Reflecting in Michigan: Bad to the Boyne, in a UP window

Sitting in the bar at the Gladstone Yacht Club up in dah U P, I noticed my reflection in the big window by our table.

With a bit of beer in me, elbows resting on the table, I had the classic writer’s look about me, the round face set off by the shaved head and goatee, maybe a touch menacing (until I talk at least, with my 16-year-old sounding voice). The eyes, those windows to the soul, are brooding buggers, hiding who knows what secrets. The green Wayne State sweatshirt sets them off nicely, the beer tells me.

Damn, I’d hit on me, I thought. Like I haven’t before.

After all I shot a 59 earlier that evening at the local golf club. For 9 holes. But I am a Zen duffer in that a score doesn’t really matter to me. Make that, I prefer to think of golf as T-ball for me and it’s about being outside, not about the six balls I lost in the water and woods.

Besides, courses in Northern Michigan tend to have things unfamiliar to us flatlanders. Things like huge pine trees and rolling hillsides that half the year serve as ski slopes.

Take for instance, The Alpine at Boyne Mountain, back in the top of the lower peninsula. You ride a cart for about a mile up to the first tee and basically play your way down a 500 foot tall mountain.

Lucky for me it was raining the day I was to play that course. As my talent for golf is every bit the equal of my hiking skills, at the very least a sprained ankle was in the works.

Still, the courses I visited on my vacation north were postcard pretty. In fact, instead of the Perfectly Michigan ad campaign being run, maybe “We’re better looking than Wisconsin,” would pack more punch.

After all, depending whom you talk with, the state is in dire straits, with a sagging economy. With the gas woes right now, it’s sort of like the 70s and early 80s in Michigan, which might mean the rest of the country should be wary, too.

This time the state is trying to drum up more tourism, and if you live in the Chicago area, particularly the south side and suburbs, it might not be that much further to come up to Northern Michigan than it is to hit Door County. And maybe one day they can build some sort of super fast hydroplane that could have you to your hotel up north in no time.

For me, I might prefer Michigan because Wisconsin only brings up odd memories of family vacations, like the time my dad beat a Northern Pike to death against a tree. That fish and all the perch and sunfish he caught wound up being frozen in cut-in-half milk cartons, put in a cooler, only to take the drive home and put in the freezer, never to be eaten.

Fishy moments aside, the part of Michigan I visited doesn’t get the amount of traffic from Chicago it wants and maybe needs. That’s good if you play golf like I do and don’t want to bump into someone who might be from home and out with one of those cam-phones.

And, like a good part of America, the area shows a growing gap between haves and have-nots. A tipsy contractor we ran into in a sports bar claimed that the homes in the midlevel market have lost significant value in the last year. Meanwhile, places in the Bay Harbor area are listing for $500,000 and up, some way up.

Rich Chicagoans like the Wrigleys have always had places up this way. My question to myself is, why can’t I sleep with someone who has such a summer home, a place visited just a few weeks a year? Can't I persuade someone of my literary intentions with the freshly shot digital picture of me sitting at the corner of the bar in the City Park Grill where Ernest Hemingway once drank, eavesdropped and had a reasonably good time.

That might just be the morel mushrooms talking. They were in season and on our pizza at the Noggin Room in Petoskey, a snug of sorts, with mugs hanging from the ceiling, those mugs belonging to to members of the Wall of Foam - folks who have drunk one of every beer the bar serves, but typically not all in one evening.

Actually, the mushrooms might have caused the following hallucination: a pretty woman, in the Andie MacDowell sort of way, was looking at me while she listened to the acoustic guitar player.

So, I say hello and strike up a conversation. She’s moving to Tinley Park, Illinois, she says to stay with friends. She’s heading to the University of Chicago to study geology. No, I misheard (again wishing to meet someone with a high paying job, gold digger that I am.)

She will be in the big city to get a master’s in theology. Top it off, she’s a Muslim, in a tastefully low cut top. She converted. She’s read the Koran four times. She is looking forward to hitting the library. Her dad is a Congregational minister.

We exchange e-mail address. It goes no further, in part because she is there with the aforementioned dad, her mom and her brother.

So that night my golf buddy Stuart and I headed back to the Inn at Bay Harbor, a Baby Grand Hotel built about 10 years ago where a concrete plant once stood. I am doing a travel piece for a Chicago area magazine, which is how a Milwaukee’s Best budget guy like me can stay at such a nice place. And sometimes its nice to have well-traveled friends who know which hotels to recommend. Another on the choices looked like one of those bad 70s chalets, back from when fondue was all the rage.

At Bay Harbor, there is a bonfire going on near the beach. A 50-something couple from Indianapolis is there, soon joined by some ex-pat India Indian doctors from near Detroit, then members of wedding party. They are well-scrubbed and the groom seems to be drunk on cheap beer and quite nervous. Small children are toasting marshmallows and handing them out at will.

I had a lot on my mind on this trip, and such moments are why you go on vacation, so that even if just for a couple hours, you can forget all your troubles as the sun sets, the fire burns and strangers share stories.

It gives you something happy to think about when you wave to your otherwise complicated reflection.