Week 38 - The Soo

On Saturday morning I hauled all my gear out to the parking lot of Nordhouse Dunes and headed up the coast on 31 toward the Straits of Mackinac. I stopped in Traverse City for vegan tamales, and the locals were all gratefully chilling outside in the sunshine (it had been snowing only a week or so before!). I bought some groceries at Oryana, the local bobo grocery store, in preparation for entering the great food desert of far northern Michigan. I was heading up to visit my friends JC and ES in Sault Sainte Marie (aka "The Soo"), and it turned out they were coming down to Petoskey for groceries at about the same time I was going to pass through, so we decided to meet up there. I arrived a little early, walked around downtown, found a little clock shop, and knocked on the door. Looking over the collection of vintage watches, one jumped out at me, I tried it on, and it fit perfectly! It had an analog dial and also a low-key digital display that could be revealed with the push of a button and would show multiple time zones. I justified the purchase because it would allow me to quickly consult UTC and Eastern Time for work as I moved west through the time zones, but deep down I just liked the look and feel of it. Then I met up with JC and ES and we went to catch up and eat some Indian food for lunch, at what was according to them one of the last really good restaurants this side of the Canadian border. Then they got in their car and I prepared to cross the Mackinaw Bridge, which I'd heard might be a bit of an ordeal. The last miles to the bridge were quite pretty, winding toward and away from the coastline so I caught periodic glimpses of the water through the trees.

The bridge was easy at first, with a speed limit of 45 and no cars around me, but as I approached the suspension span in the middle, the paved outer lane was closed for maintenance and I had to ride on the metal grating of the inside lane. The gratings were lined up square with the road, and interfered with the square grid pattern of my tires to make the steering shake disturbingly. Between that and fighting the strong gusts of wind, my heart was in my mouth for that section as I focused all my attention to keep a steady course. But then the road widened again and I sighed with relief and coasted down to the toll booths to pay my $4, still pumped up on adrenaline. I'd reached the Upper Peninsula! I immediately got off I-75 onto Mackinac Trail and rode through the dense woods of Hiawatha National Forest and out into flat expanses of horse pastures and hay fields sprinkled with yellow flowers, with the occasional cluster of red barns and silos. The grid of roads started to be named by their distance from town: 20 Mile Road, 19 Mile Road, etc.

I turned off onto a dirt road and pulled up outside JC and ES's 40-acre farm. They gave me a tour around the cleared area and introduced me to their pets:

• Lucian Underfoot Stimulus Check Samosa, a tiny Mal-shi with curly black hair, extremely friendly and excitable, who was so happy to meet me that he dribbled pee all over the porch.
• Queen Mab, a black Lionhead rabbit who's probably part Angora, very clever and dignified unless food is involved.
• Lady Thistledown, a gray Lionhead rabbit who's a bit less sociable due to a traumatic childhood and lives upstairs.
• A flock of Ayam Cemani chickens, a rare Indonesian breed that's completely black, including their beaks and feet. Supposedly even their meat is black, although JC and ES eat a plant-based diet so there's no danger of the chickens being eaten. They've found a way to keep all their roosters by separating them into a bachelor flock so they don't fight over the hens. When you get close you can see that some of the chickens' feathers have an iridescent green sheen and their wattles are slightly reddish, they're very pretty birds. It would be cool if they laid black eggs too, but in fact they're a pale pink.

On Sunday we went into Sault Sainte Marie and drove around to see the sights. I couldn't have had better tour guides, because ES is on active duty in the Coast Guard and JC is a reservist, and both of them have sailed on several kinds of ships in the merchant marine (JC even got to steer SS Badger a few times). They pointed out a stately old hydro-power plant built in 1902 and still operational, but the main attraction was the locks, which lift and lower ships across Saint Marys Falls to give them access to Lake Superior. We went to the top story of the observation deck to watch the H. Lee White locking through, seemingly rising slowly while you looked at it but quickly if you looked away. It was fun watching it with a boat nerd like ES, who explained how the ship's bulk loading conveyor belts worked and speculated on why the hatches weren't clamped down as is mandatory on Lake Superior. Apparently the major traffic through the lock is carrying taconite iron ore from mines to steel mills, and carrying windmill parts and other foreign goods to the heartland via the St. Lawrence Seaway and returning filled with grain. He pointed out the "jack-ups" on a dredging barge, like giant legs that could be extended to stabilize it on the river bottom. I got to hear lots of tidbits about Great Lakes shipping, like the story about a raven that lived at the locks and had learned to land on the bridges of passing ships and beg for food.

The week's weather was all over the place; there was a day where it got into the 70s and several frosty nights, and the wild temperature swings brought gusty winds. When there wasn't any wind or cold, there were clouds of kamikaze mosquitoes, so aggressive that they landed immediately and were easy to kill, but in such numbers that it didn't help much. I worked outside a little bit, and sometimes had little corpses piled all around me as if I were a bug zapper. So I wound up working inside a fair bit, and provided entertainment for Lucian, who was sometimes disruptive and sometimes slept quietly nearby. Mab slowly warmed up to my presence, just sniffing me at first, but eventually allowing me to pet her (petting a rabbit's head actually expresses that it's the one in charge). It was light until after 9pm, and one day we went on an evening excursion to a place JC and ES call "Narnia", a little primeval grove of cedar trees and giant mossy boulders on the shore of the lake. Just after we got there, the clouds parted and the slanting sun lit up orange lichens on rocks out in the lake and the crystal clear water, making for a stunning scene.

On Friday we went to the Museum Ship Valley Camp downtown, a massive old ore freighter from 1917 with her cargo holds converted into a museum about Great Lakes shipping. There were too many interesting things there to describe, but the highlights for me were: looking down at the massive triple-expansion steam engine, trying to puzzle out how the steam-assisted power steering mechanism worked, the way the steel floor rippled from being stretched over its supports by ton after ton of cargo, the ornate etched brass gauges with hand lettering, and a type of brace and bit drill I'd never seen before that can drill into a corner flush with the wall. They also had a lifeboat from the Edmund Fitzgerald that had been ripped in half by the storm, and some huge buoys from a recovery effort that had been pulled under and crushed by water pressure.

On Saturday we went down to Mackinaw City to hit to the tourist attractions. We spent the morning at Fort Michilimackinac, a meticulously reconstructed 18th century fort with active archaeological digs and interpreters dressed in period clothing and doing everything with replica tools and historical techniques. They had a huge birch bark canoe in the visitor's center, a working earthen oven, a blacksmith shop where they repaired their own tools, soldiers demonstrating the firing of mortars and muskets, rooms furnished as they would have been for different eras and occupants, and indigenous bark huts. We spent a lot of time talking to the gardener, who based her techniques and plant selections on what could be gleaned from the historical record, down to oiled paper row covers and using tobacco juice as a pesticide. They'd even assigned different garden areas to different staff so it wouldn't look too uniform, because historically there wouldn't have been any central planning or control, and as she pointed out, people back then would have been better or worse gardeners just like today. Clearly the place was run by serious history geeks; even the doors on the modern bathrooms were built with historical carpentry techniques like nail clinching.

Then we had a fantastic lunch at a Jamaican restaurant, watched a busking juggler, did some shopping, and headed over to another museum ship, the USCG Icebreaker Mackinaw WAGB-83. She was built during World War II, and kept the shipping lanes clear of ice for war materials and manufacturing. She was extremely powerful, with six massive train engines in three separate engine rooms and once broke through an ice sheet 36 feet deep. The fuel tanks held over 346,000 gallons of diesel, and were filled just once a year in a process that took an entire week. An especially interesting aspect of this museum ship was that everything was left exactly as it was when she was taken out of service in 2006, down to the linens on the bunks and the boxes of crackers in the galley. Because I was with Coast Guard people, we got a special tour of the "A gang", essentially the maintenance department of the ship, with shops for welding and piping, electrical work, and machining, where all the drawers were still fully stocked with bolts and fittings and the shelves full of raw material. ES pointed out a lot of fascinating details about the ship's systems and procedures that I doubt would ever be part of any tour for ordinary tourists, but which I thoroughly enjoyed. Well, at least until I got that special kind of fatigue that comes from taking in too many museum exhibits.

P.S. Over the course of the week I made good progress on Project Footwork, writing and using a training program for the Twiddler and getting rapidly better at typing on it. I bought a pair of fingerless weightlifting gloves and some velcro and experimented with sticking the Twiddler to my palm, which seems like a promising method. I got a used mobile phone and started to test a Linux environment on it, and started shifting to a new text editor that's extremely resource efficient. I got a safety vest with lots of pockets to hold all the accessories for my eventual "office" and started working out designs for a harness to hold the phone so I can glance down at it when needed. It's beginning to feel more and more like a realistic ambition.

Things I Learned

• Most of the upper peninsula was logged to rebuild Chicago after the great fire of 1871, after which the government tried to convince farmers to move there, but it wasn't actually very good farmland and it's still pretty sparsely populated.
• The local Walmart has a wooden hitching post with a water trough in the parking lot for the Amish people who've been moving up here from Pennsylvania over the last five years. And apparently it gets used, because there was a fresh pile of horse droppings next to it.
• The Stephenson valve gear is a really clever mechanism that allows analog control of a steam engine's speed and direction, and when coupled with a differential that turns a screw can create something a lot like what's now called a servomotor. So far I've been satisfied with understanding the basic principles of steam technology, but I think I might enjoy reading a book on it to learn some of the details.
• The seams of birch bark canoes were sealed with pitch, and in the cold lake water it would often crack and need to be repaired on an almost daily basis.
• Too many things to list here, honestly.

Wonderful Things

• Suddenly coming upon a view of the lake in the sunshine, the water as strikingly blue as the Caribbean.
• A flock of sandhill cranes feeding in a field by the side of the road. I also saw them in Florida, and it was fun to think how they'd been travelling north just like me.
• A turtle swimming slowly underwater, perfectly clear against the white sand.
• Petting soft bunny fur.