by Matt Weiland
All of this aquatic abundance has yielded the state’s moniker as the Great Lakes State. But some still call Michigan the Wolverine State, a nickname it earned during the state’s little-known spat with Ohio. The Toledo War (1835—1836) was a bloodless boundary dispute between the then territory of Michigan and adjoining Ohio over a 468-square-mile region along their border, now known as the Toledo Strip. Under a compromise resolution adopted by Congress in December 1836, Michigan surrendered the land in exchange for its statehood and approximately three-quarters of the Upper Peninsula.
Owing to its shape, the Lower Peninsula is dubbed “the mitten,” which explains the strange but universal phenomenon in Michigan of residents pointing to the corresponding spot on the back of one’s left hand when asked where in the state he or she comes from. The Upper Peninsula, which is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, a five-mile channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, is known as the U.P. Hence its residents are called “Yoopers.” (I have always wondered why the residents of the Lower Peninsula are not therefore called “Loopers.”)
An individual from Michigan is called a “Michigander” and has what I have observed to be a perpetual fixation with the weather. The reason for this is simple: They have lots and lots of it—snowstorms, thunderstorms, long daylight hours, extreme heat during the summers, and even tornadoes. The northern part of the Lower Peninsula and the entire Upper Peninsula has an even more severe climate: warm, humid but shorter summers and long, cold to very cold winters. My high school lies just below the cuticle of the imaginary pinkie of the five fingers hidden inside the proverbial mitten—the coldest part of the state.
People in the U.P. and the northernmost parts of the mitten start preparing for winter as early as August. Some parts of the state average high temperatures below freezing from December through February, and this continues into early March in the far northern parts. During the late fall through the middle of February, the state is frequently subjected to heavy “lake effect” snow, which is created when the cold air that passes over the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes picks up moisture and heat, then eventually drops the moisture in the form of snow when the air reaches the downwind shore. The state receives a good amount of precipitation throughout the year, averaging from 30 to 40 inches per year. For this, at least, I was prepared: In southeastern Ghana, annual rainfall hovers well above 80 inches.
Most Michiganders I came in contact with were unconditionally generous, always willing to give a helping hand to someone in need; and they did so with patience and an amazing grace that was reminiscent of the traditions of my Hausa culture, which placed the generous treatment of sojourners very high on its list of morals and ethics. Examples of such generosity from Michiganders were evident to me in the first days of my arrival. From the airline lady who kept the airport open for a school official to show up, to the Academy’s van driver who, knowing that the cafeteria would be closed by the time we arrived on campus, stopped at a gas station and bought me a slice of pizza and a can of “pop” (Michiganese for soda), to my residence hall’s housemother, who knocked on my door early in the morning carrying blankets and warm sheets for me. Overnight the housemaster had phoned to tell her that the “African student had arrived, but he didn’t bring any blankets or sheets.”
Soon after my arrival in Michigan, it became apparent that I would need somewhere to go to during the many short, interspersed holidays in the school’s academic year. My Ghanaian school was only a forty-five-minute drive from my home. Moreover, the educational system in Ghana tolerated very little holiday making, considering it a distraction. I spent my first Thanksgiving at the house of a fellow student from Cleveland, Ohio, and I lived with my campus housemother’s family during the Christmas holidays. Not long after that, a woman who worked in the admissions office all but adopted me into her family. She and her husband and two daughters offered me the spare room in their house and told me I was welcome to stay with them during school breaks, weekends, or whenever I simply needed a break from campus life.
The family lived in Kingsley, a village of less than one thousand people south of Traverse City. Until my arrival, no black person had ever lived there. My host father was a hulk of a man, standing well over six feet and weighing a hefty 280 pounds; and yet he was as nimble and graceful as a gazelle on the improvised basketball court in front of our car garage, where we often played our lopsided one-on-one games. His demeanor and personality could be summed up in two words: gentle giant. He could be very funny, but he said little most of the time. He was a Republican who owned several guns, and he spoke often about racial injustice and inequality in America, especially about the plight of American Indians.
As a way of telling the direction of the East, my father had instructed me before I left Africa that I look for the direction of my shadow at midday, and that wherever it pointed was East, where Muslims face to pray. The problem with this unscientific yet time-tested and effective method of navigation in Michigan is that I didn’t see any sun for the first three or four days after my arrival. By mid-October fall weather in northern Michigan is usually well under way, which means it could be cloudy, dreary, and sunless for days. Luckily, Islamic teaching allows one, when in doubt or in a foreign land, to face anywhere to pray until he or she is able to determine the actual direction of Kaaba, the holy black mosque in Mecca.
In general, Michiganders have a live-and-let-live attitude about life, with a deep sense of religiosity and a strong kinship to family and friends. Open-minded and curious about other people’s beliefs and cultures, the Michiganders I know are more listeners than preachers. In my three years of living in the midst of a Christian family, no one ever talked to me about Christianity or tried to impress upon me its virtues. Instead, they respected my beliefs and religious practices, and were awed by my determination to pray five times daily despite the geographical and climatic challenges I faced. Muslims are instructed to rid their minds, hearts, and environments of any distraction when they stand to pray before Allah. And even though I never mentioned this to my host family, they somehow figured it out on their own. Anytime I went up to my room to pray, my host mother would turn down the volume of the television set and my younger sister would shut the door to her room, from where rock or country music always blasted.
Michigan’s long winters and rugged, wild environment are responsible for creating what I observed to be the three distinct types of Michiganders: there is the Poet, who spends lots of time observing nature and writing about it; the Outdoorsman, men and/or women who engage the elements through skiing, ice-fishing, and hunting through the sullen months of winter; and the Sports Fanatic, the ordinary Michigander who passes endless hours watching sports on television.
Michiganders’ poetic sensibility may seem unlikely, but there is a long tradition—especially in northern Michigan—of writing about topography and landscape there. After all, this is what Hemingway did in the Nick Adams stories, which capture his childhood summers in northern Michigan. Modern Michigan writers, such as Jim Harrison, Michael Delp, Judith Minty, Jack Driscoll, and Jack Ridl, describe the state’s freshwater landscapes and its pine forests and the animals hidden in them, and meditate on the intense effect of nature on Michiganders.
The Michigander’s great love of the outdoors I found difficult to fathom at first. Given the state’s miserably cold, rainy, and snowy climate, you’d think its people would be perpetual indoor dwellers. But in fact the average Michigander is devoted to skiing, ice-fishing, fishing, boating, camping, mushroom hunting, and deer hunting—pretty much everything that can be done outdoors. Michiganders even love two-tracking—the freezing practice of buddies armed with a twelve-pack of beer driving a truck slowly through the woods while they drink, gaze at deer, and shoot the shit, if not shoot any deer. While two-tracking, it is common for folks to park their truck in the bushes to allow for an oncoming two-tracking vehicle to pass (this is how the sport got its name), and also to park when c
lusters of morel mushrooms are spotted, which can be picked and taken home for dinner.
The state of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resource offers hunting licenses for all kinds of animals: from bear, elk, and caribou to turkeys, ducks, and geese. But by far the most popular animal to hunt is the deer. During the combined archery and firearms deer hunting season in October and November, residents from all walks of life and from every part of the state head into the woods in their four-wheelers, hoping to bring home some venison. One year my host dad brought home two bucks, one shot with his bow and arrow and the other with his gun. Watching an animal being skinned wasn’t something new to me; I knew how to do it by the time I was eleven. The Feast of Sacrifice—one of the two major festivals in the Muslim world—is celebrated to mark the end of the Islamic calendar and also the end of pilgrimage season to the holy lands of Mecca and Medina. And each year throughout my upbringing in Ghana, I watched as dozens of goats, sheep, and cows were slaughtered in our compound in sacrifice to Allah, in return for His eternal blessing. So the sight of my host father, hunkered in our garage, his blood-smeared hands pulling on the entrails of the carcass, made me even more comfortable with my newfound family. For me it was also a eureka! moment of sorts, at the discovery that, after all, white folks were no different from blacks or Muslims when it came to blood-letting as a means of appeasing hunger, tradition, the gods, or Allah himself.
Most of all, Michiganders are fanatical in their support for their local sports teams, from high school and college to professional, and spend untold hours during the long winter months watching football, basketball, ice hockey, and car racing. During the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, my host mother, father, and sisters and I would pack ourselves into two cars and drive to this aunt or uncle’s or that grandpa or grandma’s house, where various branches of the family would congregate. The men, including the boys, would gravitate toward the living room, where the television was invariably set to one college football game or another. I came to suspect that, for the men, one of the main reasons they enjoyed the bi-annual gatherings was that it offered them the opportunity to wax poetic and brag to each other about their new ski gadgets, fishing gear, and rifles. It was also an opportunity for people to show their allegiance to their preferred teams, which was mostly decided by the colleges their sons or daughters had attended, were attending, or planned to attend after high school.
The most dominant sports rivalry in Michigan involves the Spartans and the Wolverines, the football teams of Michigan State University and University of Michigan respectively. Branches of the large extended family would arrive at these family gatherings donned in winter coats, hats, mittens, and socks, sometimes with towels and duffel bags in tow, sometimes even undergarments emblazoned with the colors and logos of the team they rooted for, to jeer those who rooted for other teams or to maintain their pride if their team was losing. The color and battle lines were always clearly drawn at these friendly family reunions. Either you wore green (Spartans) or you wore blue (Wolverines), and you arrived prepared to taunt each other’s family’s team’s lackluster performance in previous games. An uncle whose son had long ago graduated from Michigan State would never let go of his bitterness and anger—which had sometimes kept him quiet and sullen all evening—because of the stranglehold Michigan had maintained for so many years on the neck of Michigan State. Yet at the end of each family gathering, it was the fraternity and sorority of the various men and women who married into each other’s families that won the day, and not the bitter, agonizing sports rivalry, something that had become a mere ritual, and like all rituals, an emotional and psychological therapy to its participants.
My three-year stay in northern Michigan changed my life and made me what I am. For one thing, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to continue living in areas that have lots of snow, hence my decision to attend Bennington College … in Vermont. And the quiet solace of pristine snowfall during the winter months and the long, bright, and cheerful summer days played a big role in making a dedicated writer out of me. No environment could have been more fertile for my imagination and ideas than the natural wonderland that is northern Michigan.
The connection between my host family and my African family has taken genuine and strong root over the years. My two daughters call my host mother “Grandma Michigan” and their biological grandmother “Grandma Ghana.” Their “Grandpa Michigan,” I am sad to say, lost a battle with cancer a few years ago, but he lives on in our memory, and I will always be grateful for all that he gave me.
I now live far from Michigan, in New York City, where snowfalls are scant and dirty, and certainly not the kind that inspires a writer to type away. And I have lost whatever little of that distinctive Michigan accent—what one website devoted to Michigan lore described as “a little bit Fargo, a little bit nasal Chicago, and a little bit Canada”—that I picked up during my years in the state. But I still see myself as a Michigander. When anyone asks me where I’m from, I say: Michigan. My questioner typically does a double take and asks, “But where are you really from?” To which I say again: Michigan. I am a Michigander now, or perhaps better yet, an Afrigander.
MINNESOTA
CAPITAL St. Paul
ENTERED UNION 1858 (32nd)
ORIGIN OF NAME From a Dakota Indian word meaning “sky-tinted water”
NICKNAMES North Star State, Gopher State, or Land of 10,000 Lakes
MOTTO L’Étoile du Nord (“The North Star”)
RESIDENTS Minnesotan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 8
STATE BIRD common loon (also called great northern diver)
STATE FLOWER lady slipper
STATE TREE red (or Norway) pine
STATE SONG “Hail Minnesota”
LAND AREA 79,610 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Crow Wing Co., 10 mi. SW of Brainerd
POPULATION 5,132,799
WHITE 89.4%
BLACK 3.5%
AMERICAN INDIAN 1.1%
ASIAN 2.9%
HISPANIC/LATINO 2.9%
UNDER 18 26.2%
65 AND OVER 12.1%
MEDIAN AGE 35.4
MINNESOTA
Philip Connors
The last time I was in Minneapolis in summer, I went with family and friends to a Minnesota Twins game at that aesthetic mistake known as the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. We loitered outside the stadium in the light of early evening, delaying our entry into the marshmallow atmosphere of the Humpty Dome until the last possible minute before first pitch. My friend Mark sidled up to join the line at the sweet corn stand. “Look!” he whispered, pointing to the man in front of him. “It’s Garrison Keillor.” Sure enough, there was the state bard, ordering his pregame snack. As Keillor paid, took his roasted corn, and stepped away, Mark stepped up … only to be told by the corn girl that she was plum out. Garrison Keillor had walked with the last ear.
What can anyone say about Minnesota in the face of thirty years and perhaps a thousand performances of A Prairie Home Companion? Keillor’s excavation of Scandinavian mores, his probing of Catholic versus Lutheran sensibilities, his tweaks of our taciturn and cool-headed nature—no other state has ceded the duties of its myth-making to one person with such a wide reach. I feel a little like Mark did that day: as if I’m standing in line at the sweet corn stand of the Minnesota soul, only to find that Garrison Keillor has been here already and cleaned the joint out.
I spent twenty-two of my first twenty-three years in Minnesota, but I now live in New Mexico—culturally, if not quite geographically, about as far from Minnesota as possible without leaving the country. Yet even in the Mexican-American borderlands we exiles from the North Country have a way of finding each other. I’ve become friendly with two fellow Minnesotans here, and they both remind me of the ways of our home state. One is the only friend I’ve made in the last ten years who bothers to remember my birthday. That’s typical of Minnesotans. We remember. We send the card or the gift. We do the little things that k
eep a hum of continuity about our lives.
I met my other Minnesota friend, Ron, at a little place that serves New Mexican wine. I was tending bar; Ron was having a drink with his wife. His chiselled Nordic face and my nasal voice gave us away, and we struck up a quick friendship. Now we play cribbage a couple of times a week when the bar is slow in the afternoon. Ron calls it his therapy, and he’s only half joking. His wife has Alzheimer’s with progressive dementia, and she’s always there with him in the bar. I don’t look askance or make a fuss when she curses him or punches him in the shoulder.
“Okay, dear, we’ll be all right,” he says in a soothing voice as the blows rain down. That he hasn’t institutionalized her makes him, in some people’s eyes, something of a saint, and therefore true to the culture that raised him: Minnesotans are in it for the long haul. We do the little things even when life refuses to hum smoothly along. That he takes her out drinking nearly every day, an activity that seems to exacerbate her confusion, makes him something more complicated, and he’s the first to admit that lunch and dinner and drinks on the town are far cheaper than a bill from—as he always puts it—the funny farm.
Our parsimony—financial and emotional—can, of course, border on the callous. This is a side of ourselves we acknowledge best in our jokes. Take this one, for example: