Michigan's Eastern Upper Peninsula

 

As I mentioned last week, Roland and I spent several days last month in the eastern part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. While staying at my brother’s cabin, we took excursions to Tahquamenon Falls and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Then, on our way along U.S. 2, we visited Fayette State Park. The first two were mainly for my research, although we enjoyed them, too, and the last was solely for fun.

One of my works in progress is a women’s fiction novel about a writer who is burned out. To get the rest and relaxation she needs for her recovery, she takes a trip to the U.P. and ends up deciding to stay there. The story is not a travelogue, but I am adding some scenes at local tourist areas for authenticity and variety.

Jo gets better acquainted with people in her new community during a church picnic at Tahquamenon Falls. The photo at the top of this post shows the Upper Falls. The one below shows the Lower Falls, which wind around an island that is connected to the parking lot, concessions, and picnic area by a foot bridge.

I wanted to get all the details of that visit right, but my primary purpose for our trip to the falls was to see if the picnic area at the Lower Falls is large enough for a small church picnic. It is, as you can see from the next photo.

There is also a large picnic area at the Upper Falls, but one advantage of having the church event take place at the Lower Falls is that there are greater recreational opportunities there. Roland and I did not wade in the water at the Lower Falls, but, like the people in the next photo, my characters do.

The next day we went to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, known to locals as “the Soo.” As a child, my family went there every other Saturday so my father could visit parishioners in the hospital and the rest of us could exchange our books at the library. My father loved watching the lake freighters from the window in his office at the church in DeTour, and we never went to the Soo without heading to the locks and watching the boats go through.

So of course that is one of things my protagonist does. Her companion checks the schedule and times it so they are there when a freighter goes through. I didn’t think to do that, so we were fortunate to arrive while the Presque Isle was going through on its way upbound. The next photo shows the ship leaving the Soo Locks and heading into Lake Superior.

Another research reason for going to the Soo was that I wanted to get a feel for the Meijers superstore where my protagonist would go when she wanted to shop for groceries she couldn’t get nearer to her fictional village. Unfortunately, it made me jealous because it was larger and had more variety than my nearest Meijers or any of my neighborhood grocery stores.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m placing my fictional village on U.S. 2, which runs along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. As we were following U.S. 2, we took a side trip to Fayette State Park, which we visited purely as tourists.

From 1867 to 1891, Fayette was a company town that produced iron for use in the steel industry. Roland was interested because he spent the first half of his working life in an East Chicago steel mill, and I was interested in how the families lived. I did learn something, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough to set a story there and I haven’t found any other good resources, either. So don’t look for a book about Fayette.

The final two photos show the town’s business district and the furnace complex where the iron was smelted.

The trip to the U.P. was both informative and fun, but next week I’ll have an announcement about a different book.

 

Researching Setting

 

Last month Roland joined me on a research trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is the setting for a women’s fiction novel I’ve been working on. During the first few days we stayed at my brother’s cabin in DeTour Village, where I grew up, and took excursions to several places that my protagonist visits in the novel. That’s the cabin in the picture at the top of this page. I’ll tell you about the excursions in next week’s post.

DeTour Village lies on the St. Mary’s River between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and it is as far east as you can go in the U.P. without falling into the water. I wanted to set my novel slightly farther west, though, along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. That’s still in the eastern part of the U.P. that I’m familiar with, but I haven’t been there for years. So after we left DeTour, we drove along U.S. 2.

I’m placing my fictional town along U.S. 2 somewhere between St. Ignace and Manistique, and I wanted to make sure that my memory coincided with the actual landscape. Fortunately it did, at least for the most part, and the adjustments I had to make were minor. I took these photos through the front windshield. (With Roland driving, of course.)

Many people think of the U.P. as mountainous, but, as you can tell from the photos, it isn’t all like that. The mountains are in the west, and the eastern part is mostly flat with some gently rolling hills (although they didn’t seem gentle when I rode my bicycle up them as a kid).

A writer who doesn’t know better might easily place a novel in the eastern U.P. among the mountains, but that would be wrong. It’s better to check out a setting before writing about it.

Even if a writer thinks he or she knows the facts, it’s important to check them. That was the purpose of my research trip, and it was worth the effort.

A Great Egret Sighting

 

My walks frequently take me along Schoon Ditch. Aside from the exercise, it’s always a pleasant walk because I don’t know what I might see.

So on two of my walks in June (about a week apart) and another in early July, I was pleasantly surprised to see a large white bird standing in the water. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen a similar bird along that trail, but it has been several years, and the sightings are always rare.

Although I’m not any better at identifying birds than I am at identifying flowers, I think it was a great egret. My internet research says they aren’t common in Indiana and are mostly seen here in late summer or early fall, so I don’t know what this one was doing here in June. It might have been resting but is unlikely to have been searching for food since, as far as I know, there are no fish in Schoon Ditch. Still, there are plenty of ducks if it was looking for feathery companionship and couldn’t find it among its own kind.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my Canon camera with me, and the zoom on my cell phone isn’t as good. It takes great closeups, but whenever I got too close the bird flew away. Not far, and it seemed pretty nonchalant in that very public spot between a high school and a hospital, but it didn’t stay in one place long enough to give me a good photo op.

Next time, maybe it will pose for better pictures.

Hunting Dragonflies

 

Back in June, my camera club took a field trip to Oak Ridge Prairie with our resident dragonfly expert. I hadn’t previously had much luck capturing dragonflies with my camera, so I was thrilled by the experience. I felt as if I was in Fort Knox except surrounded by dragonflies rather than gold.

The photo at the top of this post shows a Common Whitetail, and it is the only female in the group. I forgot to ask our resident expert why there was such an imbalance between the sexes, but Google’s AI says the males are aggressive and the females tend to stay away to avoid harassment. Maybe they need a “Me Too” movement.

The rest of these photos are all males, and I have included them alphabetically. In the order they appear, they are: Banded Pennant, Calico Pennant, Eastern Pondhawk, Spangled Skimmer, Twelve-Spotted Skimmer, and Widow Skimmer.

Some of the dragonflies melted into the background and were hard to see. Next week’s post talks about a bird who stood out and didn’t care who saw him.

A Fair Showing

 

Although I never made it to this year’s Lake County Fair because of the devastating storms, my photos did. The fair itself was closed for several days due to the power outage and downed trees, but the exhibit drop-off and the judging both occurred before that. And when I picked up my photos after the fair closed, I discovered how I had done.

I submitted 22 photos and received two third-place ribbons. Would I have liked to have done better? Of course. But considering the quality of the competition, I consider that a fair showing.

The photo at the head of this post received third in the Advanced Color/Portrait group. I love this photo that I took in Vietnam, but it didn’t do well in my camera club competitions, so I am pleased that it earned a ribbon at the fair.

The other white ribbon came in the Advanced Color/Lake County Fair group for a photo of a 4-H color guard for one of the riding competitions. That’s the photo below.

I wish I could have made it to the fair and seen everybody else’s entries, but I’m glad some people were able to see the photo exhibition.

And I’m proud that my photos were part of it.

Writing the Old-Fashioned Way

 

During the five days we were without power after the recent storm, I had to do my writing the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. Even so, I managed to get a lot of writing done.

The even bigger problem was doing research without the internet. Yes, my cell phone worked, and I could have used it to search for information, but the options for charging it were inconvenient and I didn’t want to waste my battery life on researching a story.

While waiting for the electricity to come back on, I started a new middle-grade novel. This is a contemporary story about a girl whose mother sends her to live with the father she has never known. That involves a bus trip from Florida to Indiana, but how long would it take? Without the internet to look up bus schedules, I had to guestimate it using what hardcopy resources I had.

The atlas said the distance from Miami to Indianapolis is just under 1,200 miles. Since my protagonist begins and ends her journey in small towns, it can’t be an express, so I worked the math out this way. Assuming a bus normally travels at sixty-miles-per-hour, it would take an express bus approximately twenty hours to cover the distance. But since it wasn’t an express and would be making frequent (albeit short) stops in small towns, I estimated that it would take about 1½ times as long, or thirty hours, so that’s what I used until I had the internet again. I’m not looking to use an actual schedule or a named bus line, but I still want to get the general parameters fairly close.

Once the internet was back, I checked the bus schedule and adjusted my time accordingly. There is no direct route and I had to add some transfers, but thirty hours wasn’t that far off. So I’m grateful that I had an old-fashioned paper atlas as a resource.

I was also grateful for the other physical resources I had at my fingerprints, including a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a book of baby names for naming my characters.

I was ecstatic when the electricity came back on and I could return to writing on my laptop and using the internet for research, but I will never underestimate the value of writing the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes it’s the only choice.

Stormy Weather

 

“Stormy Weather” will not be the name of my next published book after all, but it is literally the title of my life last week.

I had written and scheduled my next two blog posts on dragonflies and a great egret, respectively, but Mother Nature had other ideas. You’ll get those later, but for now they have been preempted by the storm that disrupted our lives.

Roland and I had been in North Carolina for a baby shower for our first grandchild, and we returned on Monday, August 10. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that we were already home rather than driving through it.

The storm came up quickly on Tuesday morning. I wish I had had the presence of mind to take photos of the breathtaking lightning and slashing rain outside the dining room windows, but I didn’t, and there is no way words can describe the scene. Suffice it to say that I had never seen such wild weather.

We discovered later that the storm is classified as a derecho, which is a widespread and long-lived line of thunderstorms that produces very high winds and significant wind damage. There can be tornados within or associated with the derecho, but a derecho moves in a straighter line and covers a much larger area than a tornado does. That’s a simplistic definition, but it’s enough for this blog post.

When the storm cleared, it left trees uprooted and branches scattered all over the neighborhood. The photo at the top of this page shows a tree that fell on the roof of the adult education room at our church, which is just down the street from our condo. Fortunately, the damage to the roof was minor and the leaks were quickly patched. The grounds around the church weren’t as lucky, and many of the trees in the beautifully landscaped campus are no more.

Our condo complex suffered a similar fate. The damage to the building was minor, mostly consisting of lost siding, but some of the trees in front were destroyed. The next photo was taken from our balcony shortly after the worst of the storm passed over, and the one after it is a closer up shot of the same tree when I went out for a walk on Wednesday morning. I thank God that it fell on and blocked the driveway in front of the condo rather than falling in the other direction and crashing through our window.

We lost power for five days. I had clothes in the washer, but, fortunately, it had almost finished so I hung the damp clothes up to dry. Unfortunately, the humidity was so high that some of them didn’t dry for several days.

For us, the loss of power was a bigger issue than the storm damage itself, although the extent of the damage was what kept NIPSCO from restoring the power for so long. Roland had to drive ten miles just to find ice for our cooler. Even with that, we had to throw out everything in the freezer.

Figuring out what to eat was also a problem. We had plenty of bread and luncheon meat (which we moved to the cooler as soon as we got ice), so we ended up eating of lot of sandwiches. We had taken some boeuf bourguignon out of the freezer to defrost for dinner and ended up eating it cold. The Munster Lyons Club had donated their building for a charging station and free meals, and we ate there once. A local grocery store with a generator continued selling its fried chicken, and with one thing and another, we managed.

My biggest problem was boredom. Between the natural light coming through the window during the day and a few battery-powered lanterns, we had enough light to read by. Without TV or the internet, however, we discovered that even reading and Roland’s crossword puzzles couldn’t keep the boredom away. It did help me, however, when I came up with the plot for a new book and started writing it with pen and paper.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Although we have some battery-powered lanterns, we were afraid of running out of D batteries. I have a small but powerful flashlight that takes AA batteries and I had plenty of those, so I created my own lamp out of that flashlight, a paper clip, and a wire stand that we had been using to display a wooden egg from Romania. That way I could (and did) use the flashlight for reading and writing without having to hold it. If you look closely, you can see my homemade lamp in the next photo.

We made it through the big storm and the smaller ones that followed, but I am proudest of my church’s flagpole and the American flag that there was no time to lower before the storm hit. As you can see from the final photo, they stood tall and proud and remain a symbol of our country’s strength even among adversity.

God bless America.