March 29, 2024

Our Charm Crisis

June 14, 2006
I was very sorry to learn last week that there are plans to pave 17 miles of the old gravel road along the Pictured Rocks between Munising and Grand Marais in the Upper Peninsula.
I’ve been down Alger County Highway 58 every few years since childhood. It’s the perfect road for getting that “lost in the woods way up north” feeling. The trip seems to take forever, through a desolate plain of pine stumps and then slowly winding through a conifer forest to Munising.
No doubt, people living up that way will be thrilled to have the road paved so they can fly between Munising and Grand Marais at 60 mph instead of the enforced grind of going down that rutted gravel road. But the Pictured Rocks will never be the same after the road is paved: it will have lost its wild, remote allure and the feeling that you are far off the beaten track.
Unfortunately, you see that old, rustic charm evaporating everywhere in Northern Michigan these days as trusty institutions from 50 or 100 years ago are bulldozed for the latest “improvement,“ pole barn eyesore or chain restaurant.
Speaking of the Pictured Rocks, even the famed Miner’s Castle rock formation that symbolized the beauty of the region is crumbling away. Years ago you could clamber around on top of the “castle” at a time when liability and people falling to their deaths wasn’t an issue. In recent years, it’s been roped off for safety’s sake. Last year, a major chunk sloughed off, symbolic perhaps, of the way old traditions of the North are eroding away.
Charm is an ineffable quality, burning with a low flame like the glow of hand-rubbed brass. An intuitive artist can bring it out, as can the sculpting hands of Mother Nature. In Northern Michigan, that artist is often Time itself, whose hands have rubbed the brass of our region’s memories to a pleasant warmth.
We need charm here in Northern Michigan. It’s the grail that brings pilgrims to the streets of our small towns each summer, keeping the local economy alive.
I remember visiting Leland for the first time on a cold, gray October day in 1978. Nothing prepared me for the ragged, rundown splendor of Fishtown, with it’s curling boardwalk and drying fishnets. It was like stumbling across a place that couldn’t possibly exist anywhere in America in the late 20th century except in a movie; yet there it was. Fishtown was one of the touchstones that made me fall in love with Northern Michigan.
Unfortunately, for all its benefits, charm is on the wane everywhere these days in Northern Michigan. Many were saddened by the fire which destroyed the Levering Antique Store in April. With echoes of an old country store, the place was a joy to visit. The loss of its rusty, dusty treasures from the era of family farms, railways and steamships leaves us a little more culturally impoverished.
My own summer stomping grounds are in Benzie County, a place which used to ooze rural charm that is now on the endangered species list. Last year, a favorite store in Honor called Beulahland closed its doors, taking with it a fabulous used bookstore that should have qualified as a state treasure. Tens of thousands of musty volumes filled its heavily-bowed shelves -- many of them collector’s items. And in Frankfort, I was sorry to see this spring that the property on which the Smokestack junk store sits is up for sale. With its leaky roof and dark, eerie corners, the Smokestack is a department store of junk -- a garage sale Walmart for scavengers. Hope it’s not a sign of the end.
It’s funny how we have all sorts of initiatives to preserve farmland, forests and streams in Northern Michigan, but the funky, junky old places that give our home its character are left to fend for themselves. Maybe we need a Charm Conservancy to save us from “progress.”

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