Michigan: The Wild, Forgotten North

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Hold up your flattened right hand with the palm facing you, the fingers closed and the thumb hooked upward. What you’re seeing is an outline of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Detroit and Ann Arbor are on the fleshy bulge of the thumb; Lansing is in the valley of your palm; Grand Rapids is on the left ridge, and Saginaw is in the loose skin between your thumb and index finger.

Most of the state’s population is concentrated in these cities near the wrist (the border with Ohio and Indiana). But the thumb and four fingers are well worth visiting—despite their unfortunate politics—flush as they are with natural beauty, fresh produce and eccentric characters. And the Upper Peninsula—connected to the lower only by a bridge—is even wilder and more colorful.

In the crack between your pinkie and ring finger is Traverse Bay, and at the bottom of the bay is Traverse City, the self-proclaimed “Cherry Capital of the World.” In July and August, it’s hard to argue with the boast, for every few miles of highway brings another roadside stand selling paper sacks of cherries—both sour and sweet—and most restaurants serve at least one version of cherry pie.

The Cherry Hut

My favorite restaurant, though, is the Cherry Hut in nearby Beulah. The ranch-house architecture is painted in a Santa Claus red-and-white color scheme behind a white-picket fence. The menu is studded with cherry items. When I was there this summer, I ordered a chicken-and-cherry-salad sandwich on croissant, a cherry muffin, and a slice of cherry pie topped with a scoop of cherry-chocolate-chip ice cream. I resisted a glass of cherryade, because, after all, I’m on a diet.

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Once the school year starts, the roadside stands and restaurants replace the cherries with apples. And with the apples come the autumn leaves, which are especially attractive along the long coast of Lake Michigan or the small shorelines of the inland lakes.

Sleeping Bear Dunes

The Great Lakes are so huge that they create towering sand dunes much like the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Perhaps the best example of this is Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. This national park is located just 40 minutes west of Traverse City.

The Dune Climb is the park’s biggest attraction: a 284-foot sloping wall of white sand that entices hundreds—and not just kids—to climb it every day. They soon find out that climbing sand is not like climbing a dirt mountain trail. For every two steps up the dune, you slip back a step. Step up; slide back. Step up; slide back. And when you reach the top, you’re still a mile-and-a-half and five big dunes away from Lake Michigan.

Most people just turn around and consider what they’re just accomplished. Beyond the parking lot are impressive views of Little Glen Lake. If you want to get away from the chattering crowds, you can simply make a right turn and follow the ridgeline for the length of a football field or two, and you’ll find yourself in the solitude of sand, wind and grasses.

Farther up the Lake Michigan shoreline is the lakefront resort of Charlesvoix (pronounced charl-VOYZ by the Anglo locals), at the tip of the ring finger in the hand before your face. It was here that visionary architect Earl Young designed and built some of the most imaginative residences you’ll ever see.

Young dropped out of the University of Michigan’s architecture school in 1909 to pursue his own imagination—a curious mix of Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Carroll. Beginning in 1918 and continuing through 1973, he built 32 structures, 28 of which still survive, most of them in two clumps near Lake Michigan.

He didn’t believe in blueprints. Like a jazz improviser, he let the landscape and materials at hand inspire the next move. As a result, each house was different, but many of them had walls of giant boulders with large windows, wavy roofs of shingles, and chimneys that resembled melting ice cream. What they all had in common was the use of local stone and wood and the bending lines of the foundations and rooflines to echo the contours of the landscape. Several companies offer paid tours of the houses, but the internet offers maps so you can do a self-guided tour.

Nearby, in Elk Rapids, is Pearl’s New Orleans Kitchen, an incongruous but delicious dose of Louisiana cooking in the forests of northern Michigan.

At the tip of the middle finger before your face is the southern entrance to the Mackinac Bridge, the five-mile span that connects Michigan’s lower peninsula to the upper. The U.P., as it’s locally known, reminds one of Maine: dense, scrubby woods, rocky coastlines, waterfalls, lighthouses and few people. You can drive for miles down the long, ruler-straight blacktops, which feel like corridors walled in by forests, without seeing houses or stores. You will see lots of signs, such as the tiny, black-and-white arrow that simply said “Gourd Barn.”

That smelled like folk art to me, so we made a U-turn and followed a series of such signs down several backroads. Finally we arrived at a large barn with a “1908” sign hanging on the gray, weathered slats. Inside was a woman, who has devoted her retirement to making crafts out of dried gourds and sliced-open wine bottles. The best stuff—the antique instruments, sleighs and appliances—were not for sale but stuck in corners and up in the rafters. We bought a wind chime with beads and shells hanging inside a wine bottle. It was the kind of eccentric enterprise one often finds in the North Woods.

Great Shipwreck Museum

Our next stop was the Great Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point. It has a lot of artifacts from the hundreds of boats that have gone down in Lake Superior—more dangerous than the ocean, actually, because you have less room to maneuver in a storm or thick fog before running into something. The museum has a movie about its expedition to rescue the golden bell from the sunken Edmund Fitzgerald, the wreck made famous by Gordon Lightfoot. And there is the bell on display as Lightfoot’s mournful song plays over the PA. There are dioramas of deep-sea divers and lighthouse-keeper rooms. Nearby are a vintage lighthouse, beaches and high dunes along Lake Superior.

Tahquamenon Falls

A short drive away are the Tahquamenon Falls, the state’s largest waterfall by volume. In fact, it’s a cluster of three waterfalls, all wider than they are high, memorable for their root-beer-and-seltzer-striped spillage. The brown comes from the tannin of decaying cedar and hemlock trees, the white from where the tea-like water hits an obstruction at the ledge and fills with frothing bubbles. Using boardwalks, bridges and hundreds of steps, the trail allows you to see each waterfall from near and far, from above and below, and even from the island that divides two sets of falls.

The Upper Peninsula is crammed with waterfalls; each town seems to have few of its own and each was different enough and spectacular enough to justify the short hike and long stairway to see them.

Pictured Rocks

The section of Michigan’s shore between Munising and Grand Marais is known as Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, another national park, 13 miles of sheer, multi-colored cliffs. You can’t see them from land, not even when you’re standing right on top of them, as we were at Castle Rock. So we took a two-and-a-half boat tour out of Munising. We were glad we did. It was like watching a museum of abstract paintings slowly scroll in front of you.

The horizontal stripes were created by the different layers of sediment when the rocks were still a seabed: the dolomitic sandstone was gray-white, the Jacobsville sandstone was mustard, and the garnet was dark red. The vertical streaks were created by minerals seeping out and dripping down the cliff face. The iron was red and orange, the copper was blue and green, the manganese black, and the calcium and lime were white. The stripes crisscrossed in an endless variety of combinations.

Everywhere we went in the U.P., there was at least one restaurant offering pasties, that lunchbox specialty that miners from Wales and Cornwall brought to the Midwest. They sort of resemble burritos or knishes, though they’re bigger and doughier and traditionally contain ground beef. We each had a beef pastie and a cherry pastie and felt like we were in some strange, new world.