Day Three: Roaming the U.P.

There is something intensely satisfying about sitting inside a tent and watching mosquitoes try unsuccessfully to get in.  They ram repeatedly into the netting in the tent’s mesh windows but never make it through.  If there are enough of them and you listen closely, you can hear their buzz of futility.  Inside the tent, all is calm and bug-free.  It’s a nice feeling.

This morning I woke up in another beautiful campsite.  I’d followed a small dirt road to its end, and wound up looking out over Lake Superior in an area just big enough to turn a car around.  After I hung a towel to dry over the “no camping” sign, it was the perfect campsite.  (The ranger who came by about 11pm was nice enough to let me stay after I promised to leave first thing in the morning.)  So I woke up with a gorgeous view of the lake, and Lou woke up to an awesome swimming hole.  The morning was cool enough that I needed a pullover.  Lou and I had a slow morning as I made bacon, eggs, and coffee.

This was my day entirely in the U.P.—no travel imperatives.  Lou and I were on the road around 9:30.  We wandered west, basically following the lakeshore.  We drove through Emerson, Paradise, Deer Park, Grand Marais.  We hiked a few miles in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and paused to stroll barefoot (both of us) on Twelvemile Beach.  Twelvemile Beach is one of those places that is just too impossibly gorgeous to take in.  You just look around, smile, and try to appreciate it.  You take a picture and you know the picture won’t do it justice, but you hope it’ll help your memory later.  Then you leave and wish you knew how to describe it to others.

Just offshore from Twelvemile Beach, at least according to the DeLorme Atlas & Gazatteer, is the “Alger Underwater Preserve.”  Inexplicably, there is a picture of car next to the words “Underwater Preserve” in my atlas.  The car hovers over the blue ink that denotes Lake Superior.  I threw a tennis ball into the water and Lou retrieved it a few times, but that was as close to Alger as we got.  Lou came back very wet, so I did not think it wise to take my Subaru out there.  Mr. DeLorme can take his car if he chooses.

After a restaurant dinner in Marquette, I drove a few miles north and stopped in what I believe to be Escanaba River State Forest.  I was not picky about the campsite—it was about to be dusk, and I’ve learned that although the U.P.’s mosquitoes aren’t bad during the long summer days, they swarm like mad just after sunset.  So the wise move is to have your tent set up and be finished getting things out of your car before the skeeter swarm arrives at sunset.  That way you have a mosquito-free tent and car.  Last night I kept the car doors open for too long, with the consequence that I shared my car with a hundred or so mosquitoes for the first part of this morning’s drive.  They were not welcome passengers, and did not want to leave.  Lou and I ended up driving 80mph for a stretch with all four windows, the sunroof, and the rear door open.  That flushed most of them out, but not all.  So this evening, I had camp set up before dusk, which isn’t until 9:45 or so anyway.  The tent is skeeter-free and I think the car is too, although I guess I won’t find out until morning.

And so it is that I have come to be sitting in my tent typing to you, dear reader.  It is a nice night, and peaceful, and I have a good book, and I like camping, but at times like this I do miss my wife and daughter.  They are in Colorado but not in a tent, so if they can see the mosquitoes outside, they cannot hear that satisfying buzz of futility.  I will have to tell them all about it.

Day Two: Following the Path

I woke up to a lovely morning.  Lou jumped out of the car where she’d slept and sprinted in circles.  The air was comfortable—a welcome relief from Atlanta in July—and the Ohio River was calm, smooth, and quiet.  So quiet that before breakfast, I grabbed my towel and biodegradable soap and waded in.

Eight travel hours to the Upper Peninsula.  After grits and coffee, I closed up the clamshell and Lou and I headed north.  Our route took us back through Cincinnati, then up through Dayton and Toledo and into Michigan.   We were loaded up and rolling by eight.

Many southerners, I would learn, had followed this route before me.  I started an audiobook that my buddy Matt Stoddard had recommended, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.  In the 1940s and 50s, factory owners in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region needed workers, so they sent recruiters south to the troubled coal mining country of eastern Kentucky.  They recruited whole families, promising better wages and a better life than the coal mines could offer.  Many Kentuckians answered the call, Vance’s ancestors among them.  One county in Kentucky lost 30% of its population in the migration north.

So the Vance family from Kentucky—hillbillies or hill people, as Vance refers to them—ended up in the upper Midwest, in what people now call the Rust Belt.  J.D. Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio, to a cultural tradition rooted most recently in the Appalachians, and in the Scots-Irish tradition before that.  Fierce people, with a history of some of America’s greatest feuds (like Hatfield-McCoy).  Clannish people, to whom an insult to a family member meant dishonor and a fistfight at a minimum.

They moved in droves, principally up Route 23.  Not all Midwesterners were happy to see them.  Vance tells one story of his grandparents walking into a drugstore, breaking some merchandise, throwing other items against the wall, and threatening to kick the clerk’s ass on the grounds that, before the grandparents arrived, the clerk had said something mildly rude to their son.  The clerk was scared out of his wits.  Then the Vance family casually resumed their shopping.  (It really is a great book.)  There was, Vance explains, some tension between the cultures.  Resentful Ohioans complained that the uneducated, violent hill people hadn’t learned anything in school except “readin,’ ritin,’ and Route 23.”

Then in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the factories that had employed the hill people started to close.  This was not good.  Now the hill people had no jobs.  Poverty, drug abuse, and broken families followed.  In Vance’s case, his father left his life, his mother became addicted to opioids and then heroin, and his family descended into chaos.  The families around him fared little better.  Young people like Vance had no prospects and, crucially, no role models to show what to aim for, or how to get there.  (The story revolves around Vance’s struggle to make it out—which he eventually did, and graduated from Yale Law School).

Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t pull punches.  The hill people have contributed massively to their own problems, Vance says.  He writes:

“We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy. . . . Thrift is inimical to our being.”

Vance writes candidly about the drinking, the smoking, the drugs, and the bad food.  The hill people resented Michelle Obama’s instructions to eat healthier not because they thought she was wrong, he says, but because they knew she was right.  Stubbornness can be a strength, but the decision you’re refusing to waver from needs to be a good one.  Often, it isn’t.

The book hit home for me.  That was in part because I happened to be driving on Route 23 while I was listening to it, and I can sing along to Dwight Yoakam’s country song “Readin,’ Writin,’ Route 23.”  But also because I come from the stock that Vance calls “hill people.”  Now, I was born into a healthy and comfortable family, and nobody in my family had a childhood as challenging as Vance’s.  Still, there are parallels.  My family tells our own violent stories and, like Vance, we’re damned proud of them.  My family tree has branched into opioid addiction.  My father tells some stories that sound like Vance’s—graduating law school being socially unprepared for the white-collar world he entered.  My family has its problems, but we’ll be damned if we’re going to let any outsider tell us what to do about them.

I followed Route 23 into Flint, Michigan and stopped for lunch at the White Horse Café.  I sat at the bar and ordered a burger and water, I guess to see if I could taste the lead.  The burger was good but the atmosphere exemplified too much of Hillbilly Elegy.  The young guy who had been outside smoking a cigarette when I entered came inside and slowly drank beer alone.  Overweight people eating massive calzones.  Slot machines.  I paid my tab and returned to the road.

We reached the Upper Peninsula—the “U.P.,” as I’ll call it now that I’m familiar—about 5:30, and it was beautiful from the start.  I stopped in St. Ignace, the first town across the bridge to the UP, and bought an atlas showing forest service land.  We kept heading north to Brimley, then turned left.  It wasn’t long before we were looking out of the bright blue waters of Lake Superior.

Lou was ready for some exercise and I needed it too, so we found a trail and I laced up my running shoes.  I thought about how lucky I am to be able to do something like this.  I was raised with about every advantage it was possible to have—born in the United States to a loving family with plenty of role models and plenty of investment in me.  We ran along the shore, with the trail alternating between soft sand and hard forest floor.  Lou sprinted ahead, splashed in the lake, sniffed the fir trees, and returned to the trial.  I learned at a young age what it meant to work hard, and I had people at every step of the way help me to internalize that lesson.  If you’re going to be able to pick up and drive to from Georgia to Michigan on a lark, as I had done, a lot has to go right for you.

After the run, I put Lou in the car and walked back toward a vacant spot of lakeshore with my towel and soap.  I am proud—maybe too proud, given the advantages I’ve had—but I do work my butt off and have made generally good decisions in life.  At least I took some of the good advice I got.  Lots of rich kids I grew up with got too full of themselves, then never worked or never took followed the role models they had.  I waded into the cool water and ducked my head, then applied some soap and scrubbed the sweat off.  The wind felt good against my skin.  I toweled off on the beach and wondered how many people had bathed in the Ohio River in the morning, and the Great Lakes that same evening.  Now that’s something special..

Day One: The Open Road

The verdant green of summer in America rolled past my windows.  The green of north Georgia’s foothills, the green of the Tennessee Appalachians, now the deep green grass of Kentucky.  I’d left my office at 12:45 after a morning of focus groups, bound for Michigan’s Upper Penninsula.  With my wife and daughter visiting Anne’s family out of state, I was free to wander.  I’d never been to the Upper Penninsula.  Now it was just me, my black lab Lou, and 1000 miles of open road.

I’d stocked the car for five days of roaming.  A sleeping bag and pillow for me, and a sleeping pad for Lou.  Fishing gear.  A Coleman two-burner propane stove.  Clothes and boots.  Cooler of food and beer.  Soap, towels, toilet paper.  I’d attached a tent to the top of my Subaru that and closed up tight like a luggage carrier when we were traveling, and folded open like a clamshell when we stopped for the night.

We headed north.  Audiobooks have made long-range road travel wonderful, almost meditative.  I’ll listen awhile, then hit pause and think for awhile, trying to apply the lessons of the audiobook to my own life or law practice.  I had a good one going now—Rand Fishkin’s Lost and Founder—and I was thinking hard about how Fishkin’s observations about founding his own internet company might apply to my law firm.  Great book.  I was absent-mindedly doing 80mph up a grade when the engine quit and the car rapidly lost speed.

I pumped the gas, but that didn’t help.  I turned off the cruise control, but that didn’t help.  I shifted in and out of gear.  That didn’t help.  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the traffic that was already starting to swarm past me as I lost speed going uphill in the fast lane.

Then I remembered that I’d meant to stop for gas.

I barely got my car off the asphalt before my car stopped completely.  When I tried to recrank the car, the engine turned over but the tank was bone dry.  An audiobook can be too compelling, apparently.  I didn’t even know where I was.  It turns out, in case you ever need to know, that neither Uber nor Lyft serves Corbin, Kentucky, and the only taxi service in town doesn’t answer the phone some days.  This was one of those non-answering days.  It was five miles to the next exit ramp, and seven miles to the one closest behind me.  So I cracked the windows for Lou and got out in the ninety-five degree heat to try out the sign I made—a legal pad with “GAS” written heavily on it in a ballpoint pen.  I squinted at traffic and smiled.  Sweat trickled down the back of my neck.  The only breeze was the wind from eighteen-wheelers thundering past.

Fortunately the good folks of Corbin take mercy on travelers who don’t watch their gas gauges and it wasn’t long before two people had stopped—an older guy in a dump truck and a guy about my age in an old Ford Ranger.  The guy in the Ranger drove Lou and me to a gas station.  He kept apologizing for the state of his truck, which he said was his work truck for his contacting business.  The clock and radio were missing from the dash, the headliner was torn, and the jump seat where Lou rode was filled with food wrappers.  I told him it was the prettiest truck I could ever remember seeing.

Dakota from Corbin was a good dude, as you’d expect from someone who stops to pick up stranded strangers on the side of the interstate.  He’d delayed his fishing trip just for me.  I was happy that the pepper spray that I’d shoved into my back pocket would be unnecessary.  Dakota had grown up in Corbin, graduated college, and come back with a business degree to start his contracting company.  Corbin was booming, he said.  After we stopped at the gas station, he pointed out the new developments in town while I put gas in his truck over his objection.  I’d seen his gas needle pointing at E, I said, and there was no use in both of us having to beg rides.  He said the needle was broken.

It seems like every time I drive through the heart of the country, there’s something like this.  Some unexpectedly caring stranger.  It’s an encouraging thing.  Given the opportunity to be kind, many people take it.

I made camp that night in what I thought was the perfect spot.  I’d never camped beside a major river before, and that night I unfolded my clamshell tent on the northern banks of the Ohio River.  We were just upstream of Cincinnati.  As I cooked a burger and sautéed spinach on my two-burner, tugboats and barges the length of a drag strip rumbled past.  I thought about Mark Twain’s adventures on the river that the Ohio feeds into.  Music from a nearby bar drifted over to Lou and me.  It died out about 10:30, but music from another source kept going—pleasure boats, cruising up and down the Ohio.  Playing all kinds of stuff, from country to R&B.  Apparently Cincinnati people cruise in boats, just like my buddies and I used to cruise in cars when we were younger.  I just starting to think about closing the clamshell and moving on when they quieted down.  I drifted off to happy thoughts about kind strangers and another day on the open roads of America.

Volunteer Vacation in India

In 2012, I went to Jaipur, India on a volunteer vacation.  You can read about it here.  There are ten posts about that trip in all.