embellishment known to the Victorian mind-cupolas, towers, domes, dormers, gables, turrets, and front porches you could ride a bike around.
Some of the cupolas had cupolas. They are just incredibly splendid and there are scores of them, standing side by side on the bluffs flanking Fort Mackinac. What it must be to be a child and play hide-and-seek in those houses, to have a bedroom in a tower and be able to lie in bed and gaze out on such a lake, and to go bicycling on carless roads to little beaches and hidden coves, and above all to explore the woodlands of beech and birch that cover the back three-quarters of the island.
I wandered into them now, along one of the many paved paths that run through the dark woods, and felt like a seven-year-old on a grand adventure. Every turn in the path brought up some exotic surprise-Skull Cave, where, according to a sign beside it, an English fur trader hid from the Indians in 1763; Fort Holmes, an old British redoubt on the highest point on the island, 325 feet above Lake Huron; and two mossy old cemeteries out in the middle of nowhere, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both seemed impossibly big for such a small island, and they consisted mostly of the same few names going back generations-the Truscotts, Gables, Sawyers. I happily wandered for three hours without seeing a soul or hearing a sound made by man, and only barely sampled the island. I could easily have stayed for days. I returned to the village by way of the Grand Hotel, quite the most splendid and obnoxiously hoity-toity such institution I have ever come across. A rambling white wooden building with the biggest porch in the world (660 feet), it is indubitably swish and expensive. A single room at the time I was there cost $135 a night. A sign in the street leading down to the hotel said, GRAND HOTELPROPER DRESS REQUIRED AT THE HOTEL AND HOTEL-OWNED STREET. GENTLEMEN AFTER 6 P.M. MUST BE ATTIRED IN A COAT AND TIE.
LADIES MAY NOT BE ATTIRED IN SLACKS. This is possibly the only place in the world where you are told how to dress just to walk down the street. Another sign said a charge would be levied on anyone coming into the hotel just to gawp. Honestly. I suppose they have a lot of trouble with day-trippers. I walked stealthily down the road towards the hotel half expecting to see a sign saying,
'ANYONE PASSING BEYOND THIS POINT WEARING PLAID PANTS OR WHITE SHOES
WILL BE ARRESTED.' But there wasn't anything. I had it in my mind to put my head in the front door, just to see what lifeis like for really rich people, but there was a liveried doorman standing guard, so I had to beat a retreat.
I caught the afternoon ferry back to the mainland, and drove over the Mackinac Bridge to the chunk of land Michigan people call the Upper Peninsula. Before the bridge was built in '1957, this bit of Michigan was pretty well cut off from its own state, and even now it has an overwhelming sense of remoteness. It is mostly just a bleak and sandy peninsula, '150 miles long, squeezed between three of the Great Lakes, Superior, Huron and Michigan. Once again, I was almost in Canada. Sault Ste.
Marie was just to the north. Its great locks connect Lake Huron and Lake Superior and are the busiest in the world, carrying a greater volume of tonnage than the Suez and Panama canals combined, believe it or not.
I was on Route 2, which follows the northern shoreline of Lake Michigan for most of its length. It is impossible to exaggerate the immensity of the Great Lakes. There are five of them, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior and Ontario, and they stretch 700 miles from top to bottom, g00 miles from east to west. They cover 94,500 square miles, making them almost precisely the size of the United Kingdom. Together they form the largest expanse of fresh water on earth.
More squally storms were at work far out on the lake, though where I was it was dry. About twenty miles offshore were a group of islands-Beaver Island, High Island, Whiskey Island, Hog Island and several others. High Island was once owned by a religious sect called the House of David, whose members all had beards and specialized, if you can believe it, in playing baseball. In the 1920s and
'30s they toured the country taking on local teams wherever they went and I guess they were just about unbeatable. High Island was reputedly a kind of penal colony for members of the sect who committed serious infractionsgrounded into too many double plays or something. It was said that people were sent there and never heard from again. Now, like all the other islands in the group except Beaver, it is uninhabited. I felt a strange pang of regret that I couldn't go over and explore them. In fact, the whole of the Great Lakes was exerting a strange hold on me, which I couldn't begin to understand. There was something alluring about the idea of a great inland sea, about the thought that if you had a boat you could spend years just bouncing around from one Great Lake to another, chugging from Chicago to Buffalo, Milwaukee to Montreal, pausing en route to investigate islands, bays and towns with curious names like Deadman's Point, Egg Harbor, Summer Island. A lot of people do just that, I guess- buy a boat and disappear. I can see why.
All over the peninsula I kept encountering roadside food stands with big signs on them saying PASTIES. Most of them were closed and boarded up, but at Menominee, the last town before I crossed into Wisconsin, I passed one that was open and impulsively I turned the car around and went back to it. I had to see if they were real Cornish pasties or something else altogether but with the same name. The guy who ran the place was excited to have a real Englishman in his store. He had been making pasties for thirty years but he had never seen a real Cornish pasty or a real Englishman, come to that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that actually I came from Iowa, the next state over. Nobody ever gets excited at meeting an Iowan. The pasties were the real thing, brought to this isolated corner of Michigan by nineteenthcentury Cornishmen who came to work in the local mines. 'Everybody eats them up here in the Upper Peninsula,' the man told me. 'But nobody's ever heard of them anywhere else. You cross the state line into Wisconsin, just over the river, and people don't know what they are. It's kind of strange.'
The man handed me the pasty in the paper bag and I went with it out to the car. It did seem to be a genuine Cornish pasty except that it was about the size of a rugby ball. It came on a Styrofoam platter with a plastic fork and some sachets of ketchup. Eagerly I tucked into it. Apart from anything else I was starving.
It was awful. There wasn't anything wrong with it exactly--it was a genuine pasty, accurate in every detail-it was just that after more than a month of eating American junk food it tasted indescribably bland and insipid, like warmed cardboard. 'Where's the grease?' I thought. 'Where's the melted cheese patty and pan-fried chicken gravy? Where, above all, is the chocolate fudge frosting?' This was just meat and potatoes, just natural unenhanced flavor. 'No wonder it's never caught on over here,' I grumbled and pushed it back into the bag.
I started the car and drove on into Wisconsin, looking for a motel and a restaurant where I could get some real food-something that would squirt when I bit into it and run down my chin. That, of course, is the way food should be.
CHAPTER 19
'AT NORTHERN WISCONSIN General Hospital, we'll help you to achieve your birthing goals,'
said a voice on the radio. Oh, God, I thought. This was yet another new develop ment since I had left America- the advent of hospital advertising. Everywhere you go you now encounter hospital ads.
Who are they for? A guy gets hit by a bus, does he say, 'Quick, take me to Michigan General.
They've got a magnetic resonance imager there'? I don't understand it. But then I don't understand anything to
