Moving to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

Moving On

It’s been nearly 4.5 months since the end of my Mississippi River trip and subsequently the end of nearly two years of traveling. It’s hard to imagine that all of that has come and gone. It seems like only yesterday that Carolyn and I were planning to quit our jobs and hike the Pacific Crest Trail. We had no idea where any of this would take us as we jumped headfirst into a situation full of uncertainty and excitement. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that any of that ever happened. It seems at times too much like a dream that I’m now just star starting to wake up from.

I’m under the impression that thinking back too much isn’t good. The past is the past, either good or bad, and we can’t do anything to change what has happened. I tend to be under the assumption that the best parts of life are always ahead, and so now I face a different reality, one where I tip my toes back into the flow of everyday, normal life, and try to piece together the next part of what my journey will be.

The hardest part of any long expedition is having to stop. Going on long trips have been the most fulfilling parts of my life, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I wish I could do it forever. I love the uncertainty of being in those situations, and the control I have over that uncertainty. No day is the same, no view is the same, and you just walk, bike or row, into this flow of visual energy, passing through time from one place to the next and never belonging anywhere. In many ways, it is too romantic of an idea, like a hobo or vagabond from an old book running away from his past, riding on the seat of his pants, blowing with the wind from one seemingly pointless destination to the next.

But life is nothing like a book or poem. It reads more like an encyclopedia. There are hard facts and it’s too long and boring a lot of the time. The facts are interesting only to yourself, as a measure of chronology, of how you’ve decided to pass away the time you’ve been alive. For better or worse, it does nothing to predict anything meaningful for your future.

And so, the facts now are this: the time I put aside to wander is now over; my bank account reflects that reality; and I need to go onto something new and different, to work more on balance, something that has eluded me for a long time.

It’s time to move on.

 

 Moving North

I have been a long-time fan of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP). I first visited this area in 2011 before hiking the Appalachian Trail. We traveled to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore where I took Carolyn on her first backpacking trip. I didn’t know a lot about Michigan at the time, other than what you would normally hear about Detroit on the news, so visiting the Pictured Rocks and Lake Superior was something I visually could have never prepared for.

 

 

Growing up in New England and then attending school out west in Seattle, Michigan was never on my radar as a scenic outdoor destination. It didn’t have big mountains, which was something I associated with beauty, so I had immediately written it off. But what I discovered on that initial trip was that the Lake Superior coastline was something special. It had a certain beauty about it that was hard to describe.

Carolyn grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and every summer her family would pack up the car and go to the UP for a few weeks. This is a common thing for Michigan families, and they call it ‘going Up North’.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is connected to the lower part of the state by an almost 5 mile long suspension bridge called the Mackinac. It’s a four hour drive from Detroit just to reach the bridge. And once you cross it, you’re in the Upper Peninsula.

 

 

The UP is a thinly populated landmass filled with numerous inland lakes and National Forest Land. Lake Michigan runs along it’s southern edge west from the bridge and Lake Huron to the east. On its northern edge rests Lady Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the United States, and the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area (ranking third in the world by volume).

Pictured Rocks resides somewhere in the middle of the northern coast. When you drive up there you feel as if you’ve been transported through time. Towns are few and far between, and the ones that remain are small and nondescript, appearing no more than a quick blip as you pass by in a car. It is a place where you feel like you are somewhere “Up North”, where nature dominates and any civilization that remains is merely a by-product of old timber and mining towns. It is a unique place, and one that conjures a certain set of feelings based on its aesthetic. It is like rural New England but with massive lakes instead of towering mountains. It’s a quiet place; a beautiful place; a place that makes you believe that there are still places in the United States that can own a personal identity.

 

 

Munising is a small town in the central UP that rests on the western edge of the Pictured Rocks, a more than 40-mile-long stretch of Lake Superior coastline that is dominated by picturesque sandstone cliffs.

We passed through this quaint town in 2011 after our backpacking trip on the Pictured Rocks Lakeshore Trail. I think we may have gotten a snack at a convenience store but we didn’t pay too much attention to much else on our initial visit. In 2016, after we had finished the PCT, we decided to drive up to the Pictured Rocks during fall foliage season and made a stop in Munising again. This time we grabbed coffee at the only cafe in town, Falling Rock. We sat sipping coffee amidst towering shelves of used books as it rained outside during mid-October. It turned out that foliage season was mostly over, but we still had a nice weekend hiking on the lake and talked about how pretty everything was despite it’s dreary, barren state of pre-winter existence.

We noticed a large blue factory on the eastern edge of town when we left to hit the road. Steam wisped from the top of it’s oddly shaped structure, dissipating quickly into low lying, grey clouds. I remember looking at that factory, having no idea what it was or what it produced, thinking to myself that most of the people that lived in this small little town probably worked there. I wondered how you ended up getting a job up here in a nowhere place like this. Did you seek it out? Did you grow up here and never end up leaving?

Life has a tendency of going around in circles. You can be in a place on one day, just passing through, and then on another day, years into the future, you can find yourself in that same place having a different purpose.

This has happened to me more than a few times. The first was when I visited the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as a senior in college in 2008. I had been accepted to graduate school and the University flew me out to meet the department and check out the campus. Even though I decided on a different school, I ended up marrying a woman who had gone there to undergrad, and whose parents would eventually move to a suburb only 20 minutes away, where I would later spend many months living.

The second time was when I took a train back to Michigan on my Appalachian Trail thru-hike. The closest Amtrak stop was in Toledo, OH, a place I would end up working and living in for many years. There was no way of predicting that this seemingly arbitrary city would end up becoming a much larger part of my life.

 

 

And so, Munising has become another victim in this strange pattern of unplanned happenstance. I feel like there should be a term used to describe it, like spatial dissonance, or geometric placement coincidence. It’s a bizarre feeling and one that has made me pause and think about my relationship to physical locations, now more than ever considering how many towns and cities I’ve been in over the past decade.

The way I happened into Munising wasn’t anything unusual. There was a job opening and I applied. The company reviewed my resume and then brought me in to interview, later deciding I’d be a good fit and making me an offer.

I’ve been going to work at this blue factory now for more than a month, which is actually a paper mill. The mill sits right on Lake Superior in a small bay, and it’s covered right now in ice and snow. I can see ice fishing huts out on the bay when I come to work, and Grand Island beyond, etching out into the thinness of the horizon. The Pictured Rocks are close and the edge of the park is not even 2 miles away towards the east from the mill. There’s frozen waterfalls and ice caves, cross country ski trails and snowshoe paths to explore. Many people travel up here in the winter for the extended snowmobile access with trails that span the entirety of the UP.

In late March there’s still feet of snow piled outside. Icicles hang from my office window and drip water on sunny days. It will be awhile before all this ice and snow melts away.

And so it begins, the next chapter for us along this path we call life. I am excited to see where it will lead and what will happen in the years ahead. There is so much to explore in the region that I am grateful to have the opportunity to live in this area. The North Country Trail runs right through town, along with hundreds of miles of single track trail and national forest roads. It will provide many trail running opportunities once the snow decides to go away. Not to forget all the great canoeing and kayaking, which is something that has interested me a lot since the conclusion of the River trip.

Could this finally be the balance I have been seeking? I don’t know. Like all things, time will reveal the answer when it wants to. You can only keep running for so long before you get tired. But Maybe this is just a way for me to look at everything without getting antsy. It’s hard for me to sit still. My mind wanders to where my body could wander. I am not sure it will ever not want that.

The puzzle is trying to have everything. I am hopeful that this is something I can achieve with hard work.

And this is a good start.