Harvest Village

I am missing Michigan. Ohio has its own forests, miles of neatly farmed  fields, tight farmhouse complexes tucked into isolated copses connected by the usual crappy frost heaved roads. Michigan is all that and more of it, deeper valleys and bigger hills and more appalling potholes.

Two years ago we came across a small farm on the Harvest Host program and we remembered the quiet under a starlit night sky followed by a superb breakfast brought to our van. They still do that. 

The farm is still there as is the breakfast. They sell the meat they raise as well. We don’t eat meat all the time but we aren’t vegetarians. I am not a fan of factory farming -who is?- and I’m fine with paying more for meat raised humanely and in nature. Not everyone can or even cares about the old fashioned way to raise farm animals. Dan Cool said to me that his pigs have only one bad day in their lives. He had to yell at them repeatedly to come out and get their dinner. 

They were napping in the bushes out of sight but eventually we heard grunting in the darkness under the trees shading their field and out they came ready to stick their snouts in the trough. 

Dan told us his first batch of pigs were pink skinned and got sunburned living outdoors. Now he raises more expensive dark skinned pigs. They live outdoors and they live it, only using their shelter to escape the rain. Usually they are sent to the butcher before winter but he says they have enough fat to be comfortable even in cold weather. A little straw and they pile under cover when it’s cold out. And they are smart. Sometimes they do something stupid he said with a laugh and then he had to remind himself they are just six months old. They’d be puppies if they were dogs. 

It was getting dark and time to bring in the sheep. And Dan has a couple of sheep dogs. 

Rusty was locked up safe in the van so the sheep could be herded to the barn for the night safe from real predators:

Happy animals mean better meat and happy animals mean more relaxed humans looking after them. Dan is proud of his husbandry. 

Dan and Arlene have traveled abroad as missionaries but they came home to join his seven siblings  who farm here. He has ten acres of his own and shares 80 more with his family. They cut wood and heat their water and their home with a remote boiler. Twice a day Dan or Arlene come out to check and feed the animals and throw some wood on the fire and they live through the winter with no heating hills. It’s not a bad life. 

I’m retired and not into chores but park your RV and you have a place to walk the dog or read the book of listen to the sounds of dinner fading into Autumn. 

They sell jams and stuff in the gift shop. They have a bed and breakfast apartment. They live on a dirt road near LeRoy Michigan. 

I can’t wait to come back. 

Michigan Wildcamps

It has been a new experience for us traveling since mid June when we returned to the United States from a winter on the road in Mexico. We were, for the first time since retirement started in October, traveling in high season.

School was out, families were traveling right alongside us, campgrounds were always crowded and popular wild camps frequently occupied. We were surprised to see so many vans crossing mountain passes in southwest Colorado. After a winter spent traveling almost alone  our two wheel drive bicycle-free, ladder-free, all terrain tire-free, home on wheels seemed dowdy and the antithesis of an adventure vehicle among the squadrons of four wheel drive Sprinter Winnebagos bustling around mountaineering shops and high octane coffee emporia. 

It was difficult for us to come home to a country that has thrown away its masks in contrast to Mexico where families live together and protect the fragile amongst them, with expensive injections when possible but always with basic hygiene and pandemic precautions. We explored cities and museums and cultural attractions with ease and in viral safety but suddenly we found ourselves surrounded by oblivious gatherings of unprotected people. 

We have taken notes as we have driven and once we get back there are destinations that will merit a second visit, with time to take in the history, the culture and the attractions we have had to skip across these many states. But because we are retired and have no time constraints, broadly speaking, we have allowed ourselves time to enjoy solitude, to enjoy that which has been forced upon us by the lingering Covid. 

Without jobs or offices to attend, with no children to hustle off to school, with no youthful impulses to drive us to night clubs and with friends ready and willing to take Covid tests for us, we have managed to travel so far, in a bubble.  Might as well make the bubble work for us we figured and so we have enjoyed rural America. 

Layne cooks most days, squash casserole last night, pasta tonight, grilled cheese and soup tomorrow and we buy food to go. In summer food trucks, outdoor events and roadside stands make it easy to pick up a cook’s night off. 

It’s been almost a year since we left the Keys and the usual anxieties of van life have fallen away. How to manage daily functions of living, filling and emptying trash cans, water tanks, toilet tanks and so forth occasionally provoke some head scratching but we fumble on through confident the answer will present itself which it always has. “Can you see a trash can?” She asks me at the shopping center…

Where to sleep is the other big question people ask about living on the road (dealing with the toilet is the first curiosity most outsiders have). We have learned not to worry; some solution will come up. Usually we seek out spots away from facilities, sometimes we pay for campsites, usually without hookups as we don’t need them, in state parks and even national parks (where Rusty isn’t welcome for the most part). Mostly we look for free spots and they can be delightful. 

There is a sense of the awesome origins of this country when you wild camp. We choose spots by no means unique to us, except that we are uniquely using them, by ourselves, but our presence  makes our clearing in the forest ours if only for a night or three. We sleep under the stars, sometimes with rain pattering on the tin roof, we wake up to a world of silence that is all ours before the working world rises to the sounds of bedside alarms and then we can hear the rushing of cars in the distance. 

One of the reasons we cling to Michigan is that from here on the wilderness is much reduced. On Thursday GANNET2 will be in the mechanic’s shop in Barberton Ohio where civilization begins. The density of population in the east, the patchwork of public lands will be a big change from the endless national forests of the West and the sparse towns dotting miles of empty highway. 

Several decades ago I read the entire Natty Bumpo series of novels, the best and most coherent of them The Last Of The Mohicans made into movies from time to time. I was surprised to learn that Cooperstown in New York, repository of baseball fame, was named for Cooper’s family and he wrote the frontiersman novels at a time when Ohio and Kentucky were the furthest edge of America.

I can’t make up my mind if the chance to live back then was a chance worth grabbing. As I read about Lewis and Clark actually doing what Natty Bumpo did in fiction I read about yellow fever and malaria, endemic and not understood. The chance of death so prevalent the term “I trust you are well” in correspondence had actual meaning such that today we see people resisting vaccination so little do they fear diseases we assume to have vanquished…polio is back I see to my chagrin. 

I feel myself privileged to look out on these woods and rivers from the comfort, unimaginable in 1790, of my home on wheels. 

The price we pay for the good health, the comfort and safety of these woods is to be paid shortly when we return to the order and chaos of roads, power plants, rules, customs and expectations of the 21st century. 

But for a little while longer we sleep in the deep silence of night, and wake to the cold autumnal mornings grateful for our modern warm bedding with the expectation we shall get through the day in continued good health and peace. No muskets needed, no tinctures at the ready, and alas a little less of the wonder that filled human minds when the hows and whys of the natural world were less clearly understood. 

The Adirondacks, the White Mountains, Appalachia and our old friend the Ocala National Forest are all yet to come to delight us. But after Michigan the romance of the wild frontier will be behind us for a few months and I shall miss it. Natty Bumpo I’m not, far from it, but privately I wish I were. 

The Wolverine State

I like Michigan a great deal. A friend pointed out there are some strange people in the state, people jailed for planning to kidnap the governor. But I am an optimist looking for good as I travel and I find normal people in Michigan who seem to be abnormally cheerful. Of failed kidnappers I have met none, but perhaps my obviously unsuitable status as a hostage got in the way of strange encounters. 

I like the tidiness and order you see everywhere in the Wolverine State. Farms look like they have just been primped for a magazine photo shoot. Gardens are filled with neat flower beds and homes look like they just got painted. 

I fear I may be betraying a rather shallow side to my nature but I enjoy the orderliness of lower Michigan.

Driving through Petosky, a town with a few neatly bordered up stores I noticed this innovation which they could use on North Roosevelt in Key West instead of the pedestrian lights that confuse drivers:

My eagle eyed navigator came across a farmer’s market and it really is located in an actual village, known as Bliss. We stopped and found tomatoes and onions and corn and squash and zucchini bread and neighbors discussing neighborly things while selling Michigan maple syrup and candles and oven mitts and chatting about whatever thing was going on. We landed in their midst as Florida aliens. I was pondering the latest hurricane maps in the Atlantic, they were remarking on the heavy rain the night before that kept me awake trying to cheer up Rusty. A much more immediate concern than Tropical Storm Earl ever might be in this wandering life. 

I’d like to live in Bliss and find myself blended in to a world of lawnmowers and pruning and weather speculation but I know I would fail. I’d say something iconoclastic or inappropriate or simply annoying and my neighbors would wonder why I had nothing better to say. We retreated to a forest wild camp where I pulled out the heavy paperback I bought at Pompey’s Pillar, Stephen Ambrose’s dissection of the Corps of  Discovery and Meriwether Lewis. We are off the Lewis and Clark trail now but the miles of signposts along our way sparked my need to know. 

Zucchini bread, hot tea while reading and this making my own discoveries of the meticulous preparations made to explore the Missouri and Columbia rivers two hundred years ago…a perfect afternoon in the woods. 

As we crossed the great bridge leaving the Upper Peninsula we found ourselves admiring a long line of cars waiting to pay the toll northbound, all stuck waiting to reach their Labor Day wilderness camps.

We stopped to buy souvenir supplies before we left the peninsula and Layne learned they expected 30,000 holiday visitors, enough to cram every hotel room and campground with reservations. Layne wondered at the draw of underpopulated forests of the famous Upper Peninsula of Michigan. 

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to view the Upper Peninsula as a last wedge of wilderness surrounded by worthy enterprises like farming and accountancy. The Upper Peninsula cuts down trees, hunts fish and is home to ticks and bears and rumors of Sasquatch. 

I can see why the U.P. is such a draw. The residents are polite but not outgoing, most of them, at least not to us. They use monosyllables and look away. Fair enough but in the southern reaches of the state, where flower boxes rule…

…and farms celebrate a hundred years of continuous ownership in one family, this is where Michigan is part of that patchwork quilt of good cheer we’ve found across the Great Plains. Its Mr  Rogers’ neighborhood. People are really nice. 

I have never seen Adirondack chairs at bus stops, for instance, or I hadn’t until we got to Traverse City. And there they were with the backs cut in a silhouette of the state. Wait for your clean state of the art public transit in comfort and style. 

We stopped to buy some fruit and vegetables and I checked out their portapotties. Not only were they immaculately clean, they had mirrors and spare paper - not stolen- along with a stylish basket with hand sanitizer and a trash can. I’ve seen a lot of roadside toilets and these are the nicest I’ve encountered! In Michigan of course where civility rules. 

I was chatting with a young man who fell in love with Rusty the Perfect Dog. As he petted my companion we talked about life in Michigan which is the only life he knows. This place is easy to love in summer, as easy as loving Rusty, but in winter? In my head that question always lurks. In winter? he said looking surprised by my question. “As long as it snows winter is great.” Apparently you have to have snow to justify sub zero temperatures. Then the fun begins with all those snowmobile road signs I keep seeing. Not the tractor crossing signs which refer to work. 

I am no proud to note I spotted the worlds largest cherry pie pan, not my indolent navigator.  It is in Charleroix Township where their water town crowned with communication antennae celebrates the French fur trapper heritage not the usual German place names of later immigrants. 

A young couple riding a fully dressed Indian chief were taking selfies at the spot “riding the worlds largest motorcycle” I joked.  We listed the largest roadside things we’ve seen, teapot, gavel, cuckoo clock and basket came to mind. They told us of the worlds largest chest of draws in North Carolina which we noted and will visit hopefully next month, after New England. 

We spent a night as guests at a family farm outside Petosky and after all the holidaying families went home for the night we had the stars to ourselves with Winery 1914’s pomegranate cider in a growler we bought. In the morning I put my Oaxaca poncho on to take Rusty for a sunrise walk through the orchards. 

It was not the spectacular scene of the night before as the sun set, but it was a neat tidy sunrise, slowly warming the day.  The fruit was harvested, the orchards were mown and everything was in its place, as it should be in this very reassuringly enjoyable state.