The road

The end of the road

Copper Harbor, Michigan, 1994

All this going through old photos is seriously itching my travel bone. I've let it go by the wayside in recent years, with the acting and stuff taking up a lot of my focus, but it used to be my favorite thing.

Especially the road trip. Nothing beats traveling by car, because it's not just the destinations (and it's not just the old cliche about "getting there") -- for me, I like to see the in-between places, how these spots are connected. That way you get the real context. (I'm also the guy with his face pressed up against the airplane window and the airline map in his lap trying to identify all the rivers and towns and mountain ranges on the route.)

My first big road trip was up to Michigan, back when I was living in Ohio. Five days, 2,000 miles. The destination -- Copper Harbor -- was an endless source of fascination for me. It's up at the tip top of the state, out on the end of the Keewanaw Peninsula, jutting out into Lake Superior (at the top left edge of the map).


I just had to get there. It seemed so far, so exotic, so remote.

Now as it turns out, Copper Harbor itself wasn't all that memorable. But everything I saw on the way there and back was. A thousand-foot deep copper mine, an old abandoned mining town, the waterfalls at Munising and Tahquamenon, Whitefish Point (where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down), the massive Pictured Rocks cliffs off Grand Marais that almost rival the ones in northern France, a wild bear (!) crossing the road, a natural spring with 50-foot visibility, the dirt road up to Hemingway's old fishing grounds on the Two-Hearted River, sand dunes hundreds of feet high, the turquoise waters of Lake Superior, and endless other things.

Including the beginning (or maybe the end?) of U.S. Route 41 (Chicago's own Lakeshore Drive). Who would have thought you could drive 9 or 10 hours almost due north of Chicago and not be in, I don't know, Hudson Bay? THAT's how much there is out there. And it's just a tiny, tiny slice.

{Sigh}