The biggest of the inland lakes was the closest, only a couple of miles north. That was Crystal. Once, a long time before I was born, they tried to dig a channel to connect it to Lake Michigan, but the plan backfired and nearly drained the smaller lake, which never did get back up to its previous level. A flat, sandy beach appeared all around it, and then people rushed in and built so many vacation houses and camps they boxed it all in. It’s still a popular tourist destination, though as a child I couldn’t see why. I loved the big lake, my father’s lake, mine, so much I couldn’t see why anyone would prefer Crystal. Only when I came back did I realize how pretty Crystal really is.
North of the Plattes are the two Glens. When you climb Sleeping Bear Dune you can see them set into the land like two sapphires with a platinum band that is the road in between them. I liked to say their names. Big Platte, Little Platte, Big Glen, Little Glen, Otter, the Bars, School, Bass, Lime, Lake Leelanau, Little Traverse, and some so small they didn’t even have names. Plus Lake Michigan had all those bays, Platte, Sleeping Bear at Glen Haven, and Good Harbor up past Pyramid Point. On a still day the water in those bays might be nearly as smooth as our harbor, not at all the way the lake was at Frankfort and especially Point Betsie, though even the smallest lakes could rage in a storm.
Our inner harbor was called Betsie Bay, but before the sandbar at its mouth was dredged it was Betsie Lake, and even before that it was called Aux Becs Scies, which was French, because back then French fur traders came down from Canada, but Leelanau, which was not just the name of my street but also the county to the north of us, was an Indian word, Ojibwe for Land of Delight, or so we were told, and even though it turned out to be just a made-up word and not Indian at all it seemed appropriate because I felt I lived in a land of delight. The ferries docked near the front of the bay, in Elberta, but at the back where the Betsie River curled in, there was a marsh where fish came to spawn, and when you went canoeing back there in the summer you would often flush a great blue heron or an egret hunting in the shallows. I don’t think there is anything quite so pure as the sight of an egret taking flight on a clear morning, like a clean, white handkerchief flung against the bright-blue sky. It makes the day seem so buoyant and full of promise.
It was beautiful, where I lived.
My house was set back from the street on a hill so steep there were four separate flights of stairs between it and our front porch. We didn’t have a backyard, but it didn’t matter because the woods were right behind us and our side yard was so big. I had a tire swing, and at the top of our driveway was the carriage house with its hayloft that wasn’t a hayloft anymore and downstairs beside my father’s car there was an old sleigh. My bedroom was in the back of the house, overlooking the woods, and in the fall my window filled with crimson, yellow, and orange, and after the maple leaves fell, little apricot flags still fluttered from the beech trees, pale against the deep green of the hemlocks, cedars, and firs. My favorites were the birch trees with their peeling, papery white bark. One of my father’s mates brought me a little canoe made out of birch bark from St. Ignace, and I put a clothespin in it and pretended the pin was an Indian maiden paddling around one of the little lakes tucked into the woods, but I guess it was the kind of toy you were just supposed to look at because when I put it in our bathtub it sank.
Officially Frankfort is a city. It became one the year I was four, but it wasn’t really a city, not like Chicago or Detroit, which is where a lot of the people who spent their summers at Crystal Lake lived. In a city you would get lost, but it would be impossible to get lost in Frankfort, because you could walk from one end to the other. And it’s not that much bigger now than it was then. At the west end, along Forest and Leelanau Avenues, hardly anything has changed, from the outside anyway, the same houses with their big front porches wearing fresh coats of paint. The grandest houses, the ones with turrets and tower rooms, are on the north side of Leelanau, where I lived. The house where I grew up has been painted a paler shade of gray, but it has the same clean, white trim—cornices above the tall windows, dentil molding, ornate brackets beneath the eaves, and pierced bargeboard along the carriage house roof. Even the woods between the house where Billy Johnson grew up and mine are intact. His didn’t have a tower room, just three steep gables across the front, and some of the other tower rooms were only second-floor bays with tall, pointy roofs like witches’ hats, but ours really was a tower, a small third-floor room reached by a steep ladder, with a dormer on each of its four sides and a mansard roof covered with shingles shaped like fish scales, though after my trip across the lake I always imagined them on the belly of the snow wasset instead.
Even most of the buildings on Main Street remain, though the businesses have changed. The Civil War cannon is still there in a little park at the end of the street behind the beach where the bicycle path ends. No one knows who put it there or even when. It’s simply been there as long as I can remember, unlike the cross on Second Street that marks where Father Jacques Marquette was supposed to have died and been buried, though a few years after his death his bones were dug up and taken to the mission in St. Ignace, and now no one knows where he died for sure because Roald was right—history gets swoggled. There’s an art center in the old coast guard station and a new coast guard station next door, but half the Coasties don’t remember the old station, even though it was decommissioned only a decade ago. That’s the way it is when anything changes. I remember though.
My house was only two blocks from Main Street, but even so the simplest errand took half a day, there were so many greetings and conversations, and you had to stop in all of the shops whether you had business or not, because if you didn’t the owners would wonder why. At Collins Drugstore Mr. Porter always gave me a new penny for the gumball machine. There’s still a drugstore, though it’s not Collins anymore, and what it sells more than anything else now is toys. About the only business that hasn’t changed names is the Garden Theater, where I went on Saturdays to see Our Gang and Shirley Temple and Snow White. For a nickel you got a cartoon and a short plus the feature. I liked all of the cartoons, but Popeye was my favorite. The welcome gate stood at Seventh and Main, and between that part of Main Street and the harbor there was a park called Mineral Springs where people brought jugs to fill with the healing water. You can still drink the water, though not long after the year I crossed the lake the welcome gate was moved to the top of the hill on the highway, so people coming into Frankfort from Benzonia go through the gate and get a view of the town and glittering blue lake below like a preview of coming attractions.
On the Fourth of July we always had a parade down Main Street with a band and floats and kids on bicycles with crepe paper streamers. Afterward Mineral Springs Park turned into a carnival with tents for food and games in front of the spur line that ran to the passenger station on what they used to call “the island,” where the Royal Frontenac Hotel once stood. We drank lemonade and ate hot dogs and cotton candy and Cracker Jack, which was the best because there was a sailor on the outside of the box and inside was a prize. My favorite was a little tin whistle shaped like a bird. It had painted-on feathers, and when you blew, it didn’t shriek like most whistles do but went tweet like a bird.
At Christmas there was an enormous tree in the intersection of Fourth Street and Main, twenty feet high at least, so tall they had to anchor it in the manhole, but up the hill on Leelanau Avenue I could stand in the hayloft or peek out the window of our tower room and look down on all the sparkling white lights, like stars that had fallen. The lights were always white because the tree was lit for the first time on Santa Lucia Day. The whole town came out for the lighting, and then afterward we went to the church for coffee and saffron buns. The girls wore white dresses and evergreen crowns, and the girl who was chosen to be Santa Lucia got to wear candles in her hair and carry the basket full of buns. I always hoped it would be me, but it never was because by the time I was old enough I was gone. The party was at the old church, which is where the
y put the new church, though the old wooden altar is still there, on a table in the fellowship hall. It looks more like a whole church than an altar, with spires and a little stained-glass window and its own tiny altar inside, like a church from the Old Country, and that’s probably why it was built that way, to remind people where they were from.
The new elementary school is in the same place where the old school was too, at the corner of Leelanau and Seventh, but they didn’t keep anything, and it looks like a school that could be anywhere with its flat roof and fluorescent lights and cement-block walls, which is sad, because the old school was so grand, a big, brick, three-story building with stone around its base and a tall tower above the entrance, and the sidewalk that led up to it was flanked by trees that made you feel as if you were a bride walking down a canopied aisle, and then when you opened the door beneath the tower you turned into a princess stepping inside a castle, but now there’s nothing left, the trees are gone, and you can’t even tell where the old sidewalk was.
On Christmas Eve the town gathered again at the big tree on Main, and then we walked up and down Forest and Leelanau singing carols, and the people who stayed home would open their doors and offer us hot chocolate while the yellow lights from their porches spilled out across the snow. And in the daytime cardinals and waxwings fluttered in and out of the big tree, which was strung with garlands of popcorn and cranberries, and the birds were so pretty against the greenery it seemed as if they were part of the decorations. It was such a festive time.
What I am saying is that winter in Michigan is not the unendurable runny-nosed, aching shiver people elsewhere in the country imagine, all goose bumps and an extended huddle around a woodstove, drinking toddies from cups that chatter on their saucers and pining for spring. We got outside. We explored the woods on snowshoes and cross-country skis. We skated on the harbor and went sledding down our hill. Sometimes we even got up a party to go tobogganing at Sleeping Bear Dune, near Glen Haven, where we rode the Dunesmobiles in summer. We took the train to Thompsonville and went skiing, we built snow forts, there were sleigh rides. Later, after I was grown, there was snowmobiling. You would be surprised at the number of seniors who pass on the palm trees and endless summer to retire back to Frankfort, no matter where they have spent their adult years or how long they’ve been gone.
Someone else now lives in the house where I grew up, of course. The open door in the loft above the carriage house is boarded up, and the double front doors with their gingerbread screens are painted a soft mulberry instead of green, though I know that if I wanted I could knock and say I used to live there and the owners would invite me inside and offer me a refreshment. But I don’t have to see it to know that the wallpaper with the little brown stain in the upstairs hall would be gone, maybe the sconce, and probably one of the bedrooms has been turned into a master bath and walk-in closet, the kitchen would have granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, and maybe the wall where the butler’s pantry was has been knocked out—these days people seem to like what they call an open concept—though perhaps they’ve fitted it out as a laundry room instead, with a set of those steam washers and dryers with windows on the doors that look like portholes on a ship. Who knows what became of the wringer washer on our back porch or the baroque August Förster piano in our front parlor? It’s not that I disapprove or wouldn’t have made the same updates myself, only that I like to imagine somewhere in the room where I slept, in the back of the closet perhaps, slipped through a crack between the woodwork and wall, there is still a little tin whistle shaped like a bird.
I insist: despite everything that happened, I remember my childhood as happy.
17
Later that afternoon my father took me up to the pilothouse to see the wheel that steered the ship. It was the biggest wheel I’d ever seen, and the helmsman, who wasn’t Odd now, but someone named Pete with a big nose that took a sharp hook down, stood on a thick mat of latticed wood to keep him in place in bad weather, though it had stopped snowing, the sun had come out, and there were so many windows it was brighter than the galley, so bright I felt as if I was on top of the clouds. Out past the bow the ice looked like a map with all the cracks dividing it up into different countries, and when I saw it I said, “This is the world!” and Pete laughed and said, “Well, it’s a right frozen part of it, that’s for sure, miss.” Up in the pilothouse you could barely hear the hum of the engine, and the grinding of the ice against the sides of the ship was muted, but it was harder to keep your balance, and we weren’t even in the tallest place—that was the crow’s nest, which looked like a nest it was so high up the forward spar. If you were up there you really would be standing in the sky. I wanted to climb up to see how that would feel, but my father said I couldn’t, couldn’t ever, only the most experienced watch got to do that, and never in heavy seas, because in a gale the ship would pitch so much a man might fall out and be smashed to pieces on the deck. My father didn’t say the part about being smashed, but you could see what would happen, and even though I didn’t want it to happen to me I did think it would be fun to see what the world looked like from up there. So that was another thing I would have to think about.
There was a lot of brass for the deckhands to polish—because that would be their job, along with all the painting and soogeeing that never ended—the shiny heating pipes in front of the windows that curved so tightly against each other they looked like a musical instrument, the binnacle that housed the big magnetic compass, the tall brass tube with a ring on top, and more. On the floor to the left of the wheel was the courtesy whistle, the one they used when they were docking or leaving port in the middle of the night so they didn’t wake up the whole town, but to blow the big steam whistle, according to my father, you just pulled the cords that ran across the ceiling on each side of the front-most window.
I wanted to blow all the whistles, but my father said I couldn’t. I had washed my face like Alv said, and I dangled Manitou at my knees to hide where I’d torn out the hem of my dress. I had brought my bear up so he could see the chadburns, but he didn’t care about them once he heard about the whistles. He wanted to blow them all too, and I had to tell him to be quiet so that I could hear how the chadburns worked.
You didn’t talk into them like I thought, though on the wall there was a telephone the captain could use to talk to the engine room if he wanted the lights turned on or someone sent up on an errand, and there was even a voice tube to the car deck in case he wanted to say something to the hands down there. But the chadburns were topped by dials instead of speakers, which made them look like big brass lollipops, and there wasn’t just one, there were three, one each for the port and starboard engines, and another smaller one that could be used to communicate with the aft pilothouse when the ship was backing up to dock. That one told the wheelsman how to steer, but on the engine chadburns each position on the dial rang a bell for different speeds, with one side for forward and the other for reverse, so the engineer would know what the captain wanted him to do.
“What happens if he doesn’t hear the bell?” I asked.
The wheelsman had been staring out at the ice, but now he glanced at me with an amused smile that made his big hawk’s nose look even bigger.
“It’s happened.” The lines around my father’s eyes crinkled. “That’s why one of the boys sits on a stool beneath the bell and never moves, to make sure the engineer gets the captain’s orders. If he doesn’t move his needle to signal that he’s understood, I sound the general alarm.” My father pointed to a metal box near the tall chart table built into the back of the pilothouse. There was a little gold star made out of braid just above the stripes on the sleeve of his uniform, and I thought I would like to have a star on my arm. I couldn’t know that only a few years later there would be little Norwegian girls who would have to wear gold stars on their arms, Norwegian girls, German, Polish, Danish, Dutch, even French girls. I was too young to understand how much intentional evil this world holds, too young e
ven to follow my father’s explanation of the cavitate bell and all the other things in the pilothouse, like the sign above the windows that told the wheelsman which way the ship would go when he turned the wheel, because even if he knew left from right, some posts had the rudder in front and others had the rudder in back, and that changed the directions around. I hugged Manitou to my chest and wondered if I was on a ship where left was right and right was left would my shoes be on backward.
“There sure is a lot of stuff on a ship,” I said.
My father and the wheelsman smiled. “Wait until you get to the engine room.”
“Got so much stuff down there you can’t hear yourself think,” Pete added. “We like it up here. Nice and quiet.”
“Well, I guess I know everything now,” I said.
Pete laughed. “Girl’s ready to write for her captain’s.” That’s what sailors called taking the exam to move up in rank. Mr. Johannessen had written for his captain’s, but he was still my father’s first mate because the Ann Arbor didn’t have a ship for him. And Dick Butler had written for his engineer’s, but the railroad passed over him for Walter because Walter had more hours at sea, but the rest of the black gang teased him that it was because he didn’t have the right temperament, and even though they were just kidding, they got under his skin and reminded him to be sore.
Across the Great Lake Page 9