WHERE
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| Hi. We're over here. |
80 miles from here, the Canadian border runs through the lake, which is guarded by an array of government agencies tasked with rescuing drunken boaters and poisoning sea lampreys. Thus do we defend our Freedom®.
Militarizing the imaginary line that separates Hockey from Baseball hasn't quite caught on yet in Washington, so for the moment we're still more likely to see moose and squirrel than ICE drones. Michigan wasn't always like this.
"About seven thousand five hundred years ago early peoples hunted and fished in the Upper Peninsula. These people had evolved a trading network with the tribes of what is now Wisconsin. 1610 saw the arrival of the first white man known to reach the northern lakes, a Frenchman from Canada named Etienne Brule. He was followed by other French voyagers and explorers." ~Baraga Township Zoning Land Use Plan
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| File Footage: Étienne Brûlé |
If history books are to be believed, Brûlé was a shitbag and he had it coming, but maybe that bad-boy-dies-horribly piece was just propaganda serving the powers of the day. Accusing your enemies of cannibalism runs a very close third to accusing them of sodomy and heresy in all the early editions of Information Warfare for Dummies.
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| His glass was half full of whiskey. |
When powerful old men start telling you stories about how bad things happen to bad people, it's wise to check under the rugs and behind the curtain. In lighter news, Brûlé is apparently undergoing rehabilitation in his old age, and being honored with his very own rock opera.
Anyway, the history of the U.P. can often be either dismal or entertaining, but there's too much of it, so we're going to fast-forward. From Brûlé in the stewpot (or not) we're zipping straight through 400 years of resource extraction, conflict, colonization, displacement, and disgraceful behavior at the expense of First Nation peoples.
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| SEAL Team Six during the First Lamprey War |
Those 400 years are worth reviewing, but I'm not a reporter or an historian, so I'll leave the telling of those tales to the people who are still living them.
The way it all goes down (more or less) is that the treaties get violated, the miners get exploited, the trees get cut, the get fish packed into barrels and shipped off to become lunch, and the robber-barons pull out and bugger off after they've blown their wads.
Anything furry that won't wear a collar ends up shot and nailed to a wall, or beaten to death and turned into a hat. Everybody but the bishops and the barkeeps is out of work, until the invention of conservation, cars, and building codes that require dimensional lumber.
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| Venerable Baraga, First Lord Attercop |
Highly motivated members of his fandom are trying to convince the DM to give him enough experience points to level up. Having a pet saint to slap on t-shirts and keychains would be a big draw for the sort of people who visit fanfic shrines.
Our primary exports are timber, ticks, and selfies. Our major imports are nickels (for the casino) and unhappy men in leg irons (for the maximum security prison).
Logging is a Big Fucking Deal again, since the trees have been allowed to grow back to exploitable sizes. We're calling it "sustainable forestry" these days, and it's the necessary first step for property developers across the nation who build houses that no one will live in and only corporations can afford to own.
There's a fair bit of light manufacturing activity at the Baraga railway terminus, and we've got our share of metal shops. There's even a little factory that makes aftermarket tank treads so you can swing your truck nutz off-road in the snow.
Our local coffers swell each Summer as suburbanites run the roads, seeking temporary relief from underwater mortgages and mounting consumer debt. Like any small American town on the way to Someplace Nice, our major population center doubles as a sieve that separates our shrinking middle class from their fun-money. (Thank you all, please come again next year, don't forget to tag your humblebrags with #BitchinBaraga.)
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| This is your brain on demographics. Any Questions? |
We've got 29% of the land, and 3% of the population, as far as the state of Michigan is concerned! The population density up here is only 10 people per square mile! GOD DAMMIT DON'T YOU DIE ON ME! To put that tiny "10" into perspective, the population density of Las Vegas is about 4,700 per square mile. Los Angeles? 7,500. New York City? About 26,000.
Takeaway: The U.P. is fucking empty, if you're just counting people.
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| Who's the spookiest? YOU'RE the spookiest. |
For now though, the sweet summer children tell campfire shiver-tales of how dreary the place must be when they're not here to liven it up with crushed beer cans and fluttering condom wrappers. Why think otherwise? After all, the woods are cold, dark, spooky, and almost entirely uncivilized.
They're not all wrong. Getting a pizza delivered to the Spinney would require an act of God. Jobs are scarce, internet speeds are sub-par, and the only "wild" nightlife I've seen is the skunk that tried to come in through our cat flap.
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| Super-drunk Finn, or moderately drunk Shetlander? |
Maybe that all sounds horrible, but it's gorgeous. Oh, and the silence. When the neighbors finally stop revving their engines, and when it's not boomstick season, and when snowbirds aren't roaring down the highway in their decrepit Winnebagos...it's gloriously, perfectly quiet out here in the woods. Winter is the quietest time.
We love where we live, and we're staying put. Stick around. We'll show you why.
