The Upper Peninsula

We drove today from Cheboygan, MI across the Upper Penninsula of Michigan to Ashland. It rained much of the day - we went in and out of showers, some of them heavy. Much of the time we traveled through woodland with no sight of human habitation for miles at a time. We did stop at one place we learned of from Roadfood: Gustafson's Smoked Fish, in Moran, MI.  We got a chunk of smoked lake trout and had some for a picnic lunch we ate at a roadside park. It was good. I was a bit tempted to photograph a wall of pro-gun posters at Gustafson's, but decided not to give them even a sardonic platform.

We had spent the night at Fleetwood Inn and Suites in Cheboygan, after driving up from Detroit Sunday afternoon. It was very nice. It was right on the river, and our room had a river view:

The late evening view from our motel room in Cheboygan, MI

After arriving at the motel we went out for a little drive through Cheboygan, had a bit of ice cream, and checked out the wharf, where a large U.S. Coast Guard Cutter was docked. It was impressive!

Coast Guard Cutter

The next morning (this morning), we brought our motel complimentary breakfast (which was pretty good) back to the room and ate on the patio overlooking the river. A gaggle of ducks were settled in on the dock in front of our room, and one of them came up close - probably hoping for a snack.

Ducks on our dock

A curious mallard

After breakfast we headed out, and the first thing we did was to cross the I-75 bridge that crosses over a wide inlet between Mackinaw City and St. Ignace.

The Mighty Mackinac Bridge - the third longest suspension bridge in the world and the longest in the Western hemisphere.

The contrast between Mackinaw City, which is highly developed commercially, with scores of hotels, motels and tourist shops of every description, and St. Ignace, which is not developed at all, was really striking. It was like the Upper Peninsula was in a 1950's time warp. This continued for some time as we went along Route 2, which followed the northern shore of Lake Michigan.There were 1950's-style tourist cottages still existing, hanging on by their fingernails, I guess.

The place we ate the smoked trout had a marker commemorating the crew of a ship, the Carl D. Bradey, who were lost when the ship sank in a storm on November 18, 1958. 33 crewman drowned. Two survived in a life boat, and one of them, Frank L. Mays, was 26 years old at the time, which made him just a a few months older than I am. Amazingly, I found a reference to him online. About a decade ago he gave a talk about that night. The reporter of the event said,

"For nearly 15 hours, he and another crewman from the 623-foot limestone cargo ship SS Bradley clung to life on a raft in Lake Michigan, tossed and turned by nearly 40-foot waves during a gale. During the ordeal, the raft was flipped three times. Two of the four struggling aboard were lost, leaving only Mays, a deck watchman, and Elmer Flemming, a first mate. Desperate to stay alive with waves washing over, an anchor got tossed to stay afloat. "The sea anchor created a drag, and kept us from tipping over," Mays recalls. "I kept saying to Elmer, 'If we make it till daylight, we'll be picked up.'"

 

I can't help but wonder what it has been like for him to live as a survivor, when 33 of his fellow crew-members all drowned that night.