On the Road Again

DEAR GEORGE, Recently long-time friends, Lois and Bob A, invited us to come up to visit them in Menominee, my Upper Peninsula home town. It was our first trip in 18 months. We drove up from Cincinnati via Chicago and Milwaukee in two days, arriving in Menominee in the late afternoon on Sunday. Menominee (pop. 8,150) is located on Green Bay at the southern tip of the U.P., about 55 miles north of the city of Green Bay. It’s right across the Menominee River from Marinette, Wisconsin (pop. 10,608), our twin sister city and the site of my father’s family home. Returning to Menominee and Marinette is always an emotional experience for me. I left for college in 1955, yet much of the town remains the same some 66 years later: the layout of the streets, most of the houses and buildings, the churches, the city parks, the courthouse, the library, the marina, the cemetery, the airport. On the other hand, many of the important places of my youth have either disappeared or been relocated: my grade school and high school, my father’s law office, my uncle’s Rexall drugstore, the DAR Boys Club, the Lloyd and Menominee Theaters, the Five and Dime, the GI Surplus Store, Harry Cooney’s gas station, Garbell’s soda shop, Sonny’s grocery, Trautners, the Gateway Cafe, the hospital, Herb Beyersdorf’s garage, the Ideal Dairy. While I was clearly home again, a big chunk of “home” now exists only in my mind.

Our friends live in a magnificent home that they built by hand themselves on the shore of Green Bay. Because we are so landlocked in southwest Ohio, it’s easy to forget how wonderful it is to live on the water. Menominee is spread out for three miles along the shoreline of Green Bay, Lake Michigan’s largest inlet, and the town’s southern boundary is along the Menominee River (the border between the U.P. and Wisconsin). Menominee’s main business district is situated on the bay, as are its five city parks. You never forget being on the water, the visual scenes are hypnotic, and the ready access to the bay and the river make the outdoors a central part of residents’ everyday lives: swimming, fishing, boating, water-skiing, kayaking and canoeing, skating, ice boating.

We have a regular routine as tourists when we visit Menominee and Marinette, and we did much of it this trip: driving around the loop, Henes Park (with a brand new pavilion bathhouse), the boutiques in the historic downtown district, the marina, the magnificent Spies Public Library, art galleries (including Marinette’s Rusty Wolfe Gallery which could just as well be on Madison Avenue in NYC), “Simply Charming”, Pine Tree Mall, antique malls, thrift shops, the Riverside Cemetery, Riverside Drive in Marinette, Sequins, Joe’s Cheese Shop, and a trip on River Road to the location of our old family home. We were saddened by the loss of Weathervane Antiques and Younkers department store, but pleased with the new Menekaunee Harbor Park and boat launch with its attractive regional sculptures and with the new House of Yesteryear antique store in downtown Menominee. I bought a Menominee Maroons T-Shirt for $12.95 at the drugstore, and Katja got us two U.P. hoodies and some $75-a-pound cheese at Joe’s. Katja and I had a date night at Berg’s Landing, Menominee’s finest restaurant, and enjoyed a lot of other local eateries as well: The Watermark [successor to Schloegel’s], Applejacks, The Brothers Three, the Serving Spoon, and Culvers where we had our traditional lunch with my cousins Ann and John B.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s my parents purchased and renovated an 1880’s farm near Birch Creek, five miles north of town, and my Seattle niece and nephew, Jennifer and Greg, currently operate the family property as a successful Airbnb. Katja and I went out to Farm on a day between rentals and Jim and Sharon K gave us a tour. My parents, Vic and Doris, would have been thrilled. There were new roofs on four of the buildings, the Barn’s sagging foundation had been shorn up, the guest house had been renovated, the bridge over Birch Creek repaired. All in all, the property was more inviting than it’s ever been, and it’s no wonder that nearly all of the Guest Book comments refer to it as “magical” or “mystical”. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit, though it was bittersweet. We’ve had so many happy family reunions over the years with lots of joking and laughter, but now, with the loss of parents and siblings, it’s more of a place for quiet reminiscing and nostalgia.

We decided to return to Cincinnati by way of the Upper Peninsula and the Mackinac Bridge. The 195-mile trip from Menominee to St. Ignace and the bridge reminded me of how remarkable the U.P. is. We passed through about a dozen villages and small towns, but only one had a population of 10,000 or more (Escanaba) and most had 200 people or less. The U.P. is largely a wilderness area, and we spent the vast majority of time driving through evergreen forests along the Lake Michigan shoreline — a wild and beautiful country. The Upper Peninsula is about the size of Denmark, but contains only 3% of Michigan’s population. Population density is 19 people per square mile (compared to 94 people per square mile for the U.S. as a whole). Yoopers, as natives are colloquially called, enjoy an outdoor life — hunting, fishing, boating, camping, hiking. Our trip made me once again contemplate how much my personality and attitudes were shaped by growing up in the U.P. LOVE, DAVE