Bipedal Stories

I walked down South Union Street past meticulously restored mission-style homes. As I entered the business district, the clapboard homes gave way to three- and four-story red-brick buildings. The coffee houses, brewpubs, and bearded hipsters were notes of Brooklyn in Northern Michigan.

I stepped inside Brew, a local coffee house. A United Nations of ethnicities tapped away at MacBooks. The floors were wide planks of distressed pine. The walls were exposed brick. It was New York, maybe Chicago, but without the prices and the workaday aggression. I could live here.

I ordered a coffee, muffin, flipped through the Record-Eagle, the lively local paper. The front page featured extensive coverage of the annual Cherry Festival, which had just concluded. I stepped back outside and walked to the marina. Grand Traverse Bay stretched before me, vast and grey beneath the overcast summer sky. The Bay is a harbor of Lake Michigan, the greatest of the Great Lakes, the inland seas that facilitated development and industrialization in the Upper Midwest.

A light rain blew in off the harbor. I walked back to my car, a rented Chevy Cruze. I motored through the city and then north on Peninsula Drive, which runs along a spit of land that juts into the Bay. Big homes backed up against the shore, money from Chicago. I lunched at the Jolly Pumpkin, a brewery and distillery. I continued north to the Mission Lighthouse at the peninsula’s tip. Crowds climbed the stairs to the lantern room. Families snapped photos of their summer vacation.

I drove south on Bluff Road, which runs along the other side of the peninsula. I stopped at Chantal Winery. Northern Michigan is the viticultural capital of the midwest, blessed by the the same mild summers and abundant fresh water that make it the largest producer of cherries in the United States. I bought a few Chantal blends for my return to the northeast. I checked my watch. I had an hour to get to a concert at Interlochen, the legendary music colony, some 30 miles to the southwest.