“The sun shines for an average of three hours per day, making most days gloomy and mildly wet. The sea temperature in January is 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit on average, and activities around the lakes are virtually non-existent.” — Weather-us.com
My favorite author is Jim Harrison; not the best, perhaps, but the one that I identify with the most, in part for how he defined or questioned a man’s role within nature, at the end of the 20th century. His sense of place — often Northern Michigan, but occasionally the Florida Keys, Arizona, and the upper Midwest — gave me a sense of discomfort about human nature in general, yet fed my childhood fascination for the natural world. His humor and surprising poignancy was always a delight. My friend Norm gave me a copy of Warlock, an early Harrison novel, and said he thought I’d like it. I didn’t. Out of respect to my friend, I didn’t toss it. Instead, while bored a few years later, I picked it up and read it cover to cover. I eventually read much of Harrison’s fiction. Eventually, I would appreciate his culinary writing, featured first in Smart magazine, where he served as food editor: living well, eating well, and drinking well — well, too well, as his experiences would suggest.
I am prone to compulsion from time to time. In that mood, I become Sherlockian — the game afoot — to the point where more rational people need to practice tough love and reel me in. In the days of my early exposure to Harrison, I was living in Flint, an hour’s jump on the north, as people in Detroit would view it. I, along with Norm, didn’t have relationships with women that would call for reserving New Year’s Eve. So, we frequently collaborated on a scheme to do something interesting during that holiday period, which often involved good eating and drinking. Being writers, struggling with time and distractions, we thought it would be worthwhile to go Up North and arrange a two-person writing retreat. A few years earlier, we discovered a log lodge with the feeling of television’s Ponderosa. Built in 1918 by the owner of a cherry orchard, the 7,500 foot lodge had log walls, maple plank flooring, and fieldstone fireplaces, along with two stone cottages. It was surrounded by an old forest, but close enough to hear and sense the water. It was far from the ski resorts and undesirable for most people looking for a holiday getaway. Except for us.
From my perspective, it was in the Harrison neighborhood of the Leelenaw Peninsula — the “little finger” of Michigan’s mitt. There were a few small communities on the peninsula that he was known to frequent, including Leland, a one-time fishing port on Lake Michigan. Leland has become a tourist destination, with the fishing shanties having been converted to retail shops. At the time, it still had a good balance between the summer tourists venturing north into the peninsula and the locals who found it to be a comfortable place for a good meal and some personalities. It had a “Key West North” sensibility, with Jimmy Buffet featured on the jukebox, and good fish on the menu. It was also the launching point for ferries to South Manitou Island, which was part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore. Harrison was said to frequent the Blue Bird, along with other bars in the area.
We decided to do a three-day writing retreat at the Wood-How: writing in morning, venturing out during the day, and carousing at night, with New Year’s Eve being central to the itinerary, such as it was. The “venturing out” was the search for Harrison. Having researched several articles about Harrison’s activities in the area, as well as the places sited in his novels, I was prepared to find my idol — who, likely, was doing his best not to have someone like myself find him. The Wood-How is now a private residence, but at the time was owned by a Chicago couple. They made it comfortable but not nice enough to attract someone looking for a nice place. We were the only guests for the New Year’s holiday. So, each of us claimed a table and wrote, read, and otherwise composed whatever it was we were trying to write. And the afternoons covered much of the roadways in the peninsula. By New Year’s Eve, we had given up the ghost. Of course, the guy’s a big time writer. He’s probably in the Keys, anyway. Why would he be up here in the cold. Well, it wasn’t really that cold — which was a problem. We were looking for a Northern Michigan experience: bitter cold and snow, to stimulate our appetites and desire to drink like the gold miners in the Yukon. Instead, the weather was mild, somewhere around freezing for all three days. It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s short story, “Entropy,” which was set in a winter period where the weather stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit for several days. At the end of our search, we stood on the edge of the water in Leland looking out on a strangely placid Lake Michigan. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” I remember saying. Where are the crashing waves? The furious winds? It was still. All three days were still. The day was dark until around 8 a.m. and then became dim. It was dim until about 4 p.m. when it became dark. Of course, in the north, you expect short days. But not boring days. Had I been aware that stillness in the north where there were no human beings was actually a gift, I might have reacted otherwise. But it was New Year’s Eve and I was a younger romantic. We learned that the Blue Bird was having a special Key West-themed dinner menu, with a special flight north that day from Florida. We secured a table and began our celebration. I had conch steak. I don’t remember Norm’s entrée. Eventually, we moved to the bar to witness the time change on the overhead television. As you would expect, at midnight, all eyes were on the TV for the countdown. For some reason, my eyes were on the door to the kitchen. There he stood in a bright tropical short-sleeve shirt, holding a drink, one foot in the kitchen and one foot out. Stunned, I elbowed Norm, which knocked him off the bar stool. No damage. New Year’s happened and Harrison was there a moment longer, before disappearing in the kitchen.
In 2001, I came across an essay written by Harrison called “The Raw and the Cooked.” It certainly evokes the ethic of “earning”your dinner. The essay rekindled that holiday adventure with a sense of what the northern winter experience can be:
“It is a few degrees above zero and I’m far out on the ice of Bay de Nov near Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, beyond the last of the fish shanties. It doesn’t matter how far it is but how long it takes to get there; an hour out, and an hour back to my hotel, the House of Ludington. Unfortunately, I’ve been caught in a whiteout, a sudden snow squall out of the northwest, and I can’t see anything but my hands and cross-country skis, a short, broad type called Bushwhackers, which allow you to avoid the banality of trails. I turn myself around and try to retrace my path but it has quickly become covered with fresh snow. Now I have to stand here and wait it out because, last evening, a tanker and Coast Guard icebreaker came into the harbor, which means there is a long path of open water or some very thin ice out there in the utter whiteness. I would most certainly die if I fell in and that would mean, among other things, that I would miss a good dinner, and that’s what I’m doing out here in the first place; earning, or deserving, dinner.
“I become very cold in the half hour or so it takes for the air to clear. I think about food and listen to the plane high above, which has been circling and presumably looking for the airport. With the first brief glimpse of shore in the swirling snow I creak into action, and each shoosh of ski speaks to me: Oysters, snails, maybe a lobster or Kassler Rippchen, the braised lamb shanks, a simple porterhouse or Delmonico, with a bottle or two of the Firestone Merlot, or the Freemark Abbey Cabernet I had for lunch…”
