Reading the Upper Peninsula

My summer ended with a trip to Paradise.  Literally a drive through Paradise, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula (U.P.)  The drive through Paradise lasted only a couple of minutes but it was part of a 10 day trip wandering the UP--one of the most distinctive landscapes in the Midwest. My wife and I started coming up here when we  wanted a more untamed "Great Lakes" experience from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Our most recent drive connected the rugged landscape with some of my favorite authors and their books. 

North of Paradise was Whitefish Point and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. It is a suitably dramatic introduction to Lake Superior. The beach was windswept and littered with enormous trees that had been stripped and bleached into driftwood. Far offshore, a single lake freighter was leaving Whitefish Point, a reminder that this seemingly wild landscape is also part of one of the great commercial waterways of North America. The museum tells the stories of the hundreds of ships lost on Lake Superior, most famously the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in a November storm in 1975. Songwriter and avid sailor Gordon Lightfoot wrote probably his best-known song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” remembering the sailors who lost their lives when it sank on Lake Superior.

From there we continued west to Grand Marais, a small community nestled behind the dunes of a natural harbor. Whitefish dinners are to Grand Marais what lobster dinners are to the coast of Maine. At the local bar, my sauteed whitefish was longer than the plate itself. Our overnight was the Superior Hotel, an institution in Grand Marais. The owner had a longstanding friendship with writer Jim Harrison. Harrison used to come in on a daily basis to get his Detroit Free Press and use the town’s only fax machine to send his handwritten pages to his editors in New York.

Jim Harrison is almost inseparable from northern Michigan. Best known to many readers for *Legends of the Fall*, Harrison lived for years in a small cabin near Grand Marais. His Michigan is one of hunting, fishing, food, drinking, loneliness, eccentric characters, and people attempting to live outside the conventions of ordinary American life.

We spent the next day hiking among the 200 foot high dunes and overlooks along the National Lakeshore ending with a trek the Au Sable Light Station before continuing westward.

On our drive to Marquette, we passed near Seney, Michigan. The Fox River runs through this part of the state and was said by Hemingway to offer some of the best trout fishing in the world. The country around Seney and the Fox River also became the setting for his story “Big Two-Hearted River.” Published in 1925 as part of the Nick Adams stories. The story follows Nick as he travels alone into the wilderness, camps beside a river, cooks his meals, and fishes for trout. Almost nothing happens on the surface. Yet the story is generally understood against the background of Nick’s experiences in World War I. Nick’s rituals of walking, camping, and fishing were his way of treating what many might today describe as post-traumatic stress disorder from the war. Hemingway himself later explained that the river was actually the Fox River near Seney and that he deliberately substituted the more poetic name “Big Two-Hearted River.”

Hemingway’s story has even entered Michigan beer culture. Bell’s Brewery, located downstate in Kalamazoo, named its Two Hearted Ale for the U.P. river, complete with a trout on the label—a nearly perfect Michigan combination of literature, fishing, and beer.

We spent several nights in the U.P.’s largest city, Marquette, as students at Northern Michigan University were just returning for classes. Marquette has preserved its waterfront with numerous trails and parks. We spent two days on bikes exploring the shoreline, including Presque Isle Park.

It’s here in the western half of the U.P. where author Louise Erdrich provides an essential perspective on Lake Superior and the surrounding land. Erdrich, member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, begins her *Birchbark House* series with an Ojibwe girl named Omakayas living on an island in Lake Superior in the nineteenth century.

For centuries, this has been the home of the Ojibwe, and their creation stories focus on the water. They know the seasons, plants, animals, waterways, and traditions of the region. Although the books were written for younger readers, they are equally rewarding for adults, particularly while traveling through the Lake Superior country. We listened to some of the audio books while driving north, watching the same immense forests and waters pass outside the car windows.

Our trip eventually culminated with a drive across the lift bridge between Houghton and Hancock, Michigan, leading to several days in Copper Harbor, at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula. We met with college friends for a mini-reunion at Fresh Coast Cabins and plunged ourselves into Lake Superior’s glacial waters as part of the local ritual of the sauna.

The drive across the bridge into the Keweenaw was also a setting for Leif Enger’s 2024 novel *I Cheerfully Refuse*. It is set in a near-future America that appears to be slowly coming apart. The narrator takes to Lake Superior in a small sailboat, beginning a journey that becomes part adventure story, part dystopian novel, and part meditation on grief, friendship, and hope. In Enger’s novel, Lake Superior is almost another character—beautiful, unpredictable, dangerous, and seemingly possessed of moods and intentions of its own.

There are still parts of the Upper Peninsula where the road seems to run out, the forest takes over, and Lake Superior stretches beyond the horizon.

For some, the beauty of the French Riviera may have a hold on their imaginations, but for me it is the wild, untamed feeling of Lake Superior. The lake can be both terrifying and exhilarating, like an an encounter with a divine being. Perhaps the founders of Paradise, Michigan knew what they had found.