A Fall Tour of Leelanau

By Ray Nargis
Sun contributor
This essay originally ran in the Glen Arbor Sun in the fall of 1999.
Almost a quarter century ago — in the fall of 1977 — I drove from my home in Kalamazoo to see the Leelanau Peninsula for the first time. I was looking for a place to live where the air and water would remind me of my hometown, Ludington — without the harness of the past which precludes most of us from settling in the place where we were born.

I knifed up the east side of the peninsula on my way to Sutton’s Bay under a sheltering mix of high clouds recently blown in from Canada and milky October sunlight. I distinctly remember commenting to my companion — a cat named Smoky — that this was the kind of place where we could live.
One year after America’s bicentennial the ubiquitous sprawl of mini-marts and fudge shops, which now predominate so much of the landscape from Burdickville to Northport, had not festered into a full-blown attack on the ascetics of Leelanau County. The fall colors were only a few days short of peaking, and the glinting sun off Grand Traverse Bay — at that moment rising above Power Island — was awe-inspiring.
In all the subsequent years I have driven that same route I still cannot twist along the bay without dropping a tire off the side of the road because my attention has wandered to the water and the view.
On that day I stopped In Sutton’s Bay for breakfast and was thrilled to see Jim Harrison, a writer whose work I had recently discovered in the form of a rat-eared copy of his collection of poetry called Plain Song, holding court with the waitress. The subjects of his monologue that morning were the twin virtues of menudo and merlot as hangover cures.
I recall thinking what a wonderful place that was; where writers could be met daily for quips and stories; where the famous and near-famous were available to be observed and befriended. I did not know it at the time, but I was not to see Jim Harrison again for 17 years.
I left Sutton’s Bay and drove north through Peshawbetown. The Grand Traverse Band was still years from its official recognition and economic upturn. The blight and poverty of the few tarpaper shacks and mobile homes was palpable and depressing.
I stopped in a yard of rusted cars and assorted junk where a small man and his deaf son were smoking fish in a hollowed-out refrigerator. We talked about the whitefish I was buying and the beautiful day, but I’ll never forget the sidelong glances and deferential language he used in our conversation. It was as if he held me in the utmost contempt but was shielding it with the thinnest veil of civility. I drove away wondering what his life was like and glad that I really didn’t know.
After a stop at Woody’s Bar in Northport for coffee and directions, I rounded Cat’s Head Bay and stopped at the lighthouse on the peninsula’s northern-most point. Despite a stiff wind which had blown up from the West the temperature was almost balmy for October, and I recall thinking that perhaps it didn’t get that cold in Northern Michigan. I walked down the beach a ways and then took the first of what would become many thousands of skinny dips in the isinglass, blue waters of Lake Michigan. I remember having to walk out two or three hundred feet, as the water was shallow and a bit icy, and picking my way over the large stones at the point’s end. Finally I was at neck level, and I recall thinking that if I could just keep swimming north I could escape my whole life and end up in the Upper Peninsula or Canada.
There are days when I still recall standing at the very end of the Leelanau Peninsula, so many years ago, on that fall afternoon wondering about how my life would be in the North. Perhaps everyone has a moment when they stand at some pivotal point of no return. For me it was neck-deep in the water, under an isogonic October sun, looking out towards Beaver Island at the northern-most geographic point I had ever been in my life.
My itinerant ride down the west side of Leelanau that day has remained ensconced in my memory all these years. The rolling hills leading south out of Northport gave way to a photo session at fish town in Leland. Then I made my way to Glen Haven for yet another swim. The trees enshrouding the coastline there were brilliantly vibrant-yellow-red combinations with the musk scent of decay. I stood alone in front of the old cannery and imagined what the scene would have looked like one hundred years earlier.
I stopped to buy pumpkins just north of Empire that day before taking M-72 back to Traverse City. The huge balls lay odoriferous in the wet, mud field and I recall thinking of my grandmother who had just recently died. I don’t think I said a prayer; although I might have, but I remember wishing she were with me. In her youth she had lived for a while in Empire and told me stories of going to school on a boat stuck in the ice near there. I think now that, in recalling her that day, she was inviting me to return to the home I’d never seen.
One of the original Beach Bards poets, Ray Nargis now lives in Ely, Minnesota