There’s nothing but dust in the rearview as I
nights camped there, visiting old friends I
navigate this sandy Jeep trail looking for the
haven’t seen in several years and the places
turnoff. I’d opted for what my cell phone GPS
that made me want to spend the rest of my
told me was the fastest route, and maybe it
life there. Like any trip back, it felt rushed,
would have been on an ATV, but these sandy,
trying to fit in as many of the old haunts as
washed out, unmarked two-tracks and a bad
possible rather than having the time to really
map keep turning me around. My phone has
enjoy them.
no service and the gas needle creeps closer to empty.
I’d planned to leave there early this morning, but I got a late start after having breakfast
A wet spring following an exceptionally snowy
with friends and casting for trout with a couple
winter has left massive puddles across many
of them into the afternoon. It felt strange and
of the roads, as well as high water levels
melancholic leaving there so soon.
across the entire Great Lakes region. In my truck I may have tried to plow through some
But I’ve wanted to fish the Two Hearted ever
of these puddles, but I’m not in my truck.
since I read Hemingway’s, “Big Two Hearted
Fearing that my 25-year-old Ford pickup
River,” in college, and this was my chance. The
wouldn’t be able to make the cross-country
Hemingway story, too, oddly starts with the
journey, my mother in law generously insisted
burned out remains of this U.P landscape.
that I take her Lexus. But now I’m terrified of fucking up her vehicle which is so much nicer
That lake I see through the trees holds a
than mine.
great amount of significance to me, but I just can’t seem to find the road that will take me
At times I can see Lake Superior shimmering
to it. I’m tempted to turn around, to turn
in the distance through the charred remnants
onto a road I’d passed twenty miles back that
of trees that burnt in a 20,000-acre fire here
would put me somewhere further upstream
back in 2012, when I still lived in the U.P.
on the Two Hearted, but for some reason I’ve made it my mission to reach the mouth
I first showed up on the north coast of
tonight—I just want to lay eyes on it, and
Michigan a dozen years ago, hauling my
then I can decide where to camp.
meager possessions in my Cherokee, a few hundred bucks in the glove box. I was starting
Then I find it, the actual road leading to the
grad school at Northern Michigan University
mouth, and a main dirt road I realize would
in a few days, and I had a pressing need to
have been my best bet for getting here from
find a job and an apartment ASAP.
Seney in the first place.
It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the
A campground at the river mouth is marked
place, and with this greatest of lakes. And I
prominently and bustles with people, which
vowed to myself that the U.P. would be my
makes me feel somewhat ashamed for having
home forever. When I took a job in Utah, I
gotten so turned around and on the verge of
knew that it wouldn’t be long before I’d make
lost. I park and take my first look at the river.
my way back to northern Michigan. But that
It runs deep and mellow, clear enough to see
was before I met Amy, before I bought a cabin
the stones at the bottom but stained a deep
in the mountains and built a new life. Now, a
tobacco brown.
bumper sticker on the wall of my barn in Utah proclaims, “My heart is in da U.P. but my ass
It parallels the lakeshore for a quarter mile
is stuck right here.”
or so, separated from the lake by a peninsula of dunes, before dumping into the lake which
Despite my love for the Upper Peninsula, I’ve
appears brilliant blue from here. I cross the
never been to the part of the U.P. that I’m
river on a footbridge and walk out to the
headed. The U.P. that I loved and called home
end of the peninsula where the Two Hearted
is 100 miles west of here along the Superior
finally seeps into Superior
coast in Marquette. I’ve spent the last two
12
STRUNG MAGAZINE
SPRING 2020
