Open Your Eyes
Blink and you’ll miss it. Holds true for most of these small towns in Northern Michigan. At the only intersection in Maple City sits a post office the size of a postage stamp itself, a gas station that has a handwritten sign over the 89 at the pump — no premium gas — and an abandoned corner store that says “Exciting things coming in 2020!” even though we’re six months beyond. The population is 113 and I wonder if that includes me. Somehow I don’t have a real trash bin where I live so I drive to the two-pump gas station to purchase large red bags that I put my garbage into and then leave in a cage at the end of the driveway, just in case of animals. Animals being raccoons, most likely, but I did see a bear cross the street the other day and I blinked rapidly to make sure my eyes weren’t just transforming a large dog into a galloping cub. Yet there it was, a black bear crossing the street at a quarter to midnight in another town called Lake Leelanau. Another one you could blink and miss. He/she/they were crossing the street by the one redeemable bakery on this entire peninsula, Hannah’s. I suppose this bear could get into my garbage too, but I bet the bakery’s trash is much better than mine. Who picks up the red trash bags from the cage, I’m not quite sure, but I’m glad I don’t have to drop them off at the dump.
These days I dodge more animals than pedestrians on my commute to the grocery store, and not just by a little. It’s kind of like a video game as I swerve around squirrels, frogs, possums, birds that clearly have a death wish based on the proximity of their flight path to my car. Deer too. And they can spook. Luckily it’s warm so they’re a little less spunky. My dad says to watch out when it gets cool at night. Drive slowly. But I go 65 anyway.
I’ve slowly relinquished my habit of checking my passenger side mirror before making a right turn. You simply had to in Chicago. Blinker on, side mirror check, look for bikers, watch for people, beware of God knows what coming from God knows where because that’s what city life is like. A constant lookout. Watch your back. Open your eyes.
Open your eyes. I see a lot of things every day and yet there are many things I don’t actually see. But that’s the magic of a new home, a new town, a new state, a new life. Like you’re opening your eyes after a deep sleep. Like the kaleidoscope filter got switched and suddenly the colors are new and the sights are more vibrant and the experience is drenched in novelty. I’ve seen these small towns through tourist eyes and now I get to see them as a local. A yokel. That’s the joke here. I’d never heard this term and I had to Google it to make sense of it. An uneducated and unsophisticated person from the countryside. I wonder if one such person would proudly wear that badge. Do they know that term? I’m sure I’d fit into any number of single white female slang, but I can’t say I know which ones. Best to keep yokel as an inside voice. Fudgies is another one. That’s what the true locals, the born and raised, the educated and sophisticated, call the part timers and tourists here in Northern Michigan. When you’re up here you could either trip and fall into a lake or trip and fall into a fudge shop. Why fudge is so popular here is something I will have to Google later as well.
I can’t remember if Kilwin’s was on Front St. when I was a kid. It might’ve just been Murdick’s. But it was without question that we’d grab a few slabs of the ridiculously sugary confection. Chocolate peanut butter fudge was always my favorite. Still is. When I was just a wee thing, barely able to crawl, I filled my diaper with the sands of Indian Lake, just southeast of Traverse City. Our family cabin was shared by three families and sat off a dirt road that, as a kid, seemed to take eternity to drive down. I knew we’d be close because I could smell the white pines, the state tree that left what I’d assert were hundreds of thousands of needles on the sandy ground on either side of the dirt road. Grass doesn’t grow well up here. Moss and weeds and wildflowers like to live in the sand. I couldn’t tell you why. But the white pines thrive and the scent is inescapable. Just like a fudge shop. I’m sure even the locals can’t deny that. We had a tree fort at our cabin. Not in a white pine, but built into something else. I remember climbing the little wood slats that my Uncle Ray nailed into the tree. Or maybe my dad did that. I’d get to the top, and being one of the youngest of my cousins, I’d pretend I wasn’t scared. We’d bring our dog, Zak, to the cabin and I’d watch him lick the sap off the trees, as if in a trance. My dad would push me on the tire swing and then I’d watch him skin the fish he caught in the lake before we had a fish fry. First he’d lay the newspaper on the picnic table. Then he’d slap a barely dead fish on top of that. And he’d pull the sharpest knife out of a camel-colored sleeve, slightly curved at the end and made for the art of skinning and deboning and descaling the delicate body of a fish. Dip the filets in milk, coat them in saltines, and serve them with sliced potatoes and onions cooked on the stove. It was the only way to do it.
Going “up north,” as it’s called by Fudgies, held formative memories for me. Ones that you wouldn’t think meant anything at the time. We wouldn’t spend the whole summer at the cabin, but many weeks, and they were treasured for everything that felt different than being at home. We didn’t have a water softener at the cabin so my mom would put these magic salts into the tub for bathtime. To this day I don’t even know what they were, Epsom salts maybe, but as a kid I thought they were special. I’d climb into the bath and smush my feet on them until I felt them dissolve beneath the warm water. The taxidermied moose head, which we so lovingly named Morris the Moose, hung in the kitchen of the cabin and after bathtime I’d climb on top of our plastic covered kitchen chairs to pet his nose. My grandpa shot that moose in 1964, and while I never got to meet my grandpa, I knew everything about the legend. I’d climb down from petting Morris’s nose and would sit down on a different kitchen chair. All of our chairs were mismatched, leftover orphans from their real homes that the cabin would collect throughout time. This chair was yellow with orange flowers and my thighs would stick to the seat in the summer heat as I sat down to eat a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles before bed. To this day I can open a box of Cocoa Pebbles and simultaneously smell the musk of the cabin, the scent of white pines.
When my family was still a family, meaning my parents were still together and my sisters and I were still school age, we’d drive into Traverse for dinner at Big Don’s, a drive-in hamburger joint that served their burgers in paper cars. I didn’t like their fries because they were too potatoey. Steak fries. But I loved to play with the paper car, even after we were done eating. The big topic of conversation was over who would order a shake and who would order a malt. And if you ordered a shake, everyone wanted to know: What’s wrong with you? I met a new friend of mine for dinner the other week and shared about my memory of Big Don’s, trying to make it seem like I knew the local haunts and wasn’t so green at the scene. I’ve been coming here my whole life, after all. He said, “Big Don’s? You mean Don’s Drive In? You really are a transplant,” which I know he meant as a tease. And I said back, a little defensively, “You know what? I am.” I am a tourist turned local. A part timer turned full timer. A VRBO renter turned homeowner. A Fudgie turned lifer. And maybe I get to see what I see because of that. How lucky am I? To see with open eyes. Maybe the red garbage bags and bear crossings and blink-and-you-miss-them towns have more flavor to me. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe I’ll live here for decades and still marvel at the cherry blossoms when they flourish in the spring. Or when I catch sight of a baby fox trotting down the street. Or see the Caribbean blues of Lake Michigan from the top of Treat Farm. Maybe driving along M22 will always give me that feeling. Like I’m home.
