About 10 years ago, before we sold our farm in northern Michigan and moved to Montana, I was accustomed to driving the five hours north to a cabin we kept near Grand Marais on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula. I made the drive countless times over the 25 years my wife, Linda, and I owned the log cabin that sat in the middle of 60 acres bisected by the Sucker River. If you'd been spending a month at a time in Hollywood, which I frequently was as a screenwriter in those years, there's nothing like returning to a farm with horses and chickens, and then on to a fairly remote cabin off a two-track road where when you try to sleep at night you hear a river flowing, probably the best sound on earth.
If you take out your Rand McNally you'll note that the Upper Peninsula is a long piece of land, over 300 miles, and thickish in places. It is about 30 percent of Michigan's land mass but contains only 3 percent of its population. Growing up in northern Michigan I was early on mystified by the Upper Peninsula even before I traveled there. In the 1960s I went up a number of times, and it did not cease to mystify me with its wildness. While camping I would study maps to try to figure out where I was other than within a cloud of mosquitoes and black flies, that irritating species that depends on clean water, of which there is a great deal in the U.P. There is little or no industry, and all of the mines are closed; therefore you can drink the water directly from Lake Superior — at least I always did on my long beach walks. There was a place near Grand Marais of nearly 60 miles of undisturbed beach, no people, no dwellings, just beach and water.
Louis Agassiz, the great Harvard zoologist, was also mystified by the Upper Peninsula during an expedition in the 1850s with the geologist and physician Douglass Houghton, the virtual father of the peninsula whose name is affixed to many Michigan features. Agassiz was stunned by the immensity of the virgin forests. When he got home to Cambridge, Mass., he shared his notes and conversation with his neighbor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and thus we have that famed piece of doggerel, "Hiawatha," that is exposed to every schoolchild, like it or not. I know Native Americans who think the poem is ludicrous, but then they are understandably touchy.
My first novel, "Wolf," is set in the Huron Mountains west of Marquette, the largest city in the Upper Peninsula, and features a young man, lost in every respect including geographically. These aren't mountains in the Western sense but a seemingly endless expanse of green hills. On my first trip there, camping and fishing with a friend, we were lost for two days though we never felt imperiled. We caught trout near a waterfall and slept wonderfully aided by a little booze and the thundering water. There are plenty of black bears around but of no concern as they go to great lengths to avoid you. There were a few wolves howling nearby when we were brook trout fishing in the gathering dark. We finally made it out of the Huron Mountains in my old Ford station wagon by fording a pond on top of a huge old beaver dam. I was quite happy to reach the civilization of a tavern.
As a child living in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula, I felt cheated with a winter of light snow. Light snowfalls rarely happen in the Upper Peninsula, which can get 300 inches a year along Superior, a preposterous amount. I loved visiting in the winter though I couldn't reach my cabin because of the deep snow. These people have learned over the centuries how to deal with the vast accumulations of snow. I was never truly inconvenienced.
There is also a tradition in the Upper Peninsula that you never pass by anyone needing help. An Ojibwa Indian once towed me 60 miles after I broke a fan belt on Fourth of July weekend. He seemed startled that I couldn't install a fan belt. A gas station had a spare, which he installed. He wouldn't accept money so I stuffed a C note in his wife's pocket. She smiled, having more sense than he did. Where can you find someone to tow you 60 miles and install your fan belt? Only in the U.P.
Jim Harrison is the author of over 35 books, including "Legends of the Fall," "The Road Home," "Dalva" and, published next month, "Brown Dog," a collection of novellas.
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