Great Lakes I

We are camped on the Indian River in Hiawatha National Forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. So far it seems like everything they say about the UP is right – the mosquitoes fly in flocks, the water is crystal-clear, and the people are just about the nicest on earth. Except for that guy who cursed at me at the toll booth as we crossed the Mackinac Bridge. Oh wait, I cursed at him. Never mind.

We left Dexter on Friday in order to spend Friday night at Tom and Mikki’s in Clio. The next day, Saturday, we got a bit of a late start (Patrick and I like to usually be on the road by 10 am at the latest – but we didn’t leave Clio until 1:30 in the afternoon). With Tom and Mikki following on Tom’s Harley, we crossed the lower peninsula’s countless miles of farmland via two-lane roads until we reached the Ludington area on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Manistee National Forest.

The campgrounds at Manistee are around $12, which means you get prime real estate near the roads and paths to the beaches, plus running water and a hardly-bearable bathroom. To camp in the “backwoods” (aka, 150 feet off a road) is free – and peeing in the woods smells a lot better than peeing in the bathrooms they had there. We’d planned on backwoods camping anyway, but it was nice to see just how smart we were when we pulled a little bit off a main road to find a sprawling campsite complete with fire pit.

Since we have two tents (one 4-man tent for car camping and one 2- man tent that we’ll use once we do more backpacking), we set up camp with two tents and, before it got too dark, the four of us headed down to the beach to take in the lake.

After visiting the Great Lakes again, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to live near an ocean. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’m a Jersey girl through and through who wouldn’t give up the shore for all the freshwater glacial lakes in the world. But seriously, these lakes are gorgeous, and you have none of the nastiness associated with oceans to go along with them – no salt air, no smelly fish, no rancid low tides. Just clear water, silky sand (in most places, that is) and, yes, waves.

We walked down the beach at Manistee for a while. I mostly lagged behind taking pictures while the three of them wandered ahead. I wandered into the waves mid-thigh and hardly noticed – the lake was warm as bath water. The water was this fantastic clear blue-green-brown color – almost like the color of a pale beer bottle or an old telegraph insulator. The little waves crashed on the pebbles and sounded like wind chimes.

It was strange camping with people other than just the two of us. The more people we meet and spend time with – especially on this trip – the more Patrick and I realize that, despite our obvious differences, we have a lot more in common with one another than we differ.

We’re both really quiet people, we’ve found – like right now, Patrick is off making macramé jewelry in the campsite and I’m sitting here writing. Sometimes we go hours at a time in the car with no music. We speak only as loud as is absolutely necessary to be heard. I think I used to be a much louder person than I am now (well, I know I was) – but something clicked in me a few years ago that made me shut up and open my ears. I think I have learned a lot more this way.

We’re also both relatively goody two-shoes. We were laughing the other day that pretty much everyone we know smokes or otherwise ingests pot – except us. We’re the last people on earth who have no interest in it. So it’s nice that, wherever we are, when everyone wants to offer us pot at every turn, we both say “No, thanks.” It would get really old really fast if one of us smoked and the other didn’t. And if both of us smoked, we’d be really broke by now.

Here’s an important one: We’re both very clean. Being on the road, it’s not easy to be spotless all the time, but I’m a hygiene maniac – so if I’m not totally freshly showered and laundered and perfect, I have very good ways of hiding it so everyone thinks I am. We wash dishes obsessively and with the scrubby side of the sponge. Every other night or so Patrick will almost completely unpack the car, tidy everything up, and re-pack it again. We aren’t obsessive and ridiculous about it – you can’t be, when you have two people living out of a station wagon – but when it comes down to it, we’re pretty organized and put-together.

So after a relatively shitty night’s sleep, for whatever reason, I woke up and we headed back down to the beach for a morning swim. The water felt a whole lot colder than it had the previous night, but we got used to it fast as we waded further into the waves that were cresting at three or four feet – just like a calm day at the ocean. Patrick and Tom, reviving their common Floridian childhood, tried to bodysurf on the larger waves, but generally failed. Mikki and I just bobbed in the water and laughed at them. I had brought the soap and a washcloth down to the beach to wash my hair in the lake, but I was having a good enough time just swimming around that I didn’t bother.

For some reason, I find myself wanting to swim pretty much constantly on this trip. I always liked to swim when I was a kid, and had a brief stint on the swim team, but it was never an obsession like it has become on this trip. If there is water, I will swim in it. I don’t know if it’s a side-effect of having lived in Santa Fe for so many years, being so waterless, or if it’s just some new weird quarter-life obsession I’ve developed.

Either way, a morning dip in a cool lake was a great way to start the day. By about 11 am we said goodbye to Tom and Mikki and hit the road, headed North – just the two of us once again come Sunday afternoon.

Our big destination yesterday (Sunday) was Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, on the pinky of the mitten of the lower peninsula.

Rain

Posting from Clio, Michigan, a little town outside Flint. We spent the week in Dexter, just outside Ann Arbor, but sleeping in the same bed for 6 or 7 nights was starting to wear on me - so we moved on.

Here in Clio, Patrick's high school friend Tom and his wife Mikki put us up in a camper they have in their driveway - a perfect guest house, complete with air conditioning. Today they will follow us on their motorcycle as we head over to the west coast of the Michigan mitten. Tonight we'll stay in Manistee National Forest and tomorrow will head to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. After we conquer that, we'll head to the Upper Peninsula and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Everyone has asked if we'll be going to Isle Royale National Park. The truth is that I'd love to go, but the ferry to get over there is pretty expensive. Seeing as we're doing this trip as cheaply as possible, anything pricey is a no-go.

We've been lucky thus far that awesome friends have put us up for a night or two along the way - Pat's uncle in Burlington Flats, NY; a friend-of-a-friend (Amanda and Daniel) in Rochester, NY; my brother in Pittsburgh; Amanda in Columbus; Marcia and her empty house in Dexter, Michigan; and now Tom and Mikki in Clio. When we haven't stayed with friends, we have either found free camping in state and national forests (not many people know that, as long as you're 150 feet off the road, you can camp for free in most national and state forests; no amenities, of course, but it's a place to sleep), paid for camping (we don't like that), or one night we slept in the car outside Akron.

We pulled some gear out of the car and I layed down in the trunk (I have a station wagon), and Pat attempted to sleep in the front seat - however, due to all the stuff behind that seat, he couldn't put it back, so he didn't get much of a night's sleep sitting upright. I was fine, though. My feet were near the back of the front seat and my head near the trunk, and I popped the trunk so right near my head I got fresh air and could listen to the rain. I was a little cramped, sure, but overall I didn't have a problem with it.

So here were are, about to get on the road again. I have a friend in Minneapolis who we'll hopefully catch at home before she leaves on vacation on Aug. 2 (I'd hoped to spend my birthday, Aug. 3, hanging out in Minneapolis, but it looks like I'll spend it in the car somewhere in South Dakota - whatever, could be worse), but after that, we're unlikely to encounter any more friends until Missoula, Montana. Emilie, one of my best friends, has been living in Great Falls, Montana for the last few years, but of course she is moving away from there mid-August, and I think we'll be getting there just a few days too late to see her.

Patrick and I have been eager to get West. I'm eager to get where I don't know where I am - to somewhere I've never been, or at least haven't been in a long time - a landscape that keeps reinventing itself. Anywhere I know feels too close to home to be an adventure. Today I will be glad to get to the shores of Lake Michigan, and when we head into the Upper Peninsula I will be even more excited. My mom told me stories of paper mills and fog horns and pea-soup clouds on the northern shore of Lake Superior in the '70s - I could do without the paper mills (have you ever smelled one? truly horrid), but the fog horns I'd like to hear.

I never imagined I would be more comfortable West of the Mississippi than East, but I think it's coming down to that. I need to move slower and see more. I need to have a line of sight that isn't punctuated by so many buildings and trees. Green has been lovely to see and smell and feel again, but I need to get back to the plans - and eventually the desert.

I got thinking about the concept of wanting to be somewhere new, and why it was that I was simultaneously craving being back at my little casita in Madrid, New Mexico. The hill out back of my casita is always new. There are always new birds and new plants and new rocks and old rusty metal and tumbleweeds blowing across it. The old broken-down building just behind the neighbor's house is still new to me. There are so many mountains I haven't crawled under and through. And even places I have always been - downtown, the mountains, the arroyos - keep being new, keep reinventing themselves, keep turning over people and faces.

Somehow I don't feel that constant newness anywhere else.

There have been torrential rains in the Northeast and Midwest these last few days. The other night a lightning storm actually prompted a tornado warning in New York City. Indeed, it's raining here in Clio, and parts of Chicago are under four feet of water and being evacuated. The same rain is moving across the peninsula of Michigan now, and we're about to drive into it.

Bring it on.

Just another day on the rebound road...

Patrick and I have been on the road for nearly three weeks and I have yet to finish my entries about our NY/NJ adventures from before we left. This is a problem with me and my writing lately (and by "lately" I mean the last 5 or 6 years that I have attempted to re-start a daily journal) - when I get really behind, I find it hard to start up again because I feel like I have missed so much and it's almost a lost cause. I want to be able to record everything, every day, every place we go, everything we do. It's impossible - especially when I am a full month behind, blog-wise.

So I am sitting here in Dexter, Michigan, realizing I have put this off for far too long - and since yesterday was a perfect example of the kind of incredibly strange day I expect to have on the road, I knew I needed to sit down and write about it.

This is what I have skipped blogging, and what I hope to catch up on eventually: wandering around Manhattan, deciding suddenly that we needed to leave (and fast), figuring out precisely how to leave so fast, spending a week in upstate New York from the Hudson Valley to Niagara Falls, a few days in Pittsburgh, a few days in Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park (which I definitely do have to write about; it was a mixed bag, but overall pretty cool), two days or so in Columbus, Ohio, and now Michigan.

So read about yesterday below the jump - which includes (but is not limited to) giant ears of corn, a house-sized fiberglass loaf of bread, Manchester, Michigan's world-famous chicken broil, and a bunch of Christians in a flooded basement.

Pictures 15: Pittsburgh familiarity and fraternization

Seeing my brother Dan in Pittsburgh was a real treat. We are very, very different people, but when it comes down to it we find the same things funny and regularly text each other seeming non-sequiturs simply because we know the other would appreciate it.

So, hanging out with him, his roommate Matt and his girlfriend Mandy at his place in Lawrenceville was nice. We spent a lot of time just vegging out at his apartment, so that made for a lot of images of the four of us, as well as some cool shots from the roof outside his kitchen window.

If you don't know me, nor do you stalk me online (here or via Facebook), you may not find all of these images too fascinating, but here they are nonetheless.

I am, after all, still enamored of my new-to-me camera, so I really like the way a lot of these images came out.

Click any image to see a larger version in Photobucket.


This is Dan on the first morning I was in town. We were tired and I was showing him how my camera worked. He took a picture of me, too, but it is extremely unflattering and there is no way it is going online.


Looking out his living room window - all those trees got clobbered by the snow this winter.

23 more below the jump...