John Wise

“Seek and ye shall find” paves the way to a moment of “lo and behold,” and a vision of beauty enshrouds us. I can’t say that we intentionally focus on finding the gorgeous corners of our world, but then again, we really don’t make much effort at all to focus on cities where the toil of work makes monsters of people who forget or never knew the calming effect of being in places where tranquility is a drug for those who can locate a frequency aligned to its prescription.

Dawn over serenity is a destination afforded only to the few whose constitution demands a refreshing cleansing of the grime that accumulates during the drudgery of trading time for money, though there is no greater truth in our modern world that money equates to being able to afford the discovery that takes one places, often deep within.

The roads to external and internal beauty find their starts at different junctions in our lives. One path begins with a word, the next with a book. Maybe a sunrise alights the spark where the journey into early light takes hold of the eye and imagination, suggesting that there is something else at work aside from the simple repetition of a planet circling a nearby star. Here on the Upper Peninsula, the literal beginning of a path slices down an entire country, and while interesting as a whole, we’ll experience but the tiniest of fractions during our journey of it. Like a great book where we are limited to only reading the first chapter, we’ll be denied what the rest of the story delivers.

Our drive this morning is effectively navigating a tree tunnel as it wends its way south out of Copper Harbor; within moments, we gasp at the profundity of autumnal beauty. Surely, we should have anticipated seeing this rainbow of color, but the dense layers of foliage juxtaposed against the woods and asphalt brought us beyond even our wildest dreams.

It is as though the strings of the orchestra are focused on creating a symbiosis between the melancholic and the ecstatic as we are simultaneously elated and emotionally fragile that, for some incomprehensible reason, this is all ours to experience. The musicians of the forest perform for us and us alone, where are the others?

Notes from a felted piano touch the delicate soft places of emotion that seem to guide the rustling of leaves saturated in the hues of autumn while the heartstrings of John and Caroline synchronize with the speed of the landscape pulsing in attraction to pull us in.

The visual magnificence of this play of light has touches of brilliance and surprise that, while they might be a composite of different sights gathered on other days, stand unique in their performance that will only be offered at these exact moments where we were present to accept the song and theater of nature.

Maybe all of this should have remained in the furtive clutch of hidden memories as it is an absurdity to consider that these feeble words will weave together the threads of a narrative that can share how the two of us bring images of sea and sky, the sounds of elation and noise, words of enlightenment and imagination, and the joys of love and anguish to define the overflowing romantic sense of being in such a place that largely defies explanation.

Later we came to learn of our extraordinary good fortune of being at the right place at the right time as we were told that we were witnessing a record year for leaf peepers during peak color change. And as beautiful as it truly was, later in the day, someone asked if we had driven the Brockway Mountain road that allegedly puts this tree tunnel to shame; we had not. Upon leaving Copper Harbor, we had seen the turnoff but knew not where it led or what it might behold. No matter, as we are so entranced with the natural beauty of the Upper Peninsula that we are sure to return many times to these moments.

Then, after the infinity spent in the delirium of total saturation, we are again at what appears to be the sea, though, in fact, it is merely a lake but of such depth that it too has a song that resonates within us as so many other places of great beauty.

On our way to Gay, Michigan, we passed a lady rummaging on the roadside. My unabashed curiosity demanded I stop the car, followed by a quick reverse while lowering the window, and an inquiry as to what she was looking for.

Cranberries were what the lady was hunting and she kindly offered to show us where to look. With Caroline kneeling down next to our amateur botanist, I spotted what looked like blueberries and asked what they were. After mentioning that the local cranberries are a sour type, requiring cooking and a good dose of sweetener, she tells us that the little blueberries are yummy wild blueberries and perfectly edible.

We spent the next hour collecting a bag full of these wild treats. Over the next three days, we rationed this peninsular treasure, enjoying its near-winter sweetness while relishing our great fortune yet again and basking in the memory of picking berries next to Lake Superior.

We could have gone in any number of directions up in the Copper Harbor area, but compromises are always required when exploring new lands and new terrains of experience and so we go forward to wherever that forward might take us. Had we remained in the autumnal heavens of tree tunnels, we’d have never discovered the things we hadn’t imagined were out here.

The atmosphere weighs heavily upon the waters of Earth as gravity works to contain that liquid domain within boundaries ordained by the nature of our planet. We stride over these surfaces with the intention of finding something of meaning that remains mysterious and elusive, but that doesn’t squash the curiosity of these two people who seem to intuitively understand that something magical is right in front of our senses. Is it the white froth of the waves, that large mossy rock there on the shore, or the trunk of a tree gripping its tiny corner on land above the depths? It must certainly be everything and nothing, as even in the dark sky, our minds are looking for patterns that might offer answers to the unknowns.

Oh my…it’s a scene mimicking our very lives. At the edge of the shifting sands of time, we hold fast in a tenuous grip of our place within it, but at any moment, we might succumb to the battering energy of life that laps at our fragile existence

But everything changes once we hit the Gay Bar. Seriousness and discovery give way to debauchery and humor. We have arrived in Gay, Michigan, population unknown, though obviously fluctuating due to those bent on visiting a gay bar at least once in their lives. Souvenirs are, as you’d expect, Gay-themed and bawdy. Lunch was perfect after ordering a footlong hotdog, allowing visitors to brag about having had 12 inches in the Gay Bar.

Beyond my juvenile prurient humor, it was this bait vending machine outside the Gay Bar that really attracted Caroline’s attention. Hopefully, she can add just why it was so interesting to her.

[I just couldn’t believe there would be such a thing as a live bait vending machine. Food, drink, underwear, we’ve all seen (or heard of) those machines, but live bait? Too bad we didn’t check the price. In hindsight, we could have bought some and fed fish somewhere – Caroline]

Somebody forgot their lawn ornament next to the road.

I’m speechless about seeing even more of these colors, or maybe I have just run out of words that will convey anything else.

Yep, red, yellow, orange leaves, and me in awe; nothing else exists right now.

Exploring the Quincy Stamping Mill ruin near Mason, Michigan, and also paid visits to the Quincy Smelting Works and Quincy Mine Museum further down the road. But hey, that sounds interesting; where are the photos? The gargantuan chore of assembling all these materials 16 years after we took this journey (it’s February 18, 2022, as I write this) is already an undertaking of a scale I don’t want to make larger. When I’m done with the nine days we were here in America’s mid-west, I’ll have pushed the original brief single photo posts, each with about 180 words of text to something containing between 25 – 35 photos and about 1,000 words each.

Fulfilling Caroline’s dreams and ensuring I don’t have regrets, we stopped at a yarn store somewhere after the mining museum, but where that was exactly and what its name might have been are lost in time. Regarding these roadside all-American signs extolling the virtues, typically religious, of the community or of the kind of morals people should live by, Caroline has been enchanted with them for years since first laying eyes on them.

While we stopped for dinner, our hopes were dashed as the kitchen had already closed, but the OPEN sign hadn’t been turned off yet. As luck would have it, our stop wasn’t for naught as this location on the side of the road across from Lake Michigamme was full of history that was pointed out by the person informing us we wouldn’t be eating walleye here tonight. The Mt. Shasta restaurant played a role in the 1959 Oscar-nominated film Anatomy of a Murder starring Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, and Eve Arden.

Still a half-hour from Marquette, where we’d stay the night and obviously still hungry, we found the Jasper Ridge Brewery in Ishpeming was open; time to eat, as who could know if anything was open further up the road.