Sunday, June 1st

The Missing Lake

It wasn’t just me who had never heard of Valparaiso, Indiana before. The hotel booking engines similarly preferred a town by the same name in Chile, much to my initial confusion. I had selected the city as my first overnight location based on its proximity to Chicago and the fact that hotel prices in the seemingly prettier La Porte tended towards the unaffordable over the weekend. Choosing a location in Indiana allowed me to tick off that state right at the beginning without any more effort than mastering Saturday afternoon traffic in the Greater Chicago area after a nine hour flight.

As well rested as a seven hour time difference allows I stumbled into a fine Sunday morning. The temperature, having reached ninety Fahrenheit the evening before, already hovered in the upper seventies, accompanied by blue skies with blurry, non-serious clouds lingering in the far distance. The landscape I now rolled into mastered the challenge to match the weather: lush green hills with the odd cluster of trees. The farming was in its early stages and the fields still green.

Quickly I arrived in the aforementioned city of La Porte. It started out with a hospital of a preposterously grand scale, a giant and, needless to say, ugly heap of concrete. Beyond, things improved quickly. The centre was quite large with a red, castle-style building at its heart and the usual pretty olde shoppe buildings along the highways, of which there were many to choose from. This made for a fine collection of highway shields.

The landscape became less hilly but grew a lot of extra trees. The highway in turn grew two extra lanes making travel even quicker. Time, to search for smaller country roads. The map promised such a road in the next town. New Carlisle, as such was its name, turned out to be a rather pleasant affair. The houses were all set back from the street behind at least one row of trees and ample lawns. The street, not of the sentimental kind, decided to dive down and rather run alongside a whitewashed wall, decorated with the slogan ‘Welcome to New Carlisle, Indiana. A great place to live.’ It then dug under a railway line and, lo and behold, there was a sign pointing towards Galien and my chosen country road.

That road happily ran straight north, through a landscape more and more dominated by farming, a fact amplified by a giant farming monster coming towards me with only so much room to evade. Further north, the road crossed over a toll road, something the Chicago area is regretfully littered with.

A some point it also crossed the state line, as they call their borders here, but alas, nobody bothered to put up a sign. I was about to suggest that this also meant that we crossed into the Easter time zone, but looking at the map now, this had already happened before New Carlisle. Since time setting is a county business, the north-western counties of Indiana close to and mostly dealing with Chicago smartly decided to use their time.

Galian, first village in Michigan, for this is the state I had just crossed into, appeared first as a highway intersection, then as a railway yard, and finally, too, as a town. I kept going north, first by Baroda which promised food and drink and had a vineyard by the road. The further I travelled, the more serious farming became. There was a few more vineyards, too, but soon they stopped again. More regular farming stopped soon, as well, as the outskirts of St. Joseph beckoned. All land was now taken up by residential houses in large plots, as well as churches.

St. Joseph itself was right by the shores of Lake Michigan. It featured a small centre culminating in a park by the lake shore. Since it was Sunday and, thanks to the time switch, already half past ten, a flea market was in full swing. Which meant that none of the parking spaces forsightfully provided in large amounts were available. Not really interested in flea marketing, anyway, I decided to continue north.

For reasons I can’t quite reconstruct any more, I decided to turn inland, perhaps to sneak through a gap between the busy centres of both Holland and Grand Rapids. First east to a town named Bangor, which sounded oddly familiar but was mostly just a rail yard and lots of stop signs. Then further east on the first endlessly straight road. Finally north again towards Gobles and Allegan, the latter impressed with a confused hospital, part old mansion, part new glass palace. Of the rest of the town I cannot report anything as I was busy finding my way in a complex maze of streets all alike.

Leaving town amidst a collection of fine yet endless lawns, all acutely and freshly mowed, I occurred to me that, surely, America’s number one pastime isn’t television but lawn mowing.

Pondering this thought, I somehow confused my location on the map and got lost a little. Or, rather, I wasn’t really lost I just temporarily didn’t exactly know where I was was. I still new that I wanted to get north. Luckily, it was around noon, so finding north by way of the shadows of poles and trees was reasonably easy. Eventually, this method brought me to Allendale which, incidentally, was exactly where I wanted to go, except I had confused it with Allegan earlier and thought I was a whole lot further north already.

Reality and map thusly realigned, I still kept heading north. Why change a winning plan? I crossed a river with a lovely banks of overhanging trees and parked little boats. The most prominent feature of Ravenna was a large playground which, because it was also very popular, had an even larger parking lot. Yet another river, apparently named Muskegon. This one, too, served as a Sunday pleasure spot, as demonstrated by two girls carrying a large rubber dingy towards it.

Finally Fremont, another town with a pretty centre of trees and old buildings, yet with two large factories looming over it. One was a Nestlé plant, the other the North Central Coop. The builder’s market went by the lovely name Tractor Supplies Co.

Consulting the map I discovered that further north loomed the Manistee National Forest which, apart from the lack of a straight road through it, sounded nice for driving—national parks and forests are not or only sparsely settled so there should be less traffic—, but also a little boring. Instead, I decided to return back to the shores of Lake Michigan and turned west.

Leaving Fremont, a sign warned of horse buggies and indeed, one was lazily travelling along the road just as a gang of bikers rushed past. Soon the road entered into Manistee Forest as well and things calmed down. There was the odd sign of recreation, such as campgrounds, firewood sales, or, by the crossing over White River, a canoeing operation.

Eventually I find the road that promises to travel along the lake shore north. Except, I can’t see anything of the lake, just trees and entrances to properties. Signs time and again promise the sale of lakefront acreage, so the lake can’t really be far but keeps eluding.

Suddenly, there is water, but on the wrong side of the road. It is a small lake with lots of pleasure boats bobbing about, people sitting on the beach and children carrying large tires around for correct placement. The lake is followed by a small village which culminates in the Stony Lake Inn, which may hint at the name of the lake. Or not.

A few corners further, I finally saw the lake hazily in the distance. It was bordered by what looked like large sand dunes. Indeed, a sign promised Silver Lake State Park. Wait a second. Silver Lake? So this wasn’t really the lake, but only just again a lake. The sand dunes proved very popular, though, and there are plenty of operations renting buggies or providing tours.

The next village, Pentwater, had a lake too. By now, I stopped believing that this could possibly have been Lake Michigan but, now that I look at the map, it actually was. In order to reach the village proper, the road had to swing around the lake, or rather, inlet and met another road labelled ‘31 Business,’ a side road to US route 31 not bypassing a settlement. Judging by the settlement, though, the side road should rather have been called ‘31 Pleasure.’

Having run out of viable alternative options, I took to said route 31 towards Ludington, which I skipped looking at, and Manistee. The latter I had tentatively set as my destination for the day, but as it wasn’t even three yet, I decided to venture on.

Manistee, was situated at the mound of the Manistee river, which had formed a bit of a lake before flowing into the real lake. The town centre was effectively a single street along the river front off to the side of the highway which instead crossed the river by way of a large bridge. Beyond loomed an old Great Lakes boat, the SS City of Milwaukee, moored there for people to visit her.

I, meanwhile, had enough of the busy main road. There was an alternative route which shouldn’t prove too much of a detour. It would continue up the lake shore before eventually turning east to Traverse City. First, though, it reached Arcadia, ‘childhood home of Harriet Quimby,’ first woman to gain a pilots license in the US and first woman to fly across the English Channel, unfortunately on the same day as the Titanic met its fate, so hardly anybody cared.

Perhaps two miles outside Arcadia, the road climbed up and a sign suggested a scenic outlook. I stopped and finally there it was: Lake Michigan in all its wet beauty.