Cabin in the Woods

Michigan is playing Notre Dame today down at South Bend. I wish it was at the Big House in Ann Arbor. That would be the place to renew the rivalry. They haven’t met in a few years, schedules and contracts and all that. Michigan goes in ranked number seven in the country, Notre Dame is unranked and looking for the upset.

If it was in Ann Arbor they would cram 111,000 people into the stadium and scream their lungs out. My older boy will be there, part of the long line of Wolverine tradition. Notre Dame’s offense has not scored a touchdown this season. But they have a kicker that can nail a field goal anywhere from the fifty-yard line out. Fall was always my favorite time in Michigan. Burning leaf smell and back to school and football games, the high school and the big universities up the road and the Lions, who did not stink like they do now.

In the early sixties we expanded our horizon and Dad convinced Mom that having a cabin Up North was the thing to do. Then we could join the big parade up I-75 from Detroit every weekend. In those days the interstate wasn’t complete. We rolled on two lane north past the Pine Knob and through Flint and Bay City and Saginaw before we ran out of highway at West Branch. Then we were on the two-lane for about sixty miles, through the little hamlets of Alger and St. Helen, into Roscommon County where the air was noticeably crisper and the land began to undulate into low sandy hills.

We rejoined the expressway south of Grayling, and the junction of Old 27. It wasn’t that long after the engineering marvel of the Mackinaw Bridge was completed, and we could still remember Mort Neff’s Michigan Outdoors segments on the black and white TV showing old boxy sedans with actual fenders waiting for the ferry back across the Straits with deer carcasses strapped across them.

The family would be waiting impatiently for Dad to slog home from the office and then jump in giant station wagon to drive another 250 miles to where the breeze was cool and held the hint of the big lakes and pines. Wondering who would be up, and what adventures lay ahead in that magical place where the air was better and the scenery beckoned. Looking down off Dead Man’s Hill over in East Jordan into a riot of red and yellow that stretched as far as the eye could see. Sometimes I wanted to throw myself off, drown in the color. At sunset it was on fire.

Let’s face it, Detroit is almost Ohio, for goodness sake. Up North is halfway between the equator and the North Pole, the 45th Parallel, and it is almost heaven. Four or five hours up on a Friday night, and four or five hours back on Sunday. Cruising at 85 miles an hour. Maybe ten hours on the road to enjoy the tranquillity of the lake. Almost every weekend, for years.

But fall was my favorite time. No one was there, except a few mushroom hunters, and the woods were mine, all to myself and Bonnie, my Collie dog.

In the late sixties the corporation where Dad worked was sold to an outfit in Cleveland, a hard-charging corporate acquisition group of green-eyeshade experts, and we were moved west to Grand Rapids, where the factory was located for efficiency, consolidating key business areas. From there I used to go north every weekend I could, flogging my little red Volkswagen Beetle along the West coast, inland about twenty miles from Lake Michigan. There were pleasant little towns along the way, like Reed City and Kalkaska. Most of them were on nice little lakes. US-131 links them all north of the old brick furniture-building town.

I would pass through the dot-towns with their downtown’s composed of old three-story brick buildings and accelerate again as I hit the northern city limit, the four cylinder engine banging away behind me. Then into trees and farm lands. Western Michigan is far enough removed from the hustle-bustle of the industrial SE corner of the state that it feels relaxed and country. It is a nice area.

I loved the dots on the road between our house and our cabin. I normally never stopped, since I would get gas the day before and normally be able to go until I needed to food or had to use a restroom. The list of the cities is still in my brain. Rockford. Reed City, Big Rapids, Cadillac, Manton, Mancelona, Kalkaska, Alba, Elmira and then into the parking lot at Martin Lake, Michigan’s first condominium lake development.

It was historic in a way, one of the first developments that would signal a change in the North. was pretty small potatoes, we all knew one another there. When the trees had grown back it was secluded and as the kids graduated from college and moved away the folks didn’t come up so much. But we did. We came nearly every weekend, slogging the two hundred miles to do our ski patrolling thing or to just sit on the little spit of a beach and look out at the little lake nestled in a bowl of encircling hills. The area had been logged of its towering pine trees, right down to the nubs, and now the second-growth deciduous forest was maple and birch down by the edge of the lake. There was an old path that came down the hill to the water. The Indians had used it wen they went overland across the North between the big waters. When the fall came on the hills were ablaze with the brightest colors you have ever seen, reflected in the dark spring-fed water.

One winter, deep in the fall, just lurching over into winter, it got cold before the snow came and the lake froze as still and clear as an ice-rink, and we dragged out the skates and cut great lazy turns, skating a half mile before gently crossing our skates and arcing around for the long glide back in the crisp air to hot coffee, hoping someone had driven into town for the newspaper.

Today the kick-off in South Bend is 2:30. I will tune in, thinking of games I have gone to in that magnificent stadium. Thinking of other games, the ones I listened to on the scratchy shortwave radio signal in the Indian Ocean, the play-by-play rising and fading on the solar wind.

This is even more important. We have been playing Notre Dame since the 1880s. We taught them how to build a football prgram down in South Bend.  Maybe that is why the competition has been so intense over the last century. And I will be thinking of the Fall, back home, and hoping we kick their butts under the benign shadow of the Touch Down Jesus.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra