In the summer of 1967, as we did every summer, my family vacationed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in our dilapidated old house that my father purchased in 1960 for four hundred dollars, not exactly on Lake Michigan, but just across the highway from it on a dirt road, if you can call it that. It is just five miles into the U.P. after crossing the Mackinac Bridge and considered part of the town of St. Ignace.
Over the years, the house has been “improved” upon here and there, but it is not what you would ever call grand. In the beginning, it had no electricity or plumbing but thanks to my mother, both were installed after the first two years of roughing it, starting with a real bathroom. Since then it’s had a wood floor laid down, the antiquated fireplace rebuilt with stones collected by all of us in a big summer project in 1963 and a fairly decent kitchen put in; that is, a gas stove, an old refrigerator a neighbor was getting rid of, a recycled sink from the local dump and cupboards made by my father. All this was done without turning what we call a camp into anything resembling a modern home which is just the way we like it. It has three knotty pine bedrooms, one for Mom and Dad, one for the girls and one for the boys. If we had guests, they slept on the couches in the living room or in sleeping bags anywhere they cared to. We also have a little one-room shack, our playhouse, that has a small bed and a table with a kerosene lantern for any guest important enough to rate their own room. We have a couple of tents but after a family of bears came clamoring around them in 1965, no one wants to sleep in them except unsuspecting rubes from the city gung ho to experience the great outdoors.
Though it seems to be a wilderness, the town boasts a school, two churches, a library, the only one within two hundred miles, a bakery/restaurant and a general store that sells gas, firewood, bait, and anything else the owner, Mrs. Gutzman, a wily widow who pumped the gas herself in any weather until she was ninety-two, decided to stock. It was always an eclectic offering and we, my brothers and sister, looked forward to her surprise offerings each summer. In 1964 she sold 45 rpm records to cash in on the Beatles and the British invasion. Another year she sold moccasins with a sign that said “Handmade by local Indians,” though we did notice the Made in Taiwan stamp on the inside. She also sold homemade ice cream one year that kept melting before she could stack it into cones. And every year she sold pasties, those Cornish turnovers of meat and potatoes that are a U.P. staple.
My family consists of Mother, my older sister Deborah, my older brother Martin, myself, the middle child Rebecca but called Becks and my younger brother Tim. My father passed away last winter and we were not even sure we were going to make the trip this year, so fraught with peril did it seem without him but Deborah talked us into it. She was writing her dissertation and wanted time alone to think, write and collect information in the area so she came up before our regularly scheduled time, the last two weeks in July. Deborah and Martin are a little older than Tim and myself. In fact, they are adults though neither is married yet; Martin is twenty-six and Deborah, don’t-you-dare-call-me-Debbi, is twenty-four working on her master’s. I am seventeen and Tim is only fourteen, just starting high school. He is the only athlete in our family of avid readers, shuns books, is good with his hands and resembles our father.
This particular summer, the first without our beloved Dad, got off to an auspicious start when Mother’s cousin Jeanette showed up alone saying her “goddamn hillbilly, stupid ass old husband” kicked her out and she had nowhere to go. She traveled all the way up from Kentucky in an old pickup truck with bald tires and one suitcase. She was plenty riled and proceeded to buy out Mrs. Gutzman’s supply of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and cracked the first seal in the parking lot. She asked Tim to drive her back because she wasn’t in any condition. Tim had to sheepishly say he didn’t have a driver’s license yet and her reply was “So goddamn what? Drive this piece of shit.” He then had to admit he really didn’t know how to drive a stick shift and all hell broke loose from her mouth, a woman known to curse up a blue streak in the best of times. She pushed Tim aside, got in the truck and took off leaving him in the dust. He had to hitchhike back.
Mother spent the first day trying to calm Jeanette down and get her settled into the playhouse she was reluctant to stay in because she couldn’t find her way to the bathroom from out there. She wanted to sleep with Mother who couldn’t quite accept sleeping with her drunken cousin in the bed where her husband, until recently, slept. “Oh hell, Bernice, can the sentiment. Husbands are a dime a dozen, you’ll find a new one,” she said, which set Mother on a crying jag that lasted long into the night.
But that was just the beginning of our first summer without Dad. Deborah had literally taken over the living room and turned it into a sort of library/office/newsroom with hundreds of books and pamphlets, newspapers and old prints, a typewriter and a file cabinet. These “resources” covered the couches, the chairs, the table, half the floor and even the shelf in the shed. She had really made herself at home in the two weeks she’d been here alone and I guess I could see the need but really, she could have made an attempt to get the place ready for our vacation that always included a fire in the fireplace complete with marshmallows every night, music on the old phonograph and card games played on the old pine table, also made by Dad. Now we were barely allowed in our own living room for fear of messing up Deb’s piles of books and notes. Mother was unable to deal with Jeanette and Deborah and the loss of Dad, who I have to say, was a class act and would not have brooked any aggression or sass from these two high-strung locusts, and would always maintain perfect harmony. He had a way about him, that’s all I can say without bawling myself. His death has left Martin edgy, Tim quiet and lost. Mother and I cry a lot and Deborah sulks and throws tantrums.
Things settled down eventually and with an unusually warm summer, we stayed at the beach all day and sometimes into the night and roasted our marshmallows in the sand--building a fire and sharing with our neighbors and any vacationers who just happened by leaving the living room to Deb. We got used to it and decided in the interest of saving Mother additional grief, we would not fight or squabble. That is until one day a book was found missing, sending Deborah into a tailspin with everyone turning the place upside down trying to find it. “The worst part is,” she cried, “that it’s from the library and I won’t be able to return it at the end of the week.” She was afraid of the old librarian, Miss Stackpole, who would reproach anyone with an overdue book, a turned corner or god forbid, pencil markings. What would she say about a lost book? Deborah was horrified at the thought of telling her.
Martin, who’d been both fishing and blueberry picking for the day and missed all the hysteria, came in happy and tired with his bounty and was immediately apprised of the situation, i.e. the lost book. But instead of going along with Deb’s mania, calmly asked if it was a book by Piaget and when Deb’s face lit up, ready for him to tell her where it was, coldly said he threw it away.
Well, the hysteria then turned to frenzy, then back to hysteria then on to panic where it sidled up in a state a sheer madness. Deborah lost it. While she was blubbering and shrieking, Mother asked Martin if he were sure or if it might just be in the shed or outside somewhere. Martin repeated that he was quite sure he’d thrown it out. “It was just lying in the shed, the cover was worn, the book itself was completely outdated, Piaget has long since issued revised editions so I just tossed it out with the wine bottles and fish guts. I thought it was mine from college and saw no reason to keep it around.”
Oh dear, the howling from my sister after hearing that. She snarled and scratched and almost attacked Martin but she knew better than that--Martin never understood the concept of not hitting women if they happened to be sisters. He just replied in a deadly hiss, “Why don’t you just fuck off?” Right in front of Mother which stopped everyone cold. Mother didn’t quite know how to react; Martin after all wasn’t her little boy anymore. She couldn’t very well wash his mouth out with soap. She was just glad Tim was still at the beach and didn’t hear it. It was a more innocent time.
Martin and Deborah didn’t speak to each other for the rest of our vacation and avoided contact completely and totally. It’s too bad because they used to be so much fun playing Scrabble, both literate types and highly competitive. Martin picked a lot of blueberries that year and Deborah paced the living room smoking cigarettes from an ebony holder making it seem so glamorous. She still had not gone to tell Miss Stackpole that she’d done the unforgivable, lost one of the library’s precious books. Mother offered to go to the library with her but Deb curtly replied she’d handle it herself, she wasn’t a coward but that if she had to pay for it, Martin was going to cough up the dough.
On the day the book was due, Deb got herself dressed up properly and was heading out the door when Tim, on her heals said he’d go with her. Now this had to be the first time Tim ever voluntarily entered a library and when you consider that Martin and his local friends were going out on a boat that morning, this came as something of a shock. “Becks, did you hear that, did I hear right?” Deb asked. I said I thought I might have heard wrong myself and we stared at Tim with open mouths. “I just thought I’d like to go see what all the fuss is about. I mean, books or something. What’s the big deal about them anyway? Besides, if the old bag in charge gives you any trouble, I’ll be there to help you out.” We both looked at him and laughed. He was small for his age but was for the most part scrappy. And adorable. I didn’t ever say that out loud because he’d hate it. He wanted to be a man and was a little rough and tumble but had many endearing qualities, as I said, resembling our father.
So off went Tim and Deb to face old Stackpole and I went swimming with Mother and Jeanette, really working on our tans and drinking Coca-Cola. When we went back for lunch, Deb pulled in, slammed the car door, her fists were balled and she had a pale slightly bewildered look on her face and Tim had a book in his hand and was actually reading it, a sight we’d really never encountered before. Mother and I both did a double take on that one but before we could investigate, Deb wasted no time telling us that not only did she have to pay for the book, she was to return everything she’d borrowed until it was paid for and that the charge was thirty-five dollars. “For an outdated, ragged-ass book no one in this town would ever want to read!” She was livid and her makeup was melting on her face. Apparently she’d had words to that effect with Miss Stackpole who would not budge. When Deb demanded to know how the price was determined, she said it was private information not available to patrons. Deb marched out of the library vowing never to return to which Miss Stackpole said in that case she would probably have to send the police to pick up the other materials; her nephew happened to be on the police force and she could count on him to which Deb blew a gasket and rattled the set of old wooden double doors trying to get out, nearly shattering the glass panes.
Tim, trying not to get involved unless needed perused the bookshelves and began talking to a young lady who was fascinated with a book on birds of the U.P. Tim, trying hard not to appear ignorant or for that matter, with the woman coming unglued, said he might be interested in a book himself, that he needed something to read while here on vacation and she recommended a book on bears of the U.P., mentioning she might be at the beach later looking for piper plovers, her favorite bird.
Deb very calmly informed Martin that evening that the price of the book was thirty-five dollars and he would have to pay it. He only said “bullshit,” and went out to clean fish. We had two more days of tense silence before Mother intervened and suggested that since Martin threw the book away, he should pay for it. “That’s bullshit!” is what came out of him though he apologized to Mother for his language and said he would try not to cuss in her presence but that he was mad as hell and would not be ripped for thirty-five dollars for a useless book in terrible condition from a hick-town library. Mother said they should go and speak to Miss Stackpole and see if a more reasonable sum could be agreed on. Martin refused to step foot in the library but said he’d pay “something” if a more rational price was charged. He thought six dollars tops even though he knew it would fetch nothing in a used book store. He was sick of the whole fiasco but wanted to salvage the vacation.
So in the end, Mother went to see Miss Stackpole and agreed to fill in at the library for three days so Miss Stackpole could visit her sister in Traverse City and that is how she ended up with a job unexpectedly. Before she married Dad she had been a teacher. She continued to work in the library during the summer from 1967 on. Deb wrote her dissertation on the child-rearing methods of the Ojibwe Indians and later a book on the tribes of the Great Lakes region. Tim became something of a bookworm after that trip to the library especially when it was learned he needed glasses all this time but “who knew?” said Mother.
Jeanette went back to Kentucky and her “old goddamn son-of-a-bitch husband” though she could always be counted on to show up unexpectedly from time to time. Martin is still Martin, a psychologist, only now he is married to Paula who has to constantly remind him to watch his mouth. I became a writer like my sister and am working on my first novel set in the U.P. We still have our vacation house and last year we had to put on a new roof but otherwise everything remains the same. We survived Mrs. Gutzman’s death and the first thing her son did was install self-service pumps but that wasn’t until 1978. She lived to be one hundred and three. Her son also opened a pretty nice restaurant and gift shop that brought a lot of tourists to the area. Miss Stackpole retired and never bothered to replace Piaget’s book; she knew it was all “bullshit.” Tim owns a bookstore in Greenwich Village in New York that is a living shrine to Jack Kerouac.
We still miss our father, who loved the U.P. and sang a little song he made up when crossing the Mackinac Bridge. We sing it at the top of our lungs driving across this majestic expansion over the friendliest lake in the world to the warmest place in our heart. Sometimes this makes Mother cry but then she laughs. She never found a replacement for Dad and I don’t think she even tried; some people are irreplaceable and that’s just the way we like it.
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