown up along much of the way, providing shade, and even where open land (my favorite part) lies on both sides, the road -- still unpaved -- is remarkably smooth and easy.

Besides sculpturally weathered stumps, a few small ponds and lakes vary the scenery. A beaver lodge we remembered from last year was still in place, but we saw no recent signs of gnawed trees along the road this year.