Blue Highways (48 page)

“I’m from Missouri. Traveling. I’d like to find a good place to visit in Michigan.” She watched but said nothing. “Maybe you know a nice spot.” She just stared. Northerners really carry taciturnity too far, I thought.

A clerk came up and said, “She’s deaf. Probably having trouble reading your lips.” He repeated what I’d asked.

She said, “Oh,” and put the book down. Holding up her right hand as if to say “How” in Hollywood Indian fashion, she said, “Dumb.”

“Dumb?” the clerk repeated. I didn’t know whether she meant me or herself.

“Dumb Miss Ginn,” she said and wagged her right thumb.

“Thumb of Michigan?” the clerk asked.

The girl smiled, wagged her thumb again, and nodded. “Berry bootful.”

“It’s very beautiful,” the clerk translated.

Looking at her
SKI
T-shirt, I said, “Do you ski on the Thumb?”

“Dumbs due plat. By dames car water ski.”

“Thumb’s too flat to ski,” the clerk said. “Her name’s Karworski.”

So that was how I ended up on the Thumb of Michigan.

On a map, lower Michigan looks like a mitten with the squatty peninsula between Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron forming the Thumb. A region distinctive enough to have a name was the only lure I needed, but also it didn’t hurt to have towns with fine, unpronounceable names like Quanicassee, Sebewaing, Wahjamega, or other names like Pigeon, Bad Axe, Pinnebog, Rescue, Snover, and—what may be the worst town name in the nation—Freidberger. People of the Thumb have come from many places, but Germans and Poles predominate.

I headed due east across the flat country, past the great industrial pile of Dow Chemical at Midland, past the Victorian houses in Bay City. Near Quanicassee, canals draining the wet land to make farming possible flanked the highway. In the ditches, mile after mile, violent flashes of polished bronze roiled the murky water. I stopped to see what it was. The hot, muddy banks frothed with the courtship of eighteen-inch carp. Males, flicking Fu Man Chu mustaches, metallic scales glittering like fragments of mirrors, orange tails thrashing, did writhing belly rolls over females as they demonstrated the right of their milt to prevail.

Away from the bay and lake, Thumbland was agricultural land: sugar beets, navy beans, silage; but on the bay from Caseville to Port Austin, the Thumb was an uninterrupted cluttering of vacation homes, tourist cabins, motels, and little businesses selling plastic lawn-ornament flamingoes and used tires cut into planters. The houses and cabins and businesses pressed in tightly, and in the few places where beach delivered itself to the road were “no trespassing” signs.

Whoever called Americans a “rootless” people never saw the west shore of the Thumb, where houses used eight weeks a year block off the lake every day of the year. If Americans are truly rootless, why weren’t a few lodges and hotels built to leave the shore undeveloped as the “rooted” Europeans might do it? As it is, the rootless family drives up from Ypsilanti to spend its allotted time cutting grass, painting the boathouse, and unplugging the septic tank.

But the northeastern shore was another story: open. Farms and fields came down to the edge of Huron, and the people had collected into towns rather than stringing out along the lake. If west Thumbland was unrestrained America, the east Thumb was the best of rural England—settled yet uncongested.

Harbor Beach, a factory village and a pleasant one, had both a harbor and a beach inside a long stone breakwater; it also had a plant manufacturing plastics, one making food seasonings, and another producing pharmaceutical goods, as well as a big power station. People who argue that pretty towns and industry cannot live together should look at Harbor Beach.

A very long wooden pier ran out toward the breakwater. That Friday evening the whole village must have been fishing from it; although nobody was having any luck, the night before a crazy run of perch had swum in.

“This water was something to see,” an angler said. He had that blankness of expression that comes only from years of watching eight-pound-test monofilament disappear into placid water. “Fish assaulted our bait.”

He usually fished for whatever was running—perch, steelhead, chub; in the winter, he opened the ice and fished for pike. Most of his life he had worked in Detroit as a machinist turning parts for gasoline blowtorches.

“Now kids don’t know what a gas blowtorch is, but they were beautiful things that built the country. Precision brass fittings machined to critical tolerances. Blew like thunder and ran like steam engines, and they lasted forever because they were designed and built and not just assembled. The throwaway propane bottle put us out of business. Those things are designed as junk and built accordingly. But the true blowtorch! A son inherited his dad’s torch. I loved the work because I knew somebody would keep what I made.”

He reeled in a nibbled-over minnow and reloaded. “The war changed things. During the forties, our shop converted to making brake shoes for Jeeps. There wasn’t satisfaction in the job except for good money and helping our boys. When the war ended, things began breaking down, you might say, and that’s when I and the wife started spending time up here.”

In 1942 he had bought a small farm on the Thumb. “It was a good time to buy because I had money and land was available and going at a low price if you were white. People, you see, were afraid Coloreds were going to move in to do war work at the factory—a gunpowder plant I think it was—so they sold low to whites. It worked to my advantage. But I don’t think any Coloreds ever came up to work anyway.”

He jigged his bait and said to the water, “Hello?” then reeled in the dead minnow. “I like my role now—of no consequence whatsoever.” He looked down the pier for activity. “I decided to buy the place up here on a Friday evening similar to this one. Went home from the shop and realized when I got home that I was just waiting for Monday. Funny thing was, I didn’t like the job anymore.”

As he packed up his gear, he asked why I was in Harbor Beach. I told him I was looking for a good hamburger. “That would be the Crow’s Nest if you get out before ten,” he said. “Be sure to see the painting. That thing stirs up almost as much commotion as a fast run of perch.”

A
T
the Crow’s Nest we drank “America’s Only Fire-Brewed Beer,” a brew remarkably interchangeable with any other American beer. Maybe that was why a man called Stitch took his Stroh’s with a nip of ginger brandy. He wore coveralls and a herringbone sportcoat with a Buddy Poppy in the lapel. He was old and looked older. Before he lost coherent speech, I heard several things in his gargle of words. This was one: “I got healed when I was sixteen. Healed in a church basement on Wednesday night. Never been a religious man, but I been a believer since.”

“What were you healed of?”

“An affliction to bear. I had feet flat as waffles.”

He told a story about tracking down a pair of coyotes that were eating his mother’s chickens. A long tale of the chase he’d recounted many times before, it was one of those events by which a man comes to define himself; no matter where else he’d failed, he’d killed the coyotes.

Above the bar hung the painting the fisherman had mentioned. On black velvet was a stacked, shimmering-haired, bronzed-bodied blonde in Indian-style headband and loincloth. That’s all she wore unless you counted the expression on her face. Just another backbar nude, more silly than indecorous, I thought. I asked the bartender, a comely blonde herself, if the fuss about the painting was due to the mocking of Indian traditions.

“Indian traditions? What’s with Indians? It’s the bare tits, dearie.”

“I see.”

“Some people have gotten on my case because of a rumor that I posed for it.” She stared at the painting as she pulled a draft. “Of course it isn’t me. No woman’s built like that. Those are fantasy knockers. They look like muscles.”

Indeed they did. At nine o’clock, five post-adolescents with cigarettes rolled in their T-shirt sleeves came in and began setting up a band. They had speakers the size of closets, an amplifier control panel like the Kalamazoo switchboard, a siren to alert all of Lake Huron, enough strobes to light an airfield, and more drums than the Indian nation. I wondered what the group would do if they had to make music from cow bones and a washtub.

At ten o’clock they cut loose. I saw why I was supposed to be out before ten. I heard the band through my elbows on the bar, heard them against my forehead. The guitarist took off his shirt and flaunted a curved chest white as the gut side of a catfish. He was singing. I knew that because his mouth opened and closed, and he wasn’t eating.

Sidling to the bar came a fellow in a blue suit large enough for a dancing partner to step in with him. He puffed a Swisher Sweet and didn’t cough much. To the barmaid he said, “Pretty lady, this man’s here to boogie.”

“Anybody else know that, Shorty?”

Two young women drinking Scotch and Coke sat and waited to dance. The one with deep, dark eye sockets relentlessly worked a stick of chewing gum. The other, wearing snakeskin knee boots and golden slacks that fit as if gilded to her, was slender and had the eyes of a lynx. Boys in yellowed shirts took her to the dance floor one after another. They were stumps. Dancing out of her pelvis, she swirled around them like smoke, moving across the floor, inching back, sliding away. The siren went off, and the strobes flashed her into a wispy possibility. The boys were dying for her, but they got drunk and sat down. She danced on alone against the amplified drums and moved through the shadows of other dancers. Six college boys from Ann Arbor came in to drink Heinekens, and one had a few turns with the lynx, but only his shoulders and hands danced. No one else even tried.

At eleven-thirty the doors flew open and a couple dozen people—men wearing plaid slacks, the women billowy dresses—rolled in. I asked the barmaid who they were.

“Weekenders. Housewives and dentists and things. One guy’s a chiropodist. They’re the people that never dance with their own husbands and wives.”

The men moved like the college boys, but with a little more effort and a little less result, while the women assumed strange postures as they danced: one placed both hands between her thighs and pulled her legs back and forth; another danced with an arm upraised as if calling for a fair catch; a third moved with arms perpendicular to her body as though greeting someone just off a boat; but the best danced with hands in pockets, her legs moving as if hot-wired to the drums. In the women there was a desperate sexuality, although I don’t think the husbands—unlike the carp in the ditches—knew what was going on.

At midnight, a spinning dancer pulled a string at her waist, her dress billowed open like a parachute, and she stepped out of it and whirled it above her head. She wore a bikini swimsuit made with less material than the washing instructions in her husband’s shirt. But the men lost interest as soon as they realized it wasn’t her underwear.

The noise and smoke finally drove me to cover. When I left, the lynx had at last found a fit partner behind the bandstand: a full-length mirror.

And that’s what went on one Friday night in May in Harbor Beach, Michigan.

T
HE
wipers were useless. A black squall line had moved in so quickly, I could only pull off the road until the worst of the storm passed. I was on state 142, just west of the farm town of Bad Axe, and looking for Ivanhoe. Later when I was—apparently—in Ivanhoe, I had found only a church, so I headed east through Ubly, then down the edge of the Thumb, past more shoreline houses, to Port Huron. The rain eased but continued.

I had to decide. Either the eastward route lay through Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland, or it was a shorter northeast jog through Canada. I crossed the St. Clair River into Sarnia, Ontario, and stopped at Canadian customs to assure officials I carried none of this or that, had enough money for my stay, was unarmed, had no live animals, and would be in the country only a few hours.

“Describe the purpose of your trip,” the inspector said.

“Passage.”

“Enjoy it, then.”

But I didn’t. The showers kept at it, the traffic ran heavy, I got lost in London, and again in Brantford; finally I was just driving, seeing nothing, waiting to get off the road. But it was a long haul of two hundred fifty miles through the province. By the time I reached U.S. Customs, the rain had stopped and, as I crossed the bridge over the Niagara River north of the falls, with quite unbelievable timing, the Canadian sun turned the eastern cliffs orange.

I was in New York: land of Texas hots, beef-on-a-wick, and Jenny Cream Ale, where hamburgers are hamburgs and frankfurters frankfurts. I was also within minutes of running out of gasoline. I took a guess that Lewiston would be a left turn; if not, I was in trouble again. But it was there, looking a century older than the Michigan towns I’d come from.

In fact, Lewiston was two centuries older, although the oldest buildings now standing were ones built just after the British burned the town in 1813. I filled up next to an old stone hotel where, the gas man told me, James Fenimore Cooper wrote
The Spy
. “It’s some book, they say. Understand,” he added, “our station wasn’t here then.”