A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  Michigan is a long state, top to bottom, so even starting from the middle it took us until afternoon to cross the Mackinac Bridge. It’s an awe-inspiring sight, the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere. I didn’t tell Dawn this, because she was driving and can get a little nervous about crossing long bridges, but in high winds (which we were experiencing) the bridge can move as much as 35 feet from side to side.

  The Mackinac Bridge

  The bridge across Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans was the longest bridge we would cross, but the Mackinac was the most impressive—and the scariest. As we approached, there was a flashing sign that read, “High wind warnings ahead,” but I chose not to tell Dawn what that could mean. I didn’t want to have to use power tools to pry her fingers loose from the steering wheel. As you cross you can see a Great Lake on either side—Michigan and Huron. I was born in an area with lots of lakes. I know now that our lakes are just puddles. These are lakes.

  As soon as we rolled off the northern end of the bridge, we were in the Upper Peninsula. The U.P. is sparsely populated. In fact, it covers just under a third of the land mass of Michigan but contains only about 3 percent of the population. And yet, as we discovered, it is quite the tourist destination, especially on weekends.

  We’d both been lucky to have stayed pretty healthy to this point in the trip. I’d been sunburned in Florida, but it’s not much of a headline when an Irish guy with a pale complexion gets sunburned. Dawn had an upset stomach a couple of days, and I didn’t feel 100 percent one night in Salem, but considering the length of time we’d been traveling, we felt fortunate.

  However, as we crossed into the U.P., I saw a lightning strike off to my right.

  “That’s weird. Did you see that lightning?”

  Dawn looked at me a little strangely. “Not exactly the right conditions for lightning, is it?”

  I looked around at the mostly clear skies. “No, not really.”

  Five minutes later, I saw another one, this time directly in front of us. “There! You had to have seen that one!”

  Dawn just shook her head.

  Then, the buzzing in my ears started. Like an invasion of locusts, drowning out everything. I knew. I’ve had migraines for about twenty years, but they’ve stopped coming as regularly as they once did. In fact, I’m down to one or two a year now. This was the day that lucky number came up.

  As I’ve grown older, the migraines have also become less severe. In my thirties, they would send me whimpering to a dark room for several days. Now, I can function through them, but it’s like having a vice around my head, slowly, painfully, clamping down. My trip through the U.P. would be seen through the haze of that pain.

  Headache and all, we pushed on up the U.P. Our destination was the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. Being a Pacific Northwesterner, I will admit to total ignorance about the Great Lakes. Here’s something I learned recently: The amount of water contained in the five Great Lakes would cover the entire continental United States nine and a half feet deep. Also, even though I had played Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” several thousand times, I had no idea how many shipwrecks had occurred on those lakes. It’s a lot, and the museum does a wonderful job of educating and memorializing them. The people who put the museum together were mindful of the sacrifices so many made in the name of moving cargo.

  The most famous wreck, of course, is the aforementioned Edmund Fitzgerald, thanks to the song. At 730 feet, “Big Fitz,” as the boat was nicknamed, was the largest boat on any of the Great Lakes. Forty-one years after the sinking, no one knows exactly what sank the ship on that stormy November night. There was a trailing ship that kept an eye on it through the storm, until its lights just winked out and the Edmund Fitzgerald sank to the bottom.

  It was found very quickly—resting more than 500 feet below the surface. Discovering it was the extent of things until 1995, when a crew descended into the inky depths of Lake Superior and pulled up the bell, now on display in the museum. A video shows the bell being pulled to the surface. The coolest thing is that the team had a replacement bell engraved with the names of the twenty-nine men who perished that day and placed that one back with the wreck.

  The Edmund Fitzgerald bell

  In addition to the main museum, you can also tour the Whitefish Point Light tower and its keeper’s house. I think of lighthouse keeper’s quarters as being spartan, but this one is a cut above, with lots of wood-wrapped windows and doors that make for a cozy feeling. Dawn said that if they’d offer us the job, we’d move in there and watch the light for free. I like the way she thinks.

  Dawn has made a point of putting her feet in the water in the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic on this trip. She wanted to do the same with Lake Superior, but it was not to be. Where Lake Superior hits the coastline at the shipwreck museum, there were white, frothy breakers rushing in. Add in a howling wind and temperatures in the lower 40s, and there was no way she was kicking her shoes off and running into the surf.

  After we left the museum, things got interesting. As I mentioned, the U.P. is thinly populated. About ten miles south of the museum is a small town called Paradise. We looked at the map and knew that if we wanted to find dinner, it would have to be there. Being the off-season, only one place was open. Lots of tourists and a single place to eat meant a long wait for dinner. No problem. We met nice people in line, chatted until our table was ready, then ate and left.

  By then, it was getting dark, and it turned out that all the hotels and motels in Paradise were booked. In fact, according to Hotels.com, Expedia, Trivago, and so on, every hotel and motel in the whole Upper Peninsula was booked. However, we knew that quite often, websites will show all rooms booked when there are still a few for walk-in customers, so we started driving. Every time we found a hotel or motel, we went in and were told that they had given their last room away thirty minutes before. That 30=minute wait for a table in Paradise came back to haunt us.

  Finally, we arrived in a town called Newberry. It was dark, cold and windy. If there was no place to stay there, we were looking at a long drive through dark and twisting back roads to find the next town. Each place we stopped told us the same thing: no vacancy. Finally, we hit our last hope. If they were booked, we were going to have to either sleep in the Silver Bullet or make the long drive into the night.

  The desk clerk told us the usual, “Just gave away our last room about twenty minutes ago.” But then he dangled this: “Our regular hotel is all booked up, but we do have an ancillary building that has a vacancy.”

  I didn’t like the way he put the emphasis on regular and ancillary. It gave me a bad feeling. But, so did the idea of driving through a national forest with no other town in sight.

  I was blunt. “How bad is it?”

  He was honest. “The hallway is gross, but the room is okay.”

  He was at least half right. The hallway was gross. The “ancillary” hotel appeared to be a halfway house for people working their way back into society. We met two nice men that had the shakes, smoking a cigarette. They had a three-legged dog with them. Dawn wanted to ask if their dog could stay in the room with us.

  The desk clerk showed us the room, which was awful in a truly awful sort of way. The clerk shrugged and said, “This is the last room available in the entire Upper Peninsula tonight. Had a call from a guy at a hotel in Marquette, looking for a room because they had accidentally double-booked.” That was very bad news. Marquette was the only other town of any size on our horizon, and it was close to two hours away.

  We took the room. Luckily, the floor was covered in inexpensive laminate so there wasn’t a smelly carpet to deal with. Still, there were lingering odors we couldn’t quite place. Strange noises echoed around the building all night. Between the room and the migraine, neither of us slept much.

  Day Forty-Eight

  The upside to staying in an awful room in what is essentially a halfway house? We were both up and moving early, ea
ger to put it all behind us. The downside? Dawn will never let me forget it.

  We started our day backtracking about thirty miles. In the descending darkness the night before, we had passed a number of different waterfalls we wanted to check out, but we were hurrying, trying to find a room. That became the first item on our agenda today.

  We visited both Upper and Lower Tahquamenon Falls. Less than a week ago, we saw Niagara Falls. None of what we saw today compares to Niagara, which is immense, both in height and drop. They are a huge tourist stop. The falls in the Upper Peninsula are much smaller, but equally charming, in their own way.

  For either the Upper or Lower Falls, you have to hike quite a ways to get to them. The water of the Upper Falls is a rust-colored brown. This is caused by tannins that leach from cedar swamps, which the river drains. It looked like weak coffee going over the rocks. The falls itself isn’t tall—maybe fifty feet—but it’s the setting that makes it worth the hike. The water below the falls pools into placid lakes, surrounded by the vibrant and changing foliage. It was one of the most peaceful spots of the whole trip.

  Upper Tahquamenon Falls

  We stopped in the gift shop, of course, to pick up a coffee mug and a magnet, and I asked the woman who rang me up how to pronounce Tahquamenon.

  “It’s easy,” she said.

  I wanted to say, “It always is, when you know the answer,” but I kept quiet.

  “It’s just like ‘phenomenon.”

  I rolled that around in my head and it felt right. Now I have a blue-speckled coffee mug that reads Tahquamenon Falls State Park, so when people stop by for a cuppa, you know I’ll be asking them to guess how to pronounce it.

  The Lower Tahquamenon Falls are smaller still, but there are five of them, so they look a little like stair steps. Like the Upper Falls, they are surrounded by tranquil, natural beauty that makes it worth the hike.

  The falls are a great way to spend an afternoon in Upper Michigan, especially on a sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-October, when all the colors of the rainbow were found in the foliage.

  I mentioned earlier that the U.P. is a culture of its own, and it really is. It feels like the people who live there like it that way and take pride in it. If you’re an outdoorsy type, I think you would be in heaven.

  They also have a sense of humor. Earlier, I mentioned that I used to play a band called Da Yoopers, on the radio. As we were heading out of the U.P., we drove through Ishpeming, and saw something called Da Yoopers Tourist Trap on the side of the road.

  In front of the Tourist Trap, was a pretty good sized gun. By that, I mean they have a rifle approximately the size of a mobile home. They claim it was even fired once.

  Da Yoopers’ gun packs a whallop

  Inside, it was exactly as advertised: a tourist trap, with a million tchotchkes and useless souvenirs. I bought several.

  As I was making my purchases, I asked the lady running the place if Da Yoopers still play and record music. She looked sad and said, “Well, the band is kind of a thing of the past.” She lowered her voice, then added, “And, some of them are dead, too.” I can see where that would put a bit of a crimp in band morale.

  Too bad. I love Da Yoopers.

  Also, we loved the U.P.

  Day Forty-Nine

  You knew it was inevitable, right? On a trip around America that has taken every possible detour in pursuit of Americana and roadside attractions, at some point you knew that we would come across the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. When I woke up today, I knew I was going to see the ball of twine, but I never anticipated meeting JFK, who made it. No, not the former president. The other JFK.

  We slept in an extra hour this morning, because we gained an hour when we reached the western extreme of Michigan. There’s no better way to spend an hour, when you’ve been running non-stop for seven weeks, than sleeping, right?

  When we left Ironwood, Michigan, I thought we were heading toward a spot in Wisconsin where John Dillinger had engaged in an epic shootout with the FBI before escaping on foot. That location is now a lodge/cafe, and there are still bullet holes in the wall. It’s also where they shot a portion of the Johnny Depp movie Public Enemy. This is the kind of thing that is right up our alley – a little pop culture, and history, all blended together. As we pulled out of the parking lot, though, Mama Google warned me that the place didn’t open until 5:00 PM. Since it was 10:00 AM, and the place was only an hour away, that plan went out the window. The John Dillinger shootout location will have to wait for another day.

  So, we headed toward Duluth, Minnesota, figuring I would find something along the way that was interesting or unusual. That’s where JFK and his ball of twine entered the picture. JFK is James Frank Kotera, and in a world where most people are drawn in shades of grey, he is drawn in vibrant full-color.

  To meet Mr. Kotera is to know him, as he will hold nothing back. I glanced through his visitors log and saw that he gets several visitors every day, from all over the world. I believe he tells each and every one of them his story, and here it is, paraphrased from memory.

  On April 3rd, 1975, he was in his bedroom when he felt the hand of God on his back. He had an interesting conversation with God that went something like this:

  “James, this is the real God.”

  “The real God? Right here in my bedroom?”

  “Right here in your bedroom. James, you need to quit your drinking and straighten out your life, or you will never be the famous JFK, the twine man.”

  Now if I had this conversation with God, I would have mentioned that there was already a pretty famous JFK, but Mr. Kotera is a better man than I. He listened to God and told me he has never had another drink since that morning.

  For some reason, he waited to get started on his life’s work, but on the 4th anniversary of his conversation with God, he started building his ball of twine. Thirty seven years later, he is still working on it. He told me he had already worked on it for several hours this very morning.

  “Over and under, over and under, and it will never fall apart.” He said in a sing-song voice that made me suspect he had said it perhaps a million times before.

  I was tempted to say, “Wax on, wax off,” but I already loved Mr. Kotera, so I didn’t.

  Have you seen the late-seventies movie Being There, starring Peter Sellers as Chance the gardner, or perhaps read the novella of the same name by Jerzy Kosinski? If not, the basic plot is that Peter Sellers plays an exceedingly simple man who only talks about gardening and television. Everyone who encounters him hears the same simple homilies and respects his wisdom.

  Mr. Kotera is the closest I have ever come to meeting a real Chance the Gardener. I’ve never met anyone who is so happy, so satisfied with their lot in life, so convinced they are doing exactly what they should be doing every day. I felt blessed to have met him, and will not forget him or the life lessons he effortlessly imparts. One of my lessons for the day is, a gift can spring up from the most unexpected places. JFK and his perspective was one of those gifts.

  By the way, the sign in front of JFK’s house says “Dump and Twine Man” because he still works three days a week at the dump, which he also loves.

  JFK keeps meticulous notes and measurements about his ball of twine. He measures and weighs each piece of string he adds to it. He told me that as of this morning, it weighs 22,200 lbs. Because of the way he has to build it, it’s actually more of an “egg” of twine now, as opposed to a “ball.” Mr. Kotera explained that is a function of the very heavy twine resting on the concrete blocks, There’s no way for him to add more twine around the middle.

  I said, “Unless you got a crane in here, lifted it up and set it on a new base.”

  He nodded. He was way ahead of me, as usual. “Yep. $8,000.”

  Enough said. It will continue to be the World’s Biggest Egg of Twine until someone wants to kick in eight grand.

  JFK’s Egg of twine

  I knew nothing could top the experience of finally realizing the ult
imate roadtripper goal of finding The World’s Largest Ball of Twine, but it was only noon, so we had to go on with our day. We stuck to the backroads. In some spots, the leaves were falling so fast, it felt like a psychedelic snow. Much of Wisconsin felt like we were driving through a postcard.

  When we crossed over into Minnesota, it crossed another state off my “to visit” list, marking #49 out of 50. Only North Dakota has eluded me.

  Duluth was the first city we hit in Minnesota. I was tempted to go by the home that Robert Zimmerman was born in. Who? Oh, right. Bob Dylan. Most people associate him with Hibbing, Minnesota, but he was born and lived in Duluth the first six years of his life. We decided against making the trek across town, for a couple of reasons. One, I’m just not all that caught up in seeing the birthplaces of musical icons. We’ve all gotta be born somewhere, and unless they did something noteworthy there, aside from maybe being potty trained, it just doesn’t matter much to me. Second, I have to make a small confession: although I love his songs, I’ve never loved Mr. Dylan as a recording artist. I listen to Dylan songs most every day, but typically they are sung by other artists.

  What we couldn’t pass up was the Aerial Lift Bridge. It was built in 1905, originally as a transporter bridge. If you are like me, you may have never heard of a transporter bridge. Picture a cable crossing a river, with cable cars on it, ferrying passengers from one side to the other. There were only two of them ever built in the USA, and this was one. In 1929, though, it was converted to the Aerial Lift Bridge, which is almost as rare. The Aerial Lift Bridge is different from every other drawbridge I’ve ever seen. Instead of opening in the middle to let a boat pass, the Aerial Lift Bridge raises and raises—135 feet in the air—until even a mammoth ship can pass underneath.