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I am crocheting next to the fire in the free spot we have found far into the Hiawatha National Forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We are camped in our micro camper van next to Mosquito Pond, but it’s too cold for any mosquitos. It’s also been raining pretty much non stop since we arrived, with just a few hours of sunshine here and there.
I’ve never been happier. I want to do this forever.
Two vehicles pull up and park about a hundred yards away. A man and a woman get out and start walking down the lane to our site. I scramble to hide in the van.
We are doing nothing wrong. Nothing illegal. We’re allowed to be here. But unplanned and unexpected interactions with total strangers is just not my jam.
In a few minutes Joel comes around and opens the door of the van. “They just wanted to let us know they are duck hunting. They actually asked if it was ok! They’re gone now.”
“I’m sorry I’m so weird,” I say as I step down from the van.
Joel doesn’t miss a beat as he lays a fire. “All part of the package, babe.”
***
We drove to Michigan through Canada, crossing over the Peace bridge in Buffalo. Three things we learned about Canada:
Tim Horton’s > Dunkin Donuts. Hands down. For starters, their coffee actually tastes like coffee.
There are wind turbines *everywhere*. Not just a little windfarm here and there, but a standard part of the rural landscape for miles and miles and miles. I mean kilometers and kilometers and kilometers. I find them strangely beautiful
You can camp in Crown Land for free for up to 21 days. And there is tons of it all over. We ended up staying in the small gravel parking lot of a Wildlife Management Project, which, as it turns out, is Crown Land.
***
A rainbow greeted us as we crossed over the bridge into the UP.
***
This north forest landscape, surrounded by the cold waters of the Great Lakes—it all feels oddly familiar. Comfortable somewhere in my bones. This is in part because I am originally from Michigan, and my father’s family has lived here for generations. My mother’s family were immigrants to Flint Michigan after the war, and my parents met at Flint Junior College. When my family moved to Indiana when I was in first grade, I resented the hell out of it and insisted throughout my childhood and teen years that I was not a Hoosier, I was from Michigan, damnit. My parents had both done graduate work at the University of Michigan, and I had a t-shirt that said, “My blood runs blue,” and a bumper sticker tacked to the bulletin board in my bedroom that said “Oh how I hate Ohio State.” We vacationed every summer in Michigan, camping at the Warren Dunes State Park, and we made regular trips to visit my grandfather in Flint. One summer we came up here to the UP.
But it’s not just my childhood ties. I have this mystical belief that we carry landscapes with us through time and great divides of space. I feel the call of the landscapes of my ancestors, some of which I have visited, and many of which I have not, but all circling around the North Sea (the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland). In fact, I feel like these landscapes *are* my ancestors, even more than the actual humans and the cultures who inhabited them. This may all seem very woo-woo, but I feel it deep in my viscera. A longing for landscapes I will never live in. And these forests of northern Michigan, these cold waters of the Great Lakes, I think they remind my soul of those landscapes.
In any event, I can’t remember feeling this happy and content and free of anxiety.
***
“You look so happy!” texts Meg when I send her the photo of me in front of Tim Horton’s to let her know we are in Canada.
“I’m so so happy,” I text back.
“I don’t know why this is making me tear up,” she says.
But I think I do—I have been on the verge of tears of joy this whole trip. “It’s so beautiful,” I say to Joel, “I think I might cry.”
***
Back in Southwest Germantown, a home awaits us. A home that has been a sanctuary for me and my family, and for which I will always be grateful. But it is too big, and I can’t keep it clean on the inside, much less keep the tiny postage stamp of a garden tidy. It’s all just too much. I have imagined so many schemes in my mind for how to create a community to live with us in this too-big house—and tried, wildly unsuccessfully, to actually live a few of them—but the truth is, I’m miserable living in the same close space with anyone but Joel.
This home is also in a neighborhood that I love, but I am coming to accept that I don’t love living in. My neighbors are lovely, and we are friendly with so many people—and gardens and lilac bushes and maple and fig trees … but it is also loud, and gritty, and I live on a main corridor frequented by emergency vehicles. I have become a hermit there, rarely leaving the house. This, despite frequent resolutions and self-exhortations to get out, to walk to the coffee shop or the bookstore or the fabric store. I know I should, but I don’t. Instead, I work all day inside a home I have made lovely, and then watch TV shows in the evening set in beautiful places near water and long for those landscapes, and try to convince myself that it’s enough to love them from afar and enjoy them on a screen.
***
But I’m pretty sure that’s not how I want to live the next chapter of my life.
***
to be continued…..
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