It had been two months and five days since I underwent successful Spring Replacement Surgery and I was almost as good as new when Tom’s alarm rang at 4:30am on Friday July 29, 2022. While I was excited to once again hit the road to visit more sites, there were two substantial reasons for my lack of total enthusiasm at the start of this trip. First, when I heard Tom discuss his agenda with his wife, I realized there were not many Presidential sites penciled-in to the itinerary. And second, Bob Moldenhauer had been replaced on this trip by my photographer’s wife Vicki, which meant Tom and I wouldn’t be able to “stretch the boundaries of legality” if and when we needed to.
I was stunned when I saw Tom and Vicki’s dog Abigail seated in our Jeep when we left home at 6:08am. In my mind, that’s just what we needed – a yappin’, panting, and drooling pooch who needs to whizz every half hour. As it turned out, my companions had arranged to drop Abigail off in Bay City, Michigan where their son and his family volunteered to dog-sit during our ten-day adventure.
Two days before our departure, Tom told his son we would arrive at his house with the dog on Friday at 8:02am. I nearly fell out of my camera case with laughter when we rolled into their driveway after a two-hour drive at precisely 8:02am. It wasn’t because I was surprised by Tom’s punctuality. I was in hysterics because my photographer had the Jeep nearly tipped on two wheels as he rounded the final corner before their son’s house because he had been slowed down by an elderly driver – also called a “grey bush” by my photographer’s wife.
With Abigail safely left behind, the three of us continued our journey northward through the center of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula with Vicki behind the wheel; I don’t think she was as impressed as I was by my photographer’s driving tactics in Bay City. The first site of the day was the Mackinac Bridge; the five-mile-long suspension bridge that connected Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. I had a good look at the “Mighty Mac’s” 552-foot-tall towers through the Jeep’s moon roof, then my photographer and his wife decided to stop at Bridge View Park after we had crossed the Straights of Mackinac and arrived in the U.P. There was one interesting fact that I didn’t realize until we were in the Upper Penninsula – the Mackinac Bridge was actually a Presidential site. That’s right, on September 7, 1992, President George H.W. Bush became the first and only sitting President to walk the five-mile span during the Annual Labor Day Mackinac Bridge Walk. The event was attended by an impressive 85,000 people, which was nearly three times the usual participation.
The first time I saw the Mackinac Bridge was near the tail-end of my companion’s two-week summer vacation in 2015. As a matter of fact, the seven-year anniversary of my first “Big Mac” experience was the previous day – July 28th. When we left Bridge View Park at 12 noon, no one realized I would make bobble head history at Whitefish Point 90 minutes later. That’s right – the moment Tom carried me out onto the stony, drift-wood cluttered shoreline at Whitefish Point, I became the first bobble head in history to see three of the five Great Lakes within a two-hour span.
My joyous moment was short-lived when I saw my photographer point out to the vastness of Lake Superior and say: “Seventeen miles out there lies the Fitz and her crew; the ship is in two large pieces at a depth of about 530 feet.” At 7:10pm on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a 729-foot Great Lakes freighter, sank during a gale-force storm after departing Superior, Wisconsin with 26,500 tons of taconite ore pellets in its cargo hold. The “Fitz” was the largest ship to ever sink on the Great Lakes and the disaster was immortalized in the 1976 song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. The ship’s entire crew of 29 men, including 63-year-old Captain Ernest M. McSorley, were lost that night and their bodies remain to this day inside, or near, the well-preserved wreckage.
As I gazed out onto the white-capped expanse of the largest freshwater lake on the face of the earth, I couldn’t help but think of Lightfoot’s solemn words: “The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down; Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee. Superior, they said, never gives up her dead; When the gales of November come early.”
If they’d put fifteen more miles behind her.
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”
It was an incredible visit to Whitefish Point where I not only had the chance to stand as close as I possibly could to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, but I also posed alongside artifacts that were once on that historic ship when it floundered and sank on November 10, 1975. Some have compared the sinking of the Fitz to that of the Titanic, even calling the Fitzgerald “The Titanic of the Great Lakes”. But that comparison has always bothered me; perhaps more so because my photographer’s moronic stepfather had likened Titanic with the Edmund Fitzgerald in the past. Oh, it’s true both ships sank; however, the number of people who died on the two vessels aren’t comparable. A total of 1,517 passengers and crew members perished after Titanic struck an iceberg and sank a little over two hours later in 1912. That’s a heck of a lot more victims than the 29 crewmen who died on the Fitzgerald in 1975. In my opinion, as well as that of my photographer, the only similarity between the two tragedies lies with the captains of both ships. Captain Edward J. Smith of Titanic and Captain Ernest M. McSorley of the Fitzgerald were both veteran seamen who routinely threw caution to the wind when it came to operating their ships. Both men were arrogant, overconfident, and took chances with safety to get the job done the fastest and most productive way possible. And on their final voyages, the two captains were both warned of impending danger, and each of them scoffed at the warnings – two decisions that went down in history along with their infamous ships. The blood on both captain’s hands has never been washed away.
It was roughly 2:45pm when the three of us left Whitefish Point and headed towards the Upper Tahquamenon Falls, which was located 22 miles away. I didn’t know what to expect at those falls, but I figured they would pale in comparison to Niagara Falls that I visited in 2017. Unfortunately, I never found out. When Vicki drove the Jeep into the entrance of the parking lot closest to Tahquamenon Falls, my companions saw the large lot was completely full and the entry fee was $17 – two major factors that played into their decision to bypass the site. Okay, one played a major factor in my cheap photographer’s decision to move on.
One detail that Tom had underestimated when he planned for us to visit Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on the last weekend in July was hotel costs and availability. When we arrived in Newberry around 4pm, my photographer figured motels in that small town would be plentiful and cheap; primarily because we weren’t close to either of the two Great Lakes. But that wasn’t the case. As a matter of fact, at Timber Charlie’s in Newberry where Tom and Vic had fish dinners, the two of them were hit over the head with a huge dose of reality when it came to life in the U.P. Hotels were expensive in July and internet service was nearly nonexistent most of the time. I laughed to myself when I head Tom complain about his phone service: “I haven’t had an internet connection for hours and it sucks. Zero bars on my phone and we’re in America. Aren’t there any satellites flying over the Upper Peninsula? I thought we were still in Michigan, but it seems like we’ve ended up in the South. And the longer I’m here, the more I think the U.P. is filled with nothing but hillbillies – not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
When my photographer and his wife finished their meals, the pair discovered they had two bars of service on their phones. Not wanting to waste their brief encounter with modern technology, my companions quickly went to work to find a place to stay for the night; they became worried they’d end up sharing a refrigerator box with some of the locals. The closest hotel that was under $180 for that Friday night was located in Ishpeming, which was nearly 120 miles to the west. Tom said to his wife: “Book it! By looking at the photos, it doesn’t appear to be a ‘Cockroach Inn’. Plus, it’s better than sleeping alongside Jed and Jethro and the rest of their kin folk!”
From an opening in the camera case, I saw the dashboard’s digital clock read 6:15 just as we rolled into Marquette, Michigan, which was our first taste of any type of civilization since we crossed the Mackinac Bridge. There was a plethora of stores, restaurants, hotels, and we had internet service. It also appeared the people in downtown Marquette hadn’t just finished making a batch of moonshine. At that moment, a brilliant idea popped into Tom’s head – he suggested we stop and pay a surprise visit to their friends, Paul and Sue Rau, who had moved to Marquette from St. Clair shortly after Paul retired in 2016.
At the house, Tom and Paul talked for 45 minutes about baseball and their memorabilia collections, while Vicki and Sue chit-chatted about their home renovation projects. It had been nearly four years since my travel mates last visited the Rau’s in 2018, but it was late and time for us to head for the hotel. As Vicki backed out of the Rau’s driveway, I could easily tell that my companions were happy they stopped on our way through Marquette.
We arrived at the Magnuson Hotel in Ishpeming at 8:15pm; ten minutes later, Tom and Vic had the Jeep unpacked and they were ready for bed. I was placed alongside the room’s TV set where I spent the night wondering what my photographer had in store for us the following day. One thing was for certain – we likely wouldn’t be seeing any Presidential sites on the Keweenaw Peninsula. Not even Jimmy Carter, our only “Hillbilly” President, ever took the time to venture into that neck of the woods. And why would he? After all, Sasquatch wasn’t a registered voter!
