Jeff’s 10-Day Up North Adventure 2004
This July I did a long-week trip up north that had 5 diverse angles to it, so I thought I’d write up a report about it. It was supposed to have yet another angle to it—include the family for part of it—but they bailed due to the drivetime.
Here’s what I did in 10 days:
*drove to U.P. for a folk music festival; met new friends; found a new cabin–2 days
*drove to Minnesota for Integrative Studies weeklong retreat, foodfest and workout frenzy–6 days
*drove back thru U.P. and slept on Superior shore; then started 1 massive day wherein I woke up then visited with Guru Roland and climbed ski tower and met new friends; drove down to L.P.
*then saw start of AuSable Canoe Marathon and saw old friends;
*then drove to cabin in woods for Mike’s 40th birthday by Lake Huron and got there late at night but in time to see friends giving him a toast around very long table lit by candles in the woods; partied in woods, saw performance art; after another day of R&R at Mike’s cabin, I drove home.
Whew!
Here’s what really happened…
On Fri. July 17 (?) I loaded up the old Volvo and drove up to Marquette for the Hiawatha Folk Music Festival. Before I left I knew our lovely blackberry crop would be finished when I got home, so I had one last bowl of perfect cereal…
On the way I stopped and had dinner on the north shore of Lake Michigan, in Gulliver, at the old log lodge there. Classy oldstyle. I had fresh lake perch.
Then I took a detour onto the Garden Peninsula to see if I could find some old family friends. They have a cottage on 500 feet of beach. I noticed that my map had an “X” out thataway so I figured that was the cottage. I drove out. The road turned to dirt, then 2-track, then pure logging boonies. I turned around and took another fork. That 2-track tapered to nothing but the cottage at the end seemed about right, maybe. I stopped and gave a howdy and a lady came out and said I was at the right place. Not bad! The friends were in town but I could come on in. What a nice, quiet place! The Garden is a rare temperate place for Lake Michigan, much less the U.P., and it’s so far overlooked by tourists. Nice! The people there had been to the music fest further north and wished me well. I hit the road again. (Amazingly, the Volvo got 27mpg the whole trip.)
The Garden Cottage viewed from Lake Michigan. There’s a pond and irises between beach and cottage.
The Garden Beach. …No one.
Hiawatha is the smallest of Michigan’s 3 big hippy fests. I’d never been. I arrived late but found the corral of cars and tents that our friends had set up in the quiet woodsy camping area. I went to ask a question at the Info Tent and the guy running it said Hi and introduced himself and shook my hand. It was a fine welcome that showed the scale of this fest. It’s been going on for 30 years about and the people know each other. This festival happens in a big woodsy park that’s nestled right in Marquette, so you have access to wilderness and water on one side and town on the other. I went looking for my friends and found a big square dance getting under way under a tent. Right when I walked up they were starting and a square was looking for an extra person, but I was road-buzzed and wanted to find the folks who invited me up. Rats. One should ALWAYS jump at these kinds of chances. In the end I found my people. I thought I was just meeting friends at a fest but it turned out that they came up and met a big group of their own friends at this fest. A fest is not just a person or family going to hear music. It’s a big mishmash web of folks. So actually over a beer in the middle of the night I got to meet a whole bunch of fine folks that I had only heard about before. Very nice!
The next day was full of music and wandering and sightseeing. I liked checking out all the bikes. There was a musicians camping area that featured playing into the wee-hours. A youth area, featuring a drum circle. And a family area that was nice’n’dark’n’quiet.
This fest encourages people to pitch in on the work. If you do a couple 3-hour shifts they pay you back your entry fee and you get a t-shirt to boot. I think that’s the ticket. Work for music. It’s fun work, of course, with nice people. One wee-hours shift will do the trick, even.
My highlight was getting the nerve to take a swing-dance class. I’m thinking I need to be way more pro-active at these fests. I’m not much a consumer of music. I want IN. So I showed for dance and raised my hand. A lovely young gal raised hers. So I got to spend an hour learning all kinds of steps with the energy of youth. Invigorating yet exhausting. What fun!
I also enjoyed giving away OYB magnet stickers, bumperstickers and zine issues: I had em propped on my car. I would’ve liked to have charged a buck just to make sure the right intention was there, but oh well. I really do need to get a proper booth/show instant set-up going for big and small events alike. Some kind of insty-kiosk.
The next morning I had to get traveling on my Big Trip, so I got up early and did the hour of guided yoga under the big top before heading out. The other Michi-fests I’ve been to have this as well. Very cool!
Ya know, it seems like campgrounds in general should operate like these fests. None of this stuff is outside regular life. Why shouldn’t we be able to go camping and meet people and be civilized and have fun and hang out around a circle of music-makers in one area and then maybe go find some other music-makers who have folks dancing up a storm in some other park of the camp, and then join some folks in the morning somewhere else for yoga. I do find some campgrounds to be convivial, but the music and dance is missing. Acoustic music done on the side doesn’t have to be bothersome. Amplification sure has given public music a bad rap, though. And dance isn’t what it was neither. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t all make a big comeback. The alternatives have been massive flops: screaming, boozing and loudspeaker ravings? Get real. Of course one problem might be that’s it’s all LOST now, culture-wide anyway. Vestiges only. Well, thankfully there are enough of those. But I really don’t see why this kind of thing should be set aside. Sure it’s special but no reason why it couldn’t be common. I note that the folk music works fine in a park inside a town, works fine among neighbors. How well does other pop music fare? Music shouldn’t segregate; it should integrate, blend in. (Sure, let the kids segregate during their mating season, briefly, quietly, to the side, as they sort things out. A main culture is always integrative, sustainable.)
Anyway, I hit the road and arrived at Side Lake, MN, around supper. Dinner is lunch out there in the boonies.
This was going to be a week of intensive reading and thinking and eating and discussion, hosted by Ron Puhek, the guy who’s hosted the weekly meetings in East Lansing for 30 years. Life integration is the goal of the efforts we call the “5th Way.” We read various texts and try to appropriate them for ourselves and everyday living. Ron has a tiny oldstyle family cottage on the lake. He invited us to this thing. It’s been happening for 12 years now. He provides the food and wine. We rent a cottage down the way. He cooks up a storm every day of meals he had as a kid growing up in the area, miner food, an ethnic mix. It’s a good cult, I like to say.
Supper on the porch at Side Lake.
Families are invited but haven’t come yet. I’m one of the only ones with little kids and an inclination to rustica. I think we’ll all go next year. But how will we handle the biggest daily meal? It’s where a lot of discussion goes down. Well, maybe I’ll join the gang for that and hang with my gang the rest of the time til the evening meeting.
Evening meeting in gazebo by lake.
We meet by the water’s edge every evening and work on our lives til midnight. It’s a jampacked week, really. Amazing how so little fills it all up. All we do is read, eat, drink, nap, stroll. Well, they make me finish off the big bowls of food. And there’s hills up there, so I don’t mind. Instead of strolling, I go running on the hilly trails with my ski poles, or go rollerskiing on the big road hills. Twice a day. Or that’s what I did this year. I don’t think I’ll do it next year. I noticed that I couldn’t think while doing a hard workout. And I couldn’t think very well for a half hour afterward either. Hard efforts are for jocks.
Ron does an hour bike ride every morning, before cooking the daily feast. He rides his Huffy in one gear, coasts down the hills. Every afternoon after our feast he rows around the lake in an old aluminum fishing boat with crappy little oars. Creak, creak. Then he does some calisthenics. How many 63-yr-olds do 3 sets of 10 chin-ups after an hour row?
A big thing is being on time. Ron is by himself all the rest of the summer up there and we don’t have time to waste, so our busy daily events start on time. It’s hilarious how hard it is to get to dinner at 12:15, supper at 5:20 and the meeting at 7:30. No screw-ups. This daily practice seems as big a factor in our efforts as our readings. Chop wood, carry water, don’t be late.
A neighbor across the lake called to Ron in a kind of exasperated way while he was rowing this year and asked him how long he’d been rowing like that, ’cause he’d been coming up for 10 years and always saw him. Ron said 30 years of daily rowing in the summers. Same boat. Whew! Powerboats shriek up and down the waterway, but a daily rower is like Chinese water torture to an American. Why, why, why does he row? Why doesn’t he SPEND? Aaaiieee!!!
It really was nice doing the daily studies and the great meals and the two-a-day workouts. I don’t have hills here where I live, so I was just eating up the ones up there.
We read some of the Gnostic Gospels for this session. Here’s a big thing we learned from them. Well, we got ideas from them that blended with other ideas we’ve been working on. There seems to be a chain of reality that needs to flow a certain direction to work right. It goes from Father > Spirit > Soul > Flesh. Modern terms for this might be: Source > Energy > Feelings > Ego. (Maybe the Christ idea would be the arrows that “bridge” the links together, because the word “Christ” means “the bridge between Heaven and Earth.”) We go wrong when instead of letting life be guided from the Source on down to expression in our activities, we instead let our identity and expectations be the guide for our feelings which we then try to make ourselves get excited about. We try to make the chain flow backwards: Ego > Feelings > Energy > Source. Bad idea. So we thought about how to live with the chain flowing the right way.
Now, for a study that’s supposed to be practical this kind of lesson seems awful vague, but we’re working on a new way of learning about life. Applying an idea in our lives doesn’t mean it’s a results-based practice. We’re trying to get out of the modern approach. Results aren’t necessarily living. A process relationship seems closer. It’s not things or measurements we look for but living concepts. Medicine seems practical, for instance, but it’s the art of disease. What’s the art of life? We feel that it’s of a different order, quality or orientation, so we work along those lines. Maybe it’s more about being than becoming.
We finally celebrated our last meeting with champagne and one guy and I started driving home that night. I made it a few hours til we came to a nice bay of Lake Superior and I flashed him in his hot car up ahead and we agreed to take a break. I got my sleeping bag out and crashed on the lovely shore. He just took a catnap and continued on. He likes to drive at night. I started out again in the early a.m. What a lovely mini-sleep. I stopped at a greasy spoon for breakfast and eavesdropped on the Yooper talk.
I got to Iron Mountain and asked at the cafes for Roland. He’s been staying in that town this summer. Roland is our itinerant scholar, housesitter, 4th Way guide, and tennis pal. The very friendly baristas, many of them young ladies, of Ironic Mountain, all knew about Roland, but he hadn’t been in yet today. It didn’t take me long to find him toodling down the sidewalk on his bike. We had a happy reunion and he took me on a tour of town, including a visit to the top of the big hill with the biggest ski jump on top. They call it ski flying and world records are set here. It’s a big wood tower on a big hill. There’s a restaurant at the bottom, but insanely and sadly it doesn’t have a view of the jump or landing. There’s a grove between them. There’s quite a view from way up there, so I had to climb the tower before we took off. I shouted to Roland that it would just take a few minutes. As I started up he calmly said the last guy to do that when he brought him up here had a hard time getting back down. I thought Huh, fancy that, and took off up the ramp. There’s a 2×4 ladder set-up going up alongside the ski run-way to the top of the 300 foot tower. The ramp gets steeper as you go up. To near vertical. I got halfway up. Then I saw how far I had to go, with the dark blue sky beyond the top, with torn puffy white clouds whipping past. And I looked down to see Roland looking very tiny the in-run. And I noticed that I was climbing a totally unprotected semi-ladder type thing. And I thought “I’m high enough, I think I’ll go down now.” I was a little anxious, but got down fine. One mis-step: dead. How do they do it in winter? While carrying huge skis over their shoulders? Crazy! Man, they GOTTA have a safety line.
We visited some of Roland’s longtime friends, one of whom has my same birthday and who I’ve heard about for years. They had a fine boonies homestead with a big garden that verged out into northwoods forest. It’s interesting to see a regular family home and garden where it’s obvious that bear and moose and wolves live just beyond the yard. Then I headed for the Bridge.
I stopped briefly at two quality knife shops on my north shore drive, Marbles in Gladstone and Wolverine near Naubinway. I was most impressed by the deluxe filet knife that Wolverine makes. I told the guy I’d never seen as nice of a filet knife and he said he didn’t think anyone else made such a thing.
Near the Mackinaw Bridge I bought some smoked trout for the big party that night (and a pasty for the road). Naubinway and St. Ignace are great places for that kind of shopping.
I got to Grayling in the middle of the big AuSable Canoe Marathon festivities. The race was starting that evening. I ran into old pals and caught some race fever. “What, you’re not staying?” This is the northwood’s biggest event of the year. About 100K people watch it all told. Several radio stations do continuous live coverage. It’s a $50K 120-mile 50th annual canoe race that goes all night, 15 hours all told, 50 teams, all top notch, 18 hour cut-off. One team had won it 8 times in a row. But every team offers race fans an interesting story. There are many father/son, father/daughter, high school pals, teenagers, old-timer teams out there. Only half the first-timers finish. There are about 20K people at the raucous start. They watch the LeMans dash of a quarter-mile to the river, then they all run down thru people’s yards to watch the boats as they blast out of town, then they all dash to their cars and race down to the first bridge. The all-night traffic mayhem begins. Anyway, it was 8:30pm and I thought the race started at 10pm, so I was getting ready to head out to my next phase-shift of this adventure when a pal told me it started at 9pm, so I stayed and watched and cheered with the crowd. Then I headed out to drive across the state to Lake Huron and East Tawas to Mike’s cabin and the big party.
When I arrived in the dark they were just making the 40th birthday toasts. It was great to get out of the car and into the quiet woods and hear friends and the tinkling of wine-glasses. They had a huge long table set up outside with flowers and candles all along it for the 30 guests. I walked in out of the shadows and a scrumptious Mexican dinner was placed before me along with a hug from Martha.
The next morning I listened on a Walkman to the finish of the canoe race. During the night I’d peeked in occasionally and knew that a couple boats with young paddlers were close to the big dogs. The finish line frenzy was deafening in the tiny headphones. I gave a play by play to the mellow folks lounging around me. As the winning boat came around the final bend it was…the youngsters! They’d finally beat the old pros. New champs and a new era! Ah yes. We then played croquet and badminton and swam and visited with old pals. Then I drove home to get the kids from the grandparents and catch up.
What a ten days!
