L’Anse, Michigan

The leaves are a-changin’, and they are falling fast.  My tent has been bombarded the past two nights, even interrupting my sleep as if I were being pelted by rain. My bike seat and rack are covered with leaves in the morning.   The technicolor foliage show amped up after I left busy Highway Two and continued on my way north to Lake Superior on much lighter-travelled roads. 

The terrain is less settled and more thickly forested.  Logging roads, old and new, continually offer up entry to places to camp.  I can be assured of a quiet night when i venture down a road overgrown with weeds and with a locked gate that I can either duck under or pass around.  This is truly getting away from it all.

But before this idyll I had to endure one hundred miles of Highway Two from Escanaba to Iron Mountain and Stambaugh, large towns that had been bequeathed Carnegies.  Highway Two runs the length of the U.P. after starting in Everett, Washington north of Seattle, then traversing the top of the West through Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. There is no interstate to siphon off the traffic so it attracts truckers and all too many others. It’s just two lanes wide, but has an adequate shoulder for cyclists. 

The constant whizzing traffic made it hard to imagine I was in the far north and difficult  to appreciate its scenery. With all the traffic, there were tourist attractions here and there—a couple of corn mazes, a bat viewing area, mine tours and museums. Though the weather has been balmy, near eighty, the tourist season has past.  There is hardly a vehicle towing a boat and even fewer adorned with bicycles.

I stopped at a service station with a restaurant attached hoping for a soft drink and ice dispensing machine, as all the MacDonald’s continue to be drive-through only.  It seems to be a corporate cost-saving conspiracy.  Even worse it’s an environmental catastrophe with long lines of cars idling, inching their way to the drive-up window spewing fumes. Environmentalists ought to be raising a ruckus, demanding MacDonald’s to close those drive-throughs and make the masses get out of their cars and come inside to order their food.  

Evidently MacDonald’s profits didn’t suffer when Covid forced them to close their inside service, so they have continued the policy under the pretense of staff shortages, even though rarely does a MacDonald’s have a “hiring” sign as they did during Covid and many other stores presently have. Every MacDonald’s I’ve stopped at, if only to use their WiFi, has had a sign posted on their doors complaining of staff shortages as explanation for there being no indoor service.  That’s bogus, as it would take no more staff to serve people inside rather than through windows if they chose to make that choice. All those indoor play stations meant to make kids want to go to MacDonald’s are now sitting idle.  Maybe they weren’t such a necessary ploy to attract young-uns and their parents.

There was no ice or soda dispensing machine at the service station, so I made do with cold tap water and a few spoon fulls of Tang.  While I was drinking and eating a peanut butter sandwich, a hefty young man came out of the restaurant and asked if I’d ever had its biscuits and gravy.  He said they were quite good and offered me his takeout container.  I hadn’t been there long enough for him to have bought it for me.  It was simply a spontaneous gesture.  It may have been a side dish that he didn’t care to eat at the time and seeing me realized I needed  the calories more than him.  Whether he saw in me someone short of funds or someone off on an adventure that he wished to endorse, I know not, but whatever his motivation, I appreciated it, especially since  it was the first act of such kindness on this trip, much later than usual.

It’s not the food or money that heartens me, but rather the assurance that some humanity still lurks on the planet.  One has to wonder if one pays too much attention to the news.  Among the podcasts that keep me abreast of current events, three are an unrelenting barrage of man’s darker side, portraying Planet Earth as a cesspool of injustices.  Amy Goodman, Michael Moore and Ralph Nader spew an endless litany of grievances.  They are a non-stop avalanche of negativity and hostility, foaming with rage and anger. I only keep listening to validate my urge to have as little as possible to do with their world and to get away from it all on the bike, knowing life is nowhere as horrific as they make it out to be. What keeps them going I know not.  It’s fortunate they have an outlet for their continually being upset, otherwise they’d explode.

Every podcast, they lament the mistreatment of one group or another from Palestinians to Sikhs to prisoners fighting forest fires.  They have an endless array of topics to rail against—the evils of Facebook, the practices of Amazon, the horror of drones, Guantanamo, the super rich not paying taxes, the danger of Roe vs Wade being overturned, the absurdity of the Electoral College, the travesty of holding the Tokyo Olympics, undocumented workers killed in the World Trade Tower collapses, January 6, gerrymandering, obstinate senators, toxic masculinity, vaccine deniers, the many repercussions of climate change, another oil pipeline break and on and on, all as if there is only one side to every issue and that there is no good news to report.  Every day it’s something  else, and if its not something else, they just recycle.  If they all took a break from their injustice-mongering and went off on a bike for a few weeks and gained some perspective, they and we all would be better off for it.

Out in rural America on the bike, one needn’t be weighed down or preoccupied by the seemingly dire state of the universe because the universe isn’t as dire as all too much of the media portrays it.  There is a quiet calm and order.  The clamor coming out of the urban morass is an aberration.  One needs to take an occasional break from it to be capable of coping.

As I pedal along I can unburden myself of all such concerns.  I constantly come upon things to regenerate my spirit, not the least of which are the Carnegie libraries.  The one in Iron Mountain may have lost some of its luster with all it’s windows boarded up, but it still stood tall and proud now serving as the Menominee Range Museum.  A plaque in front of this Neo-Classic Revival building stated that when Carnegie had been in the region in 1901 checking in on the iron mines that supplied his Pittsburg steel factories, he made the offer of a library to the community, contrary to the usual manner of communities making the request.  It was replaced in 1971.

The Carnegie in Stambaugh, adjoining the town of Iron River, was now the administrative offices of the nearby school. It sat in a park adjacent to the high school and was constructed with yellow brick in contrast to the red of the school.  Both Stambaugh and Iron River have their own libraries just two miles apart.  Stambaugh’s had a rack of Halloween costumes along with cake tins that could be checked out. 

Fifty miles north I finally reached one of the goals of this trip, an inlet of Lake Superior at L’Anse.  

I will continue thirty miles further north along the shore of the lake to Houghton and it’s Carnegie, the northernmost point of these travels.  And with it I will be able to celebrate completing Michigan’s slate of Carnegies.