Michigan

I was born in Sacramento, California, but picked up and left when I was two. I lived for a few years just south of Cape Canaveral, Florida, and for a few years just east of Washington, DC. For twenty years I lived in Oklahoma. I graduated from high school and college there, met and married my wife there, and went to medical school there. For the past thirty years, though, I’ve lived in Michigan. I still occasionally feel like a transplant (I pronounce coyote correctly, with a silent “e,” and mountain correctly, with a non-silent “t,”) but for quite some time I have happily considered Michigan to be my home.

For those of you who have never been to Michigan, it may not be what you imagine. It wasn’t what I expected, when I first drove up by myself, expecting to see vast car factories, run-down cities, and dirty gray skies. Instead, I found land that was as green as Ireland, beautiful waterways, rich black earth, and charming small towns. And yes, a couple of vast car factories. And the skies are all too often gray, but it is from clouds, not smoke stacks.

Michigan has four distinct seasons. Winter is the most dreaded, mostly because it drags on and on well past when the rest of the country seems to be watching their daffodils wilt and their trees leaf out. By late April even the hardiest Michigander has had enough. (Unless they’re from the U.P., which is a term all Michiganders use to refer to the second half of the state on the northerly side of the Mackinac bridge. Yoopers have two seasons: Winter and August.)

Spring comes late and merges imperceptibly into summer. There are usually a couple of hot weeks during the summer: humid, 90 degree days that cause native Michiganders to swoon and might convince a Mississippian to remove a sweater.

Then comes autumn, fabulous autumn, everyone’s favorite season, when the apple orchards are packed with visitors and the leaves take on hues that you never thought your eyes could appreciate, then drop in late October to skitter around the feet of trick-or-treaters. After that it is time for the holidays. No one really worries about winter too much until January arrives.

There is the snow. The earliest snows are the heaviest: moisture vacuumed off the still-warm lake ends up dumped as snow by the foot. It’s beautiful but quickly tiresome. Fortunately it tends to slack off by February. The late March and early April snows, though, and the recent slushball storm I drove through traveling from the Farmhouse to Grand Rapids, are enough to make the natives yearn for Spring Break in Florida.

And there is our namesake lake. It is, without question, one of the planet’s crown jewels, an inland sea. From the middle (and I’ve been there) you cannot see land on any horizon. It is majestic and fearsome, and every sober mariner does not set out across it, even in view of the shoreline, without a measure of caution and a full kit of emergency equipment.

If you are looking for a fine summer vacation, consider spending a week on Michigan Highway 22. The Farmhouse is your southern starting point, where we can have lunch together barely a mile from Lake Michigan’s shoreline. Then you’ll drive around Portage Lake and up to Frankfort, Glen Arbor, Traverse City, Charlevoix, Petoskey, and finally Mackinaw City and a couple of nights on Mackinac Island, and yes, they are spelled differently but pronounced the same. I guarantee you’ll love it.

I grew up in Oklahoma and moved to Michigan. I think I did okay.