by Dave Balcom
6
Mother’s Day dawned in slow, steady rain that marks the arrival of a warm front, the kind of warm saturation that is rare for those who live in Eastern Oregon. All-day rain is just as rare in our steppe shrub environment as all-day cloudy. A place that gets 300-plus days of sunshine a year doesn’t have much time for all-day soakers.
Now, six years after Sandy’s adventure had ended, I was driving through the drizzle up M-66 and watching the terrain shift from the rich agricultural land to the rolling hills – the moraine left behind by the glaciers. Seeing the trees switch from balsam, aspen, maple and oak to more tamarack and pine. The tamaracks were in flower, their needles the new, green of young grass in stark contrast to the darker perennial green of the cedars that make up the finger swamps of northern lower peninsula. It was a haunting drive full of memories of my childhood, of trips often taken with friends. It was a drive with an ache to it.
Breakfast came in Barryton, as it always had.
The breakfast place seemed unchanged except the pale blue haze of cigarette smoke was gone, replaced by ferns in baskets. Gone, too, were the crusty old-timers idling over their coffee and toast. They had been as much a part of these places as the plastic-covered menus that never changed.
Waiting on breakfast, I picked up a local tourist brochure and a regional home magazine. The back cover of the home piece caught my attention.
“Don’t miss out on the next cool place!” the headline on the ad screamed. The artwork in the ad depicted a young and beautiful couple putting out on a golf green with a river in the background where an angler was tight to a fish of unknown and unknowable proportions. The copy continued, “Penny Point is the next cool place in America. Nestled on Copper Creek, between the bridges of Mineral Valley, this 722-acre residential hideaway in Northern Michigan comes complete with two championship golf courses, a sportsman’s club featuring the Lower Peninsula’s finest sporting clays course, a complete equestrian center and stables, and all surrounded by – best of all – the freedom of the Huron-Manistee National Forest with the Big Manistee River and all those trout running through it.
“Three hundred twenty-five estate sites on the golf courses, starting at $250,000, and the 20 custom designed villas, will go on sale July 1, 2006. Stop by to tour the area, call 1-800-555-1800 for an appointment, or go online at ilovepennypoint (dot) com to see the full prospectus, but whatever you do, do it now as this project is sure to fill up quickly!”
And then, in small print at the bottom, with a nifty logo, “Penny Point is another project by Next Cool Place Development, LLC”
The ad was slick, easy to read and enticing if you were looking to invest a quarter of a million before you started building on the lot.
And, in Mineral Valley?
As a youngster, the little blip on a two-lane blacktop road always raised a chuckle as we hunted for trout in the feeder streams off the Manistee. A few cottages and a post office were all it had going for it. A ghost town, it had prospered and faded through three boom eras, the first the great lumber era when the white pine was being harvested to rebuild Chicago and trees up to 6-feet in diameter were floated down the Manistee to Lake Michigan.
It had a rebirth of sorts during the Great Depression, when the Civilian Conservation Corps built a campsite on the Manistee just upriver and the town provided supplies and entertainment for the men who were working on government-provided jobs. The old camp was still there when I was running around that area, but by then it was part of the Camp Grayling National Guard training center.
The center resulted in the longer-lived boom era as weekend warriors from all around the country came to the camp for training.
The fishing had been great back in my day, but who would pay that kind of money to have a hidey hole in Mineral Valley? And how would they arrive there?
Back on the road after breakfast, I decided I’d hunt some mushrooms in a place I remembered, and, in the process, take a look at Mineral Valley. Who knows, I thought, maybe I’d even cast an eye on Miss Shar-Lotte of 1974?
7
The motel near Lake Missaukee was practically in downtown Lake City, and it was surprisingly nice and surprisingly empty, but then it was Sunday and the business travel hadn’t picked up for the week.
The motel had a restaurant and bar, rare for this small a place where the 2000 census showed fewer than 1,000 residents. But this was, after all, Michigan’s tourist belt; from here to the straits the recreational dollar was the vital industry.
The motel wasn’t a chain operation, but the duty chef agreed to fix the morels I’d found that afternoon any way I wanted them. I asked for some sautéed served with butter on mashed potatoes, but for the rest he should surprise me, and he did so, pleasantly.
I took a photo of him presenting me with the bleu cheese, spinach, and artichoke-stuffed mushroom halves that were grilled to a delicate crispiness, but I feasted on the sautéed morels spread on my mashed potatoes; just like mom used to make.
Back in my room, I downloaded my photo to my laptop and attached it to an email to the owners of the motel with a rave review suitable for submitting to the local newspaper about this wonderful practice they made of fixing a guest’s bountiful harvest at no extra charge.
You hardly ever paid for a breakfast after such an effort on the chef’s behalf, and it was a hoot to do it, every time.
While I had the laptop fired up and connected, I Googled Mineral Valley, Michigan and earned a surprising response. Mineral Valley, it seemed, was experiencing another rebirth. There was even a local newspaper listed. The Mineral Valley Record was a weekly, free-distribution newspaper that went to 12,000 households in the Mineral Valley area every Thursday. There was a motel, restaurant, a bar and a bed and breakfast, three churches, a general merchandise store and a variety of service businesses – the town was doing nicely, thank you.
And soon, it seemed, there would be a new attraction, a 325-home residential golf and outdoor sports development that was being developed along Copper Creek. The project was moving ahead despite the objections of the newspaper and others who felt that the city’s heritage and God-given attractions were sufficient for continued prosperity. Those objections centered on the impact an attraction for “trust fund babies” would have on the area and about the underclass of workers who soon wouldn’t be able to afford lunch at the new restaurants, much less a month’s rent in any apartment in the town.
“Don’t Put a Torch Lake to Mineral Valley,” read the impassioned headline on the Record’s latest editorial blasting the county commissioners for granting a zoning amendment that would allow the gated community.
Looking at the newspaper’s website, it was clear that it was a locally owned publication born of and committed to the Mineral Valley community. The personalized nature of the newspaper was captured in its masthead, reproduced on the website. There was a reporter/photographer, an editor and a clerk in the newsroom and to fill out the staff there appeared to be a sales person and a graphic artist along with a receptionist who took classifieds and directed distribution. I had managed such operations from afar, but I had never worked in one. This I knew: Nobody on that staff was doing it just for the money. There was a passion there that couldn’t be duplicated in big city newspapers where the next quarterly earnings statement was the only measure of excellence.
The newspaper was mailed each week and available on the street through vending machines and at commercial outlets.
“The Voice of Mineral Valley” was the paper’s motto. The publisher, who I was sure wrote the editorials, sold advertising, laid out ads and pages, balanced the books and made sure the paper arrived at the post office on time, was one Janice Coldwell. The editor was another woman, Julie Rathers. In fact, all the staff was female.
“Hmm,” I thought out loud, “a bastion of feminism, I’ll bet. Sounds like a fiery bunch.”
I thought it might be more fun visiting Mineral Valley than I had earlier imagined, and decided an early sta
rt to see the town waking up was as much in order as finding more mushrooms along the banks of the Big Manistee.
8
Mineral Valley was a delight. As the long-remembered two-lane road curved down into the Manistee’s valley, the first glimpse of town was a church steeple, and then the river glinting in the sun between the old cabins that had marked the river’s path here since my youth. Then a slight turn in the road gave way to a little, bustling business district.
The post office on the corner was a hub of activity as it is in almost all rural towns. Getting the mail means going to town out here; RFD doesn’t apply in places scattered amidst and around the National Forest.
And then there was the requisite Town Talk Café and, a little different from many small Midwest towns, a boat access ramp on the river adjacent to a small park where the highway made a T with the rest of the main drag.
You could put a boat or canoe in at that ramp, I knew, and end your day at the M-66 Bridge in a couple of hours, or you could at the Fife Lake Road the following afternoon.
Or, you could be taking out at this site, after having spent a great day floating the 12 miles from the old Civilian Conservation Corps campsite or any number of closer and farther places where the national forest fire trails dead ended at the river’s bank.
Here, the Manistee is already a big river and because of its nature, it cuts huge sandbars and long runs of undercut banks as it works through the cedar forests. It not only drains the swamps it runs through, it is also fed by underground springs so it has consistent water temperatures and is impervious to most floods or drought.
It’s a trout factory, growing German Brown and Brook trout in a profusion of fish to feed all the predators that call its wooded banks home.
The River Inn, the town’s bed and breakfast, was adjacent to the upstream boundary of the park, and that was my first stop.
“Hello,” said the tall and portly gentleman who answered my knock. “How may I help you?”
“I’m on a vacation and wandered into this area and was hoping you might have a vacancy I could fill for a couple of days or so.”
“We can serve you through Thursday, but we’re booked solid after Friday night for two weeks.”
“Trout or morels?”
“Both, most likely. What about you?”
“Morels and sightseeing, visiting old ground you might say.”
He watched me over the top of his half-glasses that might have been fitted for Ben Franklin as I registered at his antique roll top desk. He had one of those heads that looks to have grown out through his hair, with gray around his ears. He was tall, but stooped a bit. His belly gave him the shape of a bowling pin with legs. Yet, it was a distinguished look, I thought. As I finished the card, he picked up the conversation. “When were you here last?”
I had to stop and think. I knew that this building had been here but I didn’t think it was occupied then… I was just in college? “Labor Day weekend, nineteen seventy. We cut through here on our way to Frederick, and we wanted to fish Copper Creek here and the Brush Creek up near highway seventy-two on the way.”
“This place has changed a lot since then, hasn’t it? The Inn was rotting and empty in seventy. We didn’t come here and start restoration until seventy-two. I don’t think there was even a gas station or store here in seventy.”
“No, there was the restaurant out on sixty-six and the Post Office… I don’t know what else… I don’t think I ever made a turn at that corner, just drove right through up to Copper Creek, then took the fire trail into the swamp and started walking.”
“You were young then, and today you’d be trespassing. That stretch of the Copper Creek is all private now, with big houses and security patrols.”
“Oh, the new development I’ve heard about?”
“No, these are just isolated places that some very wealthy and private folks from downstate built in the eighties and early nineties. They don’t mingle with us at all, and their hired help don’t ever talk about them, at least not twice. We had one guard who spouted off in the bar about how one of the families was coming in the following weekend, and the guard with him shushed him down very quickly. We never saw that mouthy guard again. Took another job was all we heard.”
“That kind of secrecy must give the local gossips free rein to make up about anything they want, doesn’t it?”
He smiled at me again, “You spend a lot of your life in small towns, Mr. … er,” he glanced down at the registration card again, “Stanton?”
“As much of it as I could.”
He glanced again at the registration card. “Is Pendleton, Oregon, one such small town?”
“It is even though it’s quite a bit larger than Mineral Valley… “Small town” is often more about atmosphere than population.”
“Amen. Just hope that Pendleton avoids discovery.”
“Discovered? Hell, the pioneers discovered it in the eighteen fifties and the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla had discovered it hundreds if not thousands of years before that.”
“Not in the way I mean Mineral Valley has been ‘discovered.’ It’s on the verge of being ‘rurbanized.’ That’s the development you’ve heard of. The money grubbers are going to put Mineral Valley on a very restricted map. Make it a place where rich folks with a hankering for both the rustic and chic can call one of their many homes until they tire of it or become jealous for an address at some other next cool place.”
“Rurbanized?”
“Yes, it’s the word that describes the practice of sanitizing rural areas until they’ve lost every bit of the charm that attracted people in the first place. It’s a death knell for communities such as ours.”
“But from a business man’s perspective, if it brings people with disposable income to the area, it’s has to mean good things for your business, doesn’t it?”
“Sir,” he went all formal on me, “you can’t possibly understand my business anymore than I can yours.”
“No offense, I was just chatting.”
“None taken, let me show you the Baron Room.”
“Barren room? Sounds rather, well, stark.”
He laughed a genuine and hearty sound that proved he’d forgotten his snit with me. “No, no, not stark at all. All of my rooms are named after periods in Mineral Valley’s history, and you will love the luxury of the ‘Timber Baron’ room I’m putting you in. This way, if you please.”
After getting settled in, and going through the obligatory tour of all six of his rooms, it was clear the business he was so proud of was centered on antiques and antiquity. The place was a museum dedicated to the comforts of their times.
The “Fur Trapper’s Room” would send a PETA member’s blood boiling, but that much mink would make some women just purr.
All of the rooms were large and luxurious, and came with breakfast between 7 and 9 a.m. daily. His name was Mike Robertson, and, he said to avoid confusion, I should refer to him among townspeople as “Big Mike” to differentiate from the “other” Mike Robertson who called Mineral Valley home.
“But, sir, please don’t use the Big Mike name in my presence.”
I went for a walk. A stroll actually. Real walking is a different thing altogether for me. I woke up one day in my early thirties to realize I couldn’t see my toes from a vertical position without leaning way out over my belly and that stairs were becoming a challenge. I was smitten by how far I had let myself go from the man I was when I came home from the service. I had always been big, but then I was lean, fit and flexible.
In an epiphany, I recommitted to my lost practice of T’ai Chi Ch’uan. I pared some 70 pounds off my frame, regained a full range of motion, recaptured my breathing and reflex control and practiced my forms as part of an exercise regimen that included really walking. It had become as important to my peaceful life as it had been in my military years.
I was craving a real walk, but I needed to see Mineral Valley, so I strolled.
It took only abou
t 20 minutes to walk the entire “downtown” area, looking in windows and checking out the place. My first actual stop was the library which, in a throwback to pioneer days, was housed in the newspaper office.
Actually, it was only in the same building, but the newspaper locked and unlocked the doors, and the librarian only worked from noon to 2 p.m., when the newspaper’s office gal was off to lunch. Otherwise, you checked in and out with the newspaper clerk, and you had free run of the stacks.
I love libraries. I had spent much of my adult life in them. Prior to Google and Wikipedia, many newspaper writers were forced to do research the old-fashioned way, reading periodicals and other newspapers at the local library.
Later, as a columnist, the reference librarian was one of my favorite people. There was a time that most places large enough to support a daily newspaper had a library large enough to have a full-time reference desk. The person manning that desk could be a walking resource of who said what; an invaluable resource to a guy who never forgets a story or a quote, but can hardly remember his own name.
Libraries were also great places to hide from newspaper publishers for whom the only books that counted were the ones that could be cooked.
The gal who explained the symbiotic relationship between the library and the Record was Ellen McGee, a 20-something local native who had been working for the newspaper ever since she was graduated from high school.
“I grew up here, on the river mostly, but it became pretty obvious to me by the time I was sixteen that unless you were uglier than a carp, guiding men on fishing trips was going to be more of a wrestling match than I was up for. Then Jan, Miss Coldwell, started the Record. I’ve been here ever since.”
“Is Miss Coldwell here?”
“Nope; she’s in Traverse City. That’s where we print, on Wednesday nights. I don’t expect her back today. She’s making weekly sales calls up there and meeting with our printer. Do you want to leave her a message?”