Touring the greatest lake of all
The shores of Michigan offer more variety than many expect
We left to the south and returned from the north. In doing so, we fulfilled the grandest dream of Magellan, the dream of circumnavigation. Our compass was GPS, and our logic was simple. If we kept the lake always on our left and travelled continuously, we would eventually reach the place from which we started: Chicago, with its seismic chart of skyscrapers, protracted sunsets and canyon-like streets, closing the circle by visiting every beach and port on the greatest lake of all, Michigan.
I grew up in Glencoe, Ill., about a mile from the shore. To me, the lake was as mysterious as a biblical abyss. Had you asked, when I was 10, what was on the other side, I would have said Paris or possibly China. When I was 12, my dream was to lace up my Bauer Supremes some winter day and skate clear to the distant shore.
Only later, when I learned that such an expedition would almost surely end in an excruciating death, was that dream supplanted by the more sensible notion of going all the way around and seeing from every side the great body of water that dominates the life of those who live within rock-skipping distance.
For a long time, I forgot such fantasies, moved East and sought relief from the brutal summers and succession of days on the Atlantic, as guilt-ridden by the solace of sea spray and breaking waves as a cheating husband. When I told the woman who was to become my wife that I, too, grew up on the beach, she laughed: “Lake Michigan? That’s not the beach!” I burned with fury but said nothing.
Only in the past few years, as I’ve come to realize my children are growing up as Easterners, woefully unaware of the geography and vastness of our inland seas, has the old dream returned. Thus, nearing 47, with my children, three boys spread across the early and middle grades, I knew I had to return to the place where I started. When friends asked where I was going, I said simply, “I’m going all the way around.”
The City Chicago is the capital of Lake Michigan. As Naples sits above stony Mediterranean beaches, Chicago commands the southwestern shores of the big water. It began as a point of transit, a passage from the lake to the big river farther west, the Mississippi, which French explorers believed emptied into the Sea of Japan. In this way, Chicago, which was a wigwam village and became a fort and then a boom town, was once seen as a kind of Pacific port, our first California.
We stayed at the Drake, an old hotel set in the S-curve of Lake Shore Drive that commands the best views of the shore. The lake is bluer than the ocean. A trip around the lake should begin here, in its great city, which uses the lake as a buffer and a frame.
Like any great port, it faces the sea. To understand it, you therefore have to go to the beach, and Chicago has Oak Street Beach, the best urban beach in the world. The sand itself is as crowded as the sand in a Gidget movie. There’s a changing house where a lifeguard dozes, probably sleeping off a spree, and, out on the lake, rafts and buoys and a pumping station that delivers drinking water to the area.
To really know the lake, though, you’ve got to get in it over your head. The water is very clear and very cold. As you go under, the air leaves your body. Unless it’s August or September, when the water temperature climbs into the low 80s, your skin takes on a bluish tint.
You swim out, not as buoyant as in a salt sea, but energized.
In America, we call it freshwater. Elsewhere, it’s sweet-water. Fifty yards out, you turn and look back. The city looms like a thunderhead. The Hancock building stands above the rest. It was the world’s sixth tallest when I was a child, but now, mostly because of Abu Dhabi’s busy hands, is out of the top 20.
The Hancock’s observation deck is where you go for the wide angle. The western windows show why Chicago was the birthplace of the skyscraper. The grassland prairie is so punishingly flat, it makes sense that the people in town would build their own heights, mountains, overlooks. From the northern windows, you see the shore and the village where I grew up, as well as Wrigley Field and the Baha’i Temple in Wilmette. In the south, you see factories, smoke stacks, haze. But the big picture is east. It’s water. You strain to see the other side but never will. It’s 75 miles across from Chicago to Michigan, and close to 1,000 miles around.
Silver Beach in Saint Joseph, Mich., is a perfect beach town of candy stores, cobblestone streets and what the writer’s mother would recognize as tchotchke shops
South Shore There is a designated route called the Circle Line. Now and then, you see a sign that says you are on it. But, in the way of the early French explorers Marquette and Joliet, we preferred to cut our own path and headed out early one morning, windows open, Little Walter on the radio. We drove in and out of buildings, over the river, emerging onto Lake Shore Drive, which we took south. I-55 to I-90 East. Beyond the last tall building, the country turns grey. Tough little neighbourhoods, the streets lined with bungalows and two-family houses, front porches, steel awnings.
As you reach the southern side of the lake and turn east, you enter a land of ash and coal, grain elevators, chimneys that burp up showers of sparks or just spew. At the end of every sad street, a playground and a factory, the engine of the city, nether regions and a pump room. Factories line the lake shore, sucking up and polluting its water. The freighters come and go, the machines, trucks. This landscape scared me when I was a child.
We reached Benton Harbor, Mich., in the afternoon, the road making a somewhat depressing entry into what had been a smart town. The Victorian houses that line the avenues have been allowed to dilapidate. Ivy crawls over the columns, broken windows glitter. The town seems half artists’ colony, half ruin, the stores along main street boarded, empty. We stopped at a restaurant called the Mason Jar Cafe, a homey place with stuffed French toast and the best lemonade, then continued across the St. Joseph River to Benton Harbor’s “twin city,” St. Joseph.
Just like that, you go from blight into a perfect beach town of cobblestone streets, candy stores and what my mother would recognize as tchotchke shops. This divide mirrors the divide in the region as a whole, the line that runs across the industrial Midwest.
According to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income in Benton Harbor, which is close to 90 per cent black, was just over $18,000. The median household income in St. Joseph, which is nearly 90 per cent white, was more than $50,000.
St. Joseph was founded in the 19th century as a port on the way to Chicago and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as a vacation land for fat cats from across the lake. Early last century, it boasted a Coney Island-like fantasyland that figured in millions of summer dreams.
The park closed nearly 50 years ago, but the beach is still there, the concession stands, fountains and waterfront, which presented my first opportunity to stare across the water to where I knew Chicago had to be.
The beaches on this side are broader, without the band of rocks that punish Illinois bathers. We have stony prairie; they have westerly breezes and towering dunes, huge undulations that begin in Indiana and continue all the way north. They’re a relic of an age when the lakes were bigger. In the dunes, you’re walking on what had been sea floor, and the world here feels beautiful and new. Ludington The shores of the lakes were charted by French missionaries in the 17th century. These were the first Europeans to see the region and most were priests, travelling by canoe. In school they told us how these men entered the wilderness with little more than the Bible, how they built missions and towns. We did not memorize their names but could recognize them if the exam was multiple choice: LaSalle, Nicolet, Joliet.
Jacques Marquette was my favourite. Born in Laon, France, in 1637, he was a Jesuit by 20 and was explaining the Trinity in the New World by 30. He mapped the frontier in a series of expeditions that stand as the greatest road trip in American history: before Jim and Huck on the raft, before Dean and Sal in the Hudson, Marquette and Joliet were setting out from St. Ignace (now part of Michigan) in canoes.
Following the coast of the lake, they reached Green Bay, then continued, via a network of small rivers, to the Mississippi, which they travelled not quite to the Gulf of Mexico. In the end, they covered close to 1,000 miles. Marquette got dysentery on this trip and never really recovered. His ensuing days were filled with sojourns in which he held up, waiting out a bad spell. One of these was spent near the site of modern Chicago and another on the eastern shore of the lake, a mile from a beach in what is now Ludington, Mich., where he died at age 37.
Ludington was founded in 1845 as a centre for trappers and fishermen. We rolled into town in the early evening. In June and July, the Michigan days are nearly arctic in length. At 10 p.m., it was still light enough to read a newspaper outside. We ate at the Old Hamlin House. It was like a meal in a mother’s dream of the past, turkey dinners with a thousand sides, every food group represented, the regulars talking high school football.
We checked into Snyder’s Shoreline Inn, a two-story motel across the road from the lake. Everything I left in the 1970s was there waiting for me: the tiny bars of soap, the clunky room keys, the sand in the bed and the smell of candles and mildew.
Before bed, we went to the beach. It’s broad here, with dramatic dunes. There is a harbour and a jetty with a beautiful lighthouse at the end, as there are lighthouses up and down the coast. You can walk the jetty and look back at the yellow lights of Ludington as night comes on. A ship sails away from the harbour, the water red in the evening sun. The Enchanted Isle I am tormented by detached memories. These are like photos that have fallen from an album and lie at the bottom of a drawer. In one, I am staring at rows of fudge in some sort of diner and it’s raining outside. In another, I am on a hill looking down at a bay filled with red sails. These memories have long puzzled me: Are they from another life? After a few hours on Mackinac Island, which sits in a strait that leads from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, topping Michigan proper like the dot on the Spanish exclamation point, I realized that all those unmoored memories were in fact collected on some ancient family trip to Mackinac, when my parents were young.
Mackinaw City, where you hop a ferry across, is a child’s idea of a honky-tonk town, its big commercial street filled with banners, crowds and every variety of candy and novelty shop, each a kind of hook meant to haul in the suckers, pulling their money-soaked parents after them. At times, in such a town, you feel like a capo on the corner of Mulberry St., snapping singles off a thick roll.
We left our car in long-term parking, checked bags and climbed aboard a boat, where we had the upper deck to ourselves. We picked up speed in the straits. A storm was moving across the water. Through the rain we could see Mackinac glistening in the distance.
There is a town on the island, with stores and restaurants and inns, but most famous is the Grand Hotel, the sort of mansard-roof affair where, eons ago, a president spent an eventless August. There are no cars on Mackinac, and the first thing you notice is the smell of manure. It’s allencompassing. Sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but never gone. You move through zones: fudge then manure, fudge then manure. The Crossing In the morning, instead of continuing through the Upper Peninsula, as planned, we went south. This meant giving up the dream of complete circumnavigation, but it suddenly seemed more important to see the water from the water. And so we returned to Ludington to board the SS Badger, last of the steam ferries. We would close the circle by sea, which seemed appropriate.
The Ludington service is all that remains of this once-robust web of commercial and pedestrian traffic. An adult ticket costs $66, not including the price of a car, carried in the belly of the ship. For an extra $49, we got a state room, where you can sit at the little desk and work on a novel about the sea, or crash on the crib-- like mattress, lulled by the hypnotic slosh of sweet water. There’s a movie theatre, a gift shop, an arcade, a cafeteria and a social hall where a carnival barker type ran bingo and trivia contests, but I spent most of my time on the rail, staring at the water. Going Home I knew I was home as soon as I was on the highway. We made our way to Chicago from the north and stopped at Glencoe, my hometown. It’s changed. The people are richer.
I looked for my old friends, but they were gone too, priced-out failures like me, every one of them. I felt like a ghost, a stranger visiting my old life. But then I went down to the beach. Over the barricade, along the ravine road, past the house where Big Al used to sell hotdogs. And there it was, the lake.
Thank God, it was still the same.
This has to be among the most beautiful drives in the country, unknown to those who rush off to oceans that pale in comparison to our strange inland seas