#14 in a series of adventurous reports -- The Yooper Report

#14 in a series of adventurous reports

The Yooper Report

Brought to you from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – a land unique unto itself, where a food line with five people in it on Saturday night at the Houghton Seafood Fest brought this comment from the young man in front of us: “Wow, this is the longest line I’ve ever seen in my life!” But it wasn’t just this comment, it was also the accent, eh? Easy to fall in love with those drawn out vowels, especially since we never knew which words exactly would come out so lyrically. It was always a surprise and it always caused us to smile. And then, when the M.C. introduced the evening’s entertainment, the Flat Broke Blues Band, he said, “They’ve come to play tonight all the way from Marquette,” about 70 miles away, but the biggest city on the U.P. with a population of about 24,000. And we had to smile again.

Actually, even though we were at the gateway to the U.P.s Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts far out from the southern shore of Lake Superior like a dorsal fin, this community festival felt so comfortable, we could have been at Memorial Park in Albany. The scenery was different, but we felt welcome and included. There seemed to be thousands of young people, so we’re guessing they must have come from miles around to Houghton’s waterfront park along the Portage River. Houghton is on the south side of the river, Hancock on the north. Houghton appears to be a little more prosperous because it is home to Michigan Technical University, a college that was founded in the late 1800s to train engineers for Michigan’s exploding mining industry.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – I wanted to explain what a Yooper is, if you haven’t figured it out already: A Yooper is a resident of the U.P. That is what the people who live up here call themselves. We met a few, and can say with conviction that the report on Yoopers is good. In fact, the U.P. (more specifically the Keweenaw Peninsula) is about the only place we’ve been so far that we could seriously say we might like to live someday. Then we remember that as much as 300 inches of snow can fall here in one year. But Yoopers told us that that is changing, and they are getting less snow every year, and of course, they remind us, it doesn’t all fall at once! We even bought ourselves a local bumper sticker that is popular here: “Say yah to da U.P., eh!” If you have no idea where in the world I’m talking about, consider getting out a map or your atlas or just google it.

Copper was the wealth of the Keweenaw. The Chippewa (Ojibwa) Indians mined veins of copper that were at or near the surface and used it to make tools and jewelry. But when the white men discovered it in 1840, there was a copper rush akin to California’s Gold Rush. Many ton rocks of copper ore were hauled away while miners dug both around the surface and down into tunnels all around the rivers and streams. Individual prospectors had a hard time of it, and it wasn’t until New England investors set up mining companies that large-scale removal began. Turns out Michigan copper is a very large contributor to old wealth in New England!

Our S.F. friend Bob Pizzi’s grandfather came to the Keweenaw from Italy in the late 1800s along with many other Italians, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians looking for work in the mines. Bob’s father was born on the peninsula and moved to Detroit, which is where Bob was born (and also Paul and I), but Bob has spent time up here just about every year of his life. He told us where to go and also introduced us (via telephone) to his friends Scott and Joyce, who took us out to lunch and shared their worlds of art and political activism with us, which helped us feel even more connected.

Since mining and lumber were the main economic activities in the U.P., towns sprang up all over the place in the 1800s, making it an interesting combination of both wild and settled at the same time. In addition to copper in the Keweenaw, there have been and still are rich deposits of iron ore in the central U.P. This is the iron that supplied the north with bullets for the civil war and also has supplied the raw material for steel required by Detroit’s auto industry over the last hundred years.

Early on, some of the mining companies made an effort to take care of their workers by building housing and schools, but when the easy-to-get copper was gone, so were the companies. Once Arizona copper was discovered, the U.P.was left behind. (You may remember that we visited the Queen Copper Mine in Bisbee, AZ.) Now, many of the mining sites and mining artifacts in this area are being joined together into a National Historic Park, and it just so happened that my sister Bobbie’s friend Abby is in charge of that project. With a little luck we found her at work and she graciously gave us a personal tour of the new Park’s historic research building and artifact storage in the town of Calumet.

The end of the road on the Keweenaw is the town of Copper Harbor. It is a small place with a beautiful protected harbor along Lake Superior, a town that Paul thinks may be just about the right size – population 800. We had several long conversations with local inhabitants, and it turned out the woman who ran the fish market used to live in Albany and her kids graduated from Albany High! She grew up on the Keweenaw, left, and has now returned, as she said many, many do. We’re starting a list for our retirement community up there – just let us know if you might be interested in joining.

We sampled some of the U.P.’s other highlights as well: the Porcupine Mountains, Tahquamenon Falls, Whitefish Bay, and Sault Ste. Marie. These are all beautiful places where we hiked; saw birds, including eagles, loons, and cedar waxwing (Paul’s favorite); and marveled at Lake Superior in the sun, in the rain, in the wind, and at sunset. In fact, on the windiest day of all, which also happened to be quite clear, we drove most of the way up Brockway Mountain to a spot where we could look out 180 degrees onto the vastness of this incredible lake, and we could see the curve of the earth!

We had a date, however, to meet my brother Jack in Vermont around the 4^th of July to go sailing on Lake Champlain in his new boat. So we left the U.P. and headed across Ontario, along the northern shore of Lake Huron. We considered ourselves to be in the far north, but soon realized that from the Canadian perspective, we were in the far south. We are still working on this adjustment to our thinking as we cross the province of Quebec and head east to the Maritime Provinces.