The North always holds the winter to it, even at the height of the summer season. The flowers are fragile, and the cinder block buildings from the time before the construction boom still hint of a drift of old snow around the corner.

The new buildings are jolly enough, and that lends a frantic life to the season, when the merchants make most of their money, and the boat companies carry the bulk of their human cargo across the water. The great houses of the out-of-staters loom on the bluffs alongside the old fort on the island, old money. The Governor of Michigan has a grand Victorian mansion up there, though I do not know if she has ever visited it.

The Fudgies fill the Shepler’s boats on the run to Mackinaw Island from Mackinaw City or St. Ignace on the Upper Peninsula- the U.P.- end of the Bridge.

Sometimes I am a Troll, which is what the Yoopers call all of us who live south, or below the bridge.

Today I am a Fudgie, which is what the locals call the day-trippers to islands. Fudge is the major industry of the island, thick and suffocatingly rich.

This journey includes most of the things I do not like. Crowds. The claustrophobia of a small island packed with people. The smell of boiled sugar. Sweets everywhere. Throngs of Fudgies clogging the main drag, walking out oblivious in front of the stoic horses hauling wagons of bags and carriages full of tourists. Bicycles whizz everywhere, since no cars are permitted on the Island.

Nothing to do here but marvel at the view, or pedal around it, or pay the ten-dollar surcharge to enter the Grand Hotel, which can be deducted from the $45 bunch.

The GRand is the largest remaining summer hotel in the world, all wood, and the rest buned long ago. It’s half-mile-ling veranda was the backdrop for a Christopher Reeves movie popular a quarter century ago. The surcharge is calculated to keep the Fudgies out, and not spoil the illusion of exclusivity for the overnight guests.

It is the height of the season in the upper lakes, and it is glorious to be alive.

This is an old place for European North America, since control of it was a strategic matter of empire. Once the Lakes were the only way West, and the French used these waters as the transit lanes to bring the fur to market. They collided with the expansionist British. The Union Jack flew here, after the Fleur de Lais of the King at Versailles.

After Wolfe defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham at Montreal the British began their turn at ascendancy in North America. On the northern tip of the lower Peninsula they established a stockade they called Michilimackinac. The Redcoats watched the traffic on the Straits for signs and portents, and for sources of revenue for the King.

The Indians of these parts, Ojibwa, Creek and Cherokee, played a game with hooked sticks and a wooden ball. The French Fathers and trappers called the game La Crosse, after the shape of the sticks.

The Indians began a mach outside the stockade one day, and the ball flew between the players who dashed up and down. It was a mad sport, and still is. But on that day the soldiers and settlers came out to watch, and the Indian women mingled with them, impassive in their bulky trade robes and furs.

At a crucial moment, the ball escaped the basket of an outstretched stick, and rolled through the open gates. The Indians played naked, or nearly so, and when they darted in pursuit, the soldiers thought nothing of it. The Indians had no weapons, and were armed only with their sticks.

But as they chased the ball, the women opened their robes and the muskets and hatchets where thrown to the men on the run. The Stockade was open, and in the course of the next hour, the Indians slaughtered the officers and men of the Fort, and their women and the sutlers and the traders. Then Britain’s baastion on the upper lakes was put to the torch.

One officer escaped, assisted by a friendly tribesman. He paddled across the swift current of the straits to Mackinaw Island, and hid out in a place called Skull Cave until the fires died out, and the Indians went on to other things.

He got the word of the massacre to the King’s men back east, and when the British returned they built a proper fort with limestone ramparts and blockhouses on the hill overlooking the water on Mackinaw Island, not on the mainland.

They did not want unsecured land access to the fortress, and perhaps the lesson should have been learned for Singapore, where the guns faced the water, and death came from the jungle behind.

With the Revolution came the Americans to the fort, and traders like the Astors, who made beaver hats a necessity for the fashion-conscious back East. One of the early Astor houses remains downtown, though considerably more lavish ones would come.

There was no more fighting in the Upper Lakes, and British Canada to the east diminished as a threat. The U.S. Army left the fort for the last time in 1895, and the Island became the second National Park, only three years after Yellowstone was established by act of Congress. 

Cars were banned in 1905, and the railroads brought the masses from sweltering Chicago and Detroit, while the rich came in their own sailboats and steam-yachts. The air blew cool from the North and the air smelled of pines.

And horseshit, of course.

Mackinaw is one of the few places that smells as America did a century ago. They try their best to clean it up as soon as it lands on the streets, but life and horses are filled with the unexpected, and the bustling streets by the docks are filled with the combined odor of sweet fudge and peanut brittle and new shit.

Mackinaw is quiet most of the year, except the weekend the big yachts come on the race from Detroit, and the clopping of the horses hooves is as loud as it gets. But in the height of the season, the throngs course up the hill, and buy t-shirts and novelties. Since the island is scaled for horses and humans, it is densely packed by the docks, and it must still have the atmosphere that all the northern pleasure destinations had a century ago, a riot of sensations for the eye and ear and nose.

Designation as a national park has kept the rest of the island wooded and serene. There has not been a burial in the military cemetery for over a century.

Across the street from the old Lifesaving Station is a statue of the French Father who made this place a part of a Christian Empire. He looks with outstretched hands over the straits that link the big lakes of Huron and Michigan.

These are inland oceans, and this little city is at the very height of its season. You can smell it in the air.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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