Three states today:

Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

We woke up early, left Manistique a little after 6 a.m. and drove north through the Hiawatha State Forest through dawn mist rising through the piney woods -- and found it necessary to listen to "Misty Moisty Morning" as we drove, naturally.  At Munising we swung west along the southern shore of Lake Superior and switched the music to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."  But there were no wild storms or shipwrecks today; the water was as calm as molten silver.

This is Shelter Bay, between Au Train and Deerton.  Deep fine golden sand, light breeze off the water blowing the pines, a great calm silence.

From Marquette we headed southwest, away from the grandeur of the Great Lake, past dozens of smaller lakes half-hidden in the pines.  (It feels like a cross between Maine and the Adirondacks, only wider and wilder and without mountains.)  In Trout Creek, Michigan, we found Agate Falls.

It's just a short walk from the highway to look down at the falls.  Overhead, there's a stunning old trestle where trains used to cross at a dizzying height above the falls.  Now, apparently, ATVs and snowmobiles do it.  You could slither down the steep banks to get below the falls for better views, but we didn't.

Not far to the west, we reached Wisconsin.  See how red the rocks are in the picture of the falls?  It's iron mining country.  The soil is red, the places often have Iron in their names (Ironwood, Iron Mountain, Iron County).  The "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is about iron boats, though I never paid attention to that part of the lyrics before.   We swung back up to Lake Superior at beautiful Chequamegon Bay in Ashland, Wisconsin.

Then we drove due west to Duluth, where Uncle Don and Aunt Judy lived for a while when Don was stationed there early in his Coast Guard career.  Duluth is very cool, with ships and factories and bridges rising high over the water and high steep bluffs crowding the harbor.  (Not my picture.)

Then on into Minnesota.  You have to say that right: Minnesoohhwwwtah, with more O's than we'd normally put into it. We're in Bemidji tonight, watching the baseball game.  We took a walk earlier through the campus of Bemidji State University along the shore of Lake Bemidji to Diamond Point Park, where there are waves and gazebos and breezes and trees and remarkably comfortable Adirondack chairs.

Tomorrow: North Dakota.

Back in the U.S.S.A.

Much better!  We had some delay at Sarnia, but that was because we didn't listen to Laura and get there by 8.  (By the time we saw her comment, it was already too late.)  We got there at about 10 and got across in half an hour.

The first glimpse of Port Huron, Michigan, from the bridge, on a hazy morning:

Here's a little garden in Port Huron that seems to have been planted to please travelers looking down from the bridge.  The sign in the window says not to pick the flowers, and with binoculars you can see a stern-looking department store mannequin in an evening gown standing behind the sign -- the enforcer.  Better not.

Michigan is amazing.  So big and wide open and gorgeous.  In the "thumb" of the mitten near Canada, we drove through miles of lush farm country studded with homey towns with old brick Main Streets and old houses with sweet porches and Riverfests and farmer's markets.  When Paul Simon sang, "It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw -- I've gone to look for America," he never should have left.  He was in the heart of America before he went anywhere.

This is Vassar, Michigan.  We drove through here, but I didn't take this picture -- I borrowed it from Google Maps.

As you get further north the land gets stranger and wilder and lovelier.

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 This is the shore of Lake Huron near Cheboygan, looking across at Bois Blanc Island.  (Google made that little movie out of a series of pictures I took, all on its own.)  The water is indescribably clear and lovely, turquoise and aqua, the sun is warm, the air smells spicy and salty and sweet all at once, wildflowers bloom by the water.  Dad said, "I like it here."

Then we drove across the stunningly beautiful Mackinac bridge to the Upper Peninsula.  (We hear that people from the U.P. call people from the lower part of Michigan "trolls," because they live under the bridge.)   It's the longest suspension bridge in the western hemisphere and the fifth longest in the world, but mostly, it's just lovely.  Here's a bridge cam.

So is the Upper Peninsula.  We drove west on Route 2 along its southern margin, with the Hiawatha State Forest on our north and Lake Michigan glittering to the south, to Manistique.

Our hotel is right across the street from the lake.  After dinner we crossed the street to the Manistique boardwalk that runs for a couple of miles along the sandy shore.  There's a sign for the Carl D. Bradley Memorial Park.  The lake looks so innocent and peaceful, glittering under the sun on a summer evening, with waves lapping gently on a sandy shore, but the park honors a freighter by that name that sank in a storm in Lake Michigan in the 1950s, with 33 lives lost.  The boardwalk leads through the park toward the town to a breakwater where -- on a calm summer evening, at least -- you can walk out to the Manistique lighthouse.  We did.

Back on shore, along the river in the shelter of the breakwater, there is this lovely old boat.

And along the path on the way back to the hotel, a half-hidden flower:

Blame Canada!

It's the first day of the big trip!  We spent the morning packing and preparing, left Newton Avenue before noon, stopped briefly at the lake and turned West with high hearts ready for adventure.  Gorgeous hot summer day, perfect for  a road trip.  We saw drumlins and a fawn and possibly a bald eagle in the Montezuma Refuge, and the sky got bigger and higher and wider the way it does as you drive west across New York.  The route plan was to head for Niagara Falls, cut across Ontario to Port Huron, Michigan, and then turn north up the Mitten and then west again across the Upper Peninsula between Lakes Michigan and Superior toward Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. Good plan, huh?  Except we forgot to bargain for the 21st century headache of crossing the border between the US and Canada.

It dawned on us when we got near Buffalo around 3:30 and started seeing signs with startling crossing wait times that the border might be a problem.  Of the several crossings (Peace Bridge, Rainbow Bridge, and the one in Lewiston at I190)  Rainbow Bridge -- the one right by the falls -- looked best.  So, we drove blithely over Grand Island and into Niagara Falls -- and, on Niagara Avenue, hit traffic.  Serious traffic.  Sit still and don't move for minutes at a time, and then move forward three feet and stop and sit still for some more minutes again traffic.  Worse yet, while you're sitting still, watch people at an intersection ahead of you pulling in front of you from another street, car after car after car after car, taking up all the spaces so that even when the light changes you still. can't. move.  We had no idea.  We shoulda gone to Toledo and turned North there.  Too late now!

I did not take that picture; I stole it from the results of a Google search for "Niagara Falls traffic congestion."  However, that's pretty much how it looked, except you have to imagine the RV pulling a "toad" -- a small car on a trailer -- in the lane on our right, that couldn't wait for a space in the traffic and pulled out so that it entirely blocked an intersection, cutting off a line of cars trying to get through the line of cars trying to get into Canada (never move to Niagara Falls) until a city bus showed up and nosed its way belligerently right up to the toad, couldn't cross, and WAITED, emanating diesel bus threat vibes.  Oddly, not many people honked.  Gridlock!

Two hours and fifteen minutes of stop-and-start, mostly stop driving later, we reached a nice bored Canadian man in a booth who took less than a minute and a half to glance at our passports, ask a couple of questions and wave us through.  We did get glimpses of the American and Canadian falls and the gorge from the bridge, at least.

But mostly, it looked like this:

Well.  After that it was smooth sailing.  We took the Queen Elizabeth Way through St. Catherine's to Hamilton.   There's a whole lot of healthy-looking new industry and retail in Ontario, and also plenty of new housing construction.  Things are buzzing.  Clean, busy, growing ,thriving.   Except, they don't mow the grass along the highway, which makes it look as if the apocalypse just happened and everyone's escaping.  

Eventually we reached London, where we are now holed up in a Howard Johnson's.  (First we had trouble paying for gas with our U.S. credit card, then we drove around sleepily hunting without success for a motel, then we found the Casa Blanca, where the nice guy who ran the place didn't have the room we needed but picked up the phone and called up his son at the Howard Johnson's up the road and fixed us up.  People in Canada are notably nice.)  In the morning, we'll brave the crossing back into the US at Sarnia.  Wait times there were 80 minutes earlier this evening, according to my phone, but we're hoping mornings might be better.  After that -- Michigan!  

Update:  Dad says Canada is like a foreign country.

More eventful days at the lake

As if the Murphies didn't cause enough fuss at the Reservoir on Saturday with the auction, or on Sunday as people came and went picking up the items they had purchased, on Monday, half a dozen trucks from NYSEG, Time Warner and Frontier arrived to fix the utility wires that sagged so low between the house and the lake.

The wires are part of a utility easement that runs from a pole by our apple tree, a looooong way, maybe 500 feet, to the next pole in the woods on the lake shore, and on to the houses on the east side of the lake.  The NYSEG wires on top of the poles were high enough, but the Time Warner and Frontier wires hung lower on the poles are bundles of heavy cables that sagged so low that Dad and I measured them at the lowest point at about 9 1/2 feet off the ground.  I started by contacting NYSEG, but they were no help.  On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I found a contact-us-for-help email address for Frontier.  Somebody got back to me promising to help within an hour, on a holiday weekend, and within three days a Frontier engineer named Heather had visited the place, looked the wires over and agreed to fix them.   I had hoped they could be buried, but that turned out to be too expensive to make any sense, so instead, Heather arranged to install a new pole in the utility easement, halfway down the loooooooong span between the two existing poles, to lift them higher off the ground.

It took some coordinating on Heather's part to get all three utilities on board and make it happen, and then the storms in early July required a postponement.  But finally, the day came.  Here goes the pole truck, backing into the yard on fiberglass mats intended to protect the wet ground from tracks and ruts.

Pretty long pole!

Here's the auger for drilling the hole:

This picture shows just how low the wires were hanging.

Now for the dramatic part.  I wasn't there -- Dad was taking pictures and supervising.  Notice those orange things that all those guys have on their heads?  Dad did not have one of those orange things on his head.   The workers had trimmed some branches out of the way before bringing in the pole, and unbeknownst to Dad, they left one great big one far overhead, partially cut off and hanging by a strip of bark.  Nobody warned Dad that a half-cut branch was still hanging, and nobody stopped him when he walked, hard-hat-less, past the other workers and down to the area where the Sword of Damocles was hanging right overhead.  Wham, down it came, on top of him and one of the workers.  It knocked off the other worker's hard hat but luckily -- as Dad, you will recall, was not wearing one -- did not strike his head or otherwise maim or murder him.  Here's the branch.  It's bigger than it looks here:

As he says, what a lawsuit it would have been!  (But I'm fairly sure I'd rather have a husband.)  It fell from one of these spots:

After that, the pole went in without incident, and all the utility people attached their wires, and teh job was done.

The result?  An amazing improvement.  The wires are at least twice as high as they were, and neat and tight.  The whole lawn seems bigger and cleaner without those heavy things drooping just overhead.  And the view of the lake from the living room window is no longer bisected by two heavy black horizontal lines:

So, that's fixed!  Thanks, Frontier!

Eventful days at the lake

Here's the scene as the estate auction got started at the lake on Saturday the 26th.   Look closely -- that's David on the right with his back to the camera.  He was there all day, using his years of auction expertise from Welch's to help the auctioneers keep track of all the numbers.  And yes, that's Luke's Subaru in the background, soon to be sold, after heated bidding, for a fairly jaw-dropping sum.

Dad and I have been working all summer to get ready for the sale, sorting all the uncountable bits and pieces of stuff at the lake house into small box lots to be sold, filling up a dumpster with unsaleable trash, and weeding through our own items in our storage space and basement. Mary Link came for the weekend with help, companionship and moral support.  And finally, the day arrived.  I was afraid nobody would find the sale in the remoteness of the Plymouth woods, but I shouldn't have worried.  The auctioneers know their advertising business, and a full hour before the bidding started, cars lined both sides of the road in both directions as far as the eye could see, and well beyond.

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The bidding started with our small items, staged in the garage.  That colorful canopy on the deck was a bustling hot-dogs-and-coffee stand, run by a Grange from somewhere or other.

Below, Laura's armoire is barely visible on the left-hand side.  It went for $95, which was better than a lot of the theoretically-more-valuable antique estate furniture  And not a bad outcome, considering that it saw many years of valuable use and needed quite a few repairs.

When the garage was empty, we moved down through the yard, first to get rid of those awful red things (under $100 each) and then to the lawn by the lake for the estate items.

A tent was set up on the lawn between the house and the lake for the estate items, cleverly fit under the sagging utility wires (no longer sagging, by the way, but that will be another post.)  It was a perfectly beautiful Saturday to spend in a shady spot by a lake, and though the crowd dwindled little by little as the day went on, a surprising number of people stayed all day.

The big sellers were our equipment -- the tractor, trailer, and ATV and a few other large items.  But many of the "smalls," as the auctioneer called the non-furniture items, sold well too.  The estate "smalls" filled most of the basement -- saddles and other horse items, IBM memorabilia, kitchenware, miscellanea, and books, books, books, books, books.  To my amazement, the old books sold fairly well.  We had some outside bids from a bookseller in Boston who specializes in old horse books and equine art books (right up Grandma Frey's alley) and at least two eager collectors showed up in person. Every single book sold, and so did everything else.  The furniture went for sadly small prices --  but everyone has been warning us that antique furniture has been hard to sell since 2008, and some of the small items sold for surprisingly large prices, so in the end I suppose it evened out.

The house is almost empty now.  We kept most of the beds, a couple of dressers and other bits of furniture, some carefully chosen books, paintings, silver and small sentimental items.  I meant to sell the corner cupboard, but in the end, couldn't bear to let it go for what was going to be a pittance.  Much to the chagrin of Dad, who has had to struggle with moving it again and again -- but honestly, to my relief and happiness -- I bid for it and bought it back.  Here it is in the dining room of my Ober grandparents' house on Reservoir Road in Painted Post, circa 1969 or so.  (I never noticed before the coincidence of those addresses -- Reservoir Road for the retirement home that my grandparents built, and Reservoir Hill Road where Grandma Frey retreated after Stanfordville.  Wonder if she ever thought about that?)

And here it is again a generation earlier in October 1951, under a coat of paint, as a backdrop for Grandma and Grandpa Frey's wedding cake in the house on West Water Street in Painted Post where Grandma Frey grew up:

 It was a deeply emotional day, watching all those deeply familiar and (in some cases, at least) deeply loved things disappear into the ownership of others.  Dad was gone for part of the day for a concert in Sherburne with Jenni, and I was so very grateful to the ever-understanding and hard-working Mary Link for being there and sharing it all.  All three of us were pretty well pole-axed when it was over.  But now that it IS over, what a relief!  The house is peaceful and spacious without the worry and responsibility of all those things, and ready for the work we'll do to make it ours.  We're turning now from the past to the future, preparing for the big trip out West next week to see our children and our families and celebrate Liz's wedding.  Time moves on, and that's not always bad.

The Greatest Songs Ever...

...are up for discussion. My #1 is Danny Boy. Somewhere in my top ten is The Stars and Stripes Forever. I have another one that's right behind Danny Boy but I can't remember what it is right now. Excluded are classical masterpieces such as Beethoven's 5th. It has to be a "song", with or without lyrics. Hm, maybe "Misty" and "Moon River" and "Autumn Leaves" are in the top ten. Ah, yes, I remembered. "Over the Rainbow" is in the top three or four.

My great-great-grandparents conduct a secret romance

All you Murphies should take note of this series of letters from the 1860s in which two young people -- Pruda Erway in Pennsylvania, and Mortier Wickham in New York -- carry on a secret courtship by correspondence for more than a year that finally culminates in a surprise wedding.  (These seem to have been something of a fashion at the time -- at one point, the young man expresses exasperation because another pair of relations pulled off the same surprise a few weeks before they did.)  Had they not managed it, many things might be very different: they were my great-great-grandparents.  Among the several daughters later born to them was Catherine (Cassie) Wickham, my grandmother's mother, who grew up here, in the house on Seneca Lake that I wrote about when Grandma Frey and I went on a family history quest in 2008:

Maybe surprise marriages are a family tradition. Mortier and Pruda's granddaughter Edith -- my grandmother -- pulled off a surprise wedding of her own one Christmas in the 1920s when she took a train to Chicago where Grandpa Ober was a medical student, married him on Christmas Day and returned home alone to Ithaca.  She told nobody what they had done for months because, as a married woman, she'd have been expelled from her graduate program at Cornell.