It's a luxury

You go somewhere other than your usual digs to do something other than your usual gig, and things happen, not exactly as you imagined, which might be the whole point. You make the necessary course corrections in order to have a good time without exhausting your resources. You come back.

Time passes. Memory persists during re-entry, reconstructing events, places, moments of unusual brightness and clarity. The urge to chronicle the experience comes and goes, competing with the need to get things done in the here and now. Travelling seems to spark that memoirist impulse; maybe that's why people take their cameras and bring home the obligatory photo gallery of their trip. I have my hands full getting from Point OH to point MI, so I can't balance the going and doing with the recording and capturing. And even if I could, do I really want to spend my precious vacation time taking pictures and writing in my journal?

So when I got back from our very short northern lower peninsula sojourn, I scrounged a surface to write on while the memory was still fresh. It's a luxury to have a day at home to clean up the kitchen, do laundry, water and weed the garden, read the paper - the usual weekend things - before going back to work on Tuesday. So I put a pen to paper and scrawled a couple of pages without much self-editing; the good news and the bad news is that this happens on vacation because it doesn't during the routine everyday rhythm of home and work.

It was a luxury to be able to pack the car and take off Friday morning, arrive that evening in a campground where we are known, and for twelve dollars a night sleep in a tent, cook over a fire, meditate under a humungous pine tree, and breathe the air of the north woods.

It was a luxury to get up in a dry tent Saturday morning and drive to Mancelona for breakfast, read the local paper while drinking coffee and waiting for our sausage gravy and biscuits. The young couple from Ann Arbor at the next table at Bo Jack's Bakery Cafe was envious as they busily minded the manners of their two little girls, four-year-old Ava and two-year-old Lydia. Especially when we told them that our grown-up daughter was dog-sitting for us back in Ohio.

The early morning rain had not let up, and we found just the map we were looking for at the gas station, so we took off west on M-88 to see what we would see. What we discovered was the cute little town of Bellaire and a string of small lakes on our way around the northern tip of Torch Lake, a big beautiful body of water just inland from Grand Traverse Bay. On a lark, we turned down Cairn Road to try to find Camp Maplehurst, where I worked and played for a short time in 1974, before moving on to the U.P. and other adventures.

To my surprise, we found it largely unchanged, the lodge sitting up on a knoll about a mile in from the highway, with cabins lining the path down to a little lake. On a whim we stopped and asked if we could look around. As luck would have it, we had walked in on a reunion of campers and counselors from the 55 years of the camp's existence. That explained all the Cadillacs and Volvos in the parking lot. The proprietors, Lawrence and Brenda, son and daughter-in-law of Tom, who ran the place back in the day, graciously invited us to make ourselves at home.

So Gven Golly and I looked around the big old house and took a self-guided tour of the grounds, down to the lake, past the dock, around the ballfield and the basketball court, through a cherry orchard and back to the lodge. Old campers were singing camp songs and eating lunch together. I had never met Lawrence and Brenda, but they had known the people I worked with, most of whom have since died or become hermits, and it was cool to make that connection.

That little side trip gave us plenty to think and talk about the rest of the afternoon while driving around the hills east of Traverse Bay, past dairy farms, orchards, fields of sunflowers, and houses with fieldstone porches. Even with a good map we managed to get a little bit lost between Elk Rapids and Kewadin before getting our bearings again, rounding the southern tip of Torch Lake, and making our way back to Bellaire for a cup of good Ethiopian coffee and some serious fantasizing. Just enough exposure to the local culture to whet the appetite.

When we got back to our campsite it was still drizzling, not a heavy rain but not weather for a bike ride and a swim. We made do with a charcoal fire and cooked our pasta, which we enjoyed with some cheese, an avocado, cherry tomatoes, and an Oberon ale. The charcoal fire gradually dried the wood we found, and the fire kept going until bedtime.

Next morning the sun came out, so we made breakfast and rode our bikes to Pencil Lake for a swim. The road was smooth, with pine and poplar and ferns on both sides, and we passed the occasional house along the way. The water was clean and clear. A man and his two grandchildren got there just as we were leaving; other than that we had it to ourselves.

This was Sunday, our return-home day, so we decided to go to Traverse City and see what was happening. By midday the awesome weather and a film festival had drawn throngs of people to the beach and the streets. We did the streets first, which were packed with film geeks and tourists. Gven found just the right restaurant for lunch, Poppycock, and the food was almost as good as the people-watching. She faced out and I faced in; it's a toss-up who saw the better show.

A walk on the beach confirmed my suspicion that a fairly wide socio-economic cross-section of midwestern humanity flocks to this bay at this time of year. And who can blame them? Of course there are the high-end tourists, who have a summer house on the water, and the low-end tourists, who pitch a tent in the state park, and everyone in between. And my slow realization is the high-end tourists don't have a monopoly on education and good taste in art, food, drink, clothes, or water sports.

We took back roads almost halfway home and got to see a different view of that part of Michigan. Because we indulged our senses all morning and most of the afternoon, it was a late night before we got home. We were spent but it was worth it.