Forty Days #2 No Tourists in Munising
Posted by Aaron - 10/03/11 at 11:03:41 pmWhen it’s spring and the sun thaws creak start running though the north again enough water to drink and the sun stays our long for a good day’s hike, that’s where I’ll be. When the weather’s turned the corner, and another corner, a straight shot then, north, one long highway that used to dead end into the rippling of lakes, two lakes, Great Lakes Huron and Michigan, now separated by a suspended suspension Mighty Mac Mackinaw Bridge, a border line that crossed the sea a straight shot high above the water until you make a sweeping left, now, in the Upper Peninsula, winding through two shack towns, hunting cafes.
No one is a tourist.
In Munising, there’s a restaurant on the docks on the bay where a man broadcasts a radio show, he could do it all day, from a booth behind the hostess stand. She’ll seat you because you waited because the sign said to, out of courtesy, even though the place is yours.
“The fish fry, on Fridays, is quite the event, get here early,” she tells a couple seated after you. The man might have said “Oh boy” and rubbed his hands together inches from a busting grin. He pledges to come back on Friday.
“Won’t we honey,” he says to his wife, who orders a cinnamon roll.
“Big as the plate,” the waitress says. “Would you like warmed up.” She does.
You’ve ordered eggs and toast and potatoes and have lots of coffee because you slept last night in your car under a street lamp in a rest stop about 30 miles outside of Munising. And sleep is generous because you realized why the other cars, mostly trucks, its mostly trucks 30 miles outside of Munising, why the other sleepy trucks parked far from the street lamps.
You parked near one for safety, you thought, entertaining wild notions of a homicidal mad man raging through the rest area with a taste for human blood, especially 27-year-old blood, disemboweling only those parked far from the street lamps sleeping peacefully in the dark. The street lamp saves you.
And you do not sleep peacefully. If a mad man, if any man, woman or child, for that matter, escaped from of those up north prisons, maybe not a child then, or just a man looking for a quarter, a ride, a pair of socks, a sip of water, a swath of flesh, were to ramble though the half-circle drive off the local highway 30 miles outside of Munising, you’d know right away. You could speed away because of the street lamp, because the street lamp kept you awake with its light and buzzing.
You raided your pack for a few t-shirts to wedge in windows rolled down and then up to catch the hem and hang like curtains, your dirty laundry. How far your car seat reclined surprised you and morning came quick. You washed up over the sink in the Lysol-smelling bathroom.
Munising was 30 miles away and the morning djs on the morning show on the morning radio station joked about the weather as the sun peaked east in the early September sky.
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