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I am not – to misquote Judy Garland and Dorothy Gale – in Detroit anymore. Motor City. The D. The 313. The big bad wolf of Michigan, prowling and howling on the border with Canada. A melting pot of steam and rust, pistons and petrol. I am no longer there. It has disappeared, vanishing in my mirrors like a cloud of grey industrial smoke, blown away by an ocean breeze.
In its place are fields and trees, back lanes and tiny towns – and an air of calm, verging on silence, that doesn’t seem plausible in such proximity to Motown.
To drive north out of Detroit is to swap one of the most celebrated and – sometimes – derided American cities for something else entirely. There is a reason why the Lower Peninsula, which forms the bottom half of the Michigan landmass, is referred to as “The Mitten”. It looks like one; an enormous glove shaped by a pair of Great Lakes – Lake Michigan to the west, Lake Huron to the east. It even has a thumb – the “Thumb Coast”, which offers some of the country’s finest beaches as it sticks out into the Huron shallows.
Then there are the quieter places: Lansing, which, though it is the Michigan capital, and is home to the gorgeous neoclassical state house which gave the city its focal point in 1872, has just a tenth of Detroit’s population (and none of its commotion); Roscommon State Forest, with its winding trails and fragrant clusters of red pines; Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, shoving its golden shoulder out into Lake Michigan near the peninsula’s northern tip, densely packed hillocks of sand sloping down towards the water.
All of this is glorious, and a reason to explore. But it is also an amuse bouche, an easily digested starter before the wilderness main course. Because if the Lower Peninsula offers a rustic contrast to Detroit’s metropolitan roar, it is a noisy child compared to its bashful, brooding brother – the loner in the family who would rather keep his thoughts to himself.
Like Detroit, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula goes by various names. The UP (pronounced “You-Pee”). Yoop. Yoopland. Talk to some of its residents, and you will learn that it might also like to be called “Superior”. And not just because the largest of the five Great Lakes (the globe’s biggest freshwater lake by surface area) defines its top edge.
Not through some inflated sense of self either. The very idea of “Superior” as a name is a vocalisation of a desire that, in the past, has gone as far as attempts to force a referendum – a local vote on whether the area should carve itself off from the rest of Michigan as a separate state.
These mutterings about divorce have generally been quelled long before they have reached the ballot box, but the point is that the Upper Peninsula is different. It lies a little under 300 miles from Detroit, but might as well be on another planet. The big city could fit into The UP’s 16,378 square miles of landmass 117 times over. Yoopland’s population of 300,000 is equivalent to 8 per cent of Detroit’s headcount of 3.7 million.
This otherness is apparent when I roll up to the “border”. Not that there is a formal frontier per se, but the Straits of Mackinac, which provide three miles of distinction between the Lower Peninsula and the Upper, are a considerable gap all the same. As you might expect them to be. This, after all, is the channel – a swirl of swift, complicated currents – which acts as the link between Lakes Michigan and Huron. Travellers beware. Here be dragons.
Fortunately, there is a way to the opposite shore, and in terms of engineering ingenuity, it is one of America’s most spectacular. You can perhaps keep the Golden Gate Bridge, with its gleaming red paint, Pacific-coast sunshine and constant commuter traffic. A giant that, at more than four miles from one end to the other, is twice the length of its Californian cousin, the Mackinac Bridge goes about its business with a less-heralded beauty, its pale shades of green and white entirely suited to its rural – and frequently snowbound – surroundings.
Indeed, it takes me six minutes to drive across it – time enough to appreciate that I am leaving one world and entering another. There is no welcoming party, just a slowly creeping realisation that I am increasingly alone. Beyond the bridge, St Ignace, for all its unfussy motels, little marina and smattering of waterfront restaurants, barely grazes the map. It might be Manhattan, however, relative to what comes next: the Upper Peninsula spreading out in front of my car – enormous, unfathomable and seemingly unpopulated.
True, there are pockets of humanity – if you know where to look. Sault Ste. Marie smudges the template at the north-east corner of the peninsula, large enough that it straddles both the St. Marys River and the international border to exist as American and Canadian towns of exactly the same name. And Marquette, roughly midway along the Lake Superior waterline, offers the peninsula’s closest approximation of urban sprawl, serving up a busy port, a university and a lighthouse blinking gamely into that vast blue.
But outside these suburban kernels, the overwhelming ambience is one of soundless peace. Highway M-123 carries me into the arms, and under the canopy, of Lake Superior State Forest. While the seven-mile Tahquamenon Falls Wilderness Loop is carefully maintained, I meet only a handful of other hikers on the trail – and the splash and crash of the waterfall in question, when I reach it, could almost be a jagged burst of radio static, such is its disparity with the all-encompassing stillness of the treescape.
Grand Marais, up on the Superior lakeshore, hardly raises the volume, its genteel B&Bs staring out on to the sheltered inlet of West Bay, and a beach so pristine that even the driftwood seems to apologise for the intrusion. Only when I turn south, trading Lake Superior’s hugeness for Lake Michigan’s scarcely smaller dimensions, do I feel as if I am re-engaging with the America of baseball diamonds and fast-food franchises. Manistique has one of the latter, right there by the water; a neon Narcissus casting an unwelcome, incongruous reflection.
The UP is a summer destination, of course – a place where the road-trippers of the warm months do not lean too far into autumn. It is the third week of September, and already I can feel winter gnawing at the edges of the picture, waiting to swamp the peninsula in the cold and darkness to which its residents are well inured.
Much less weather-hardened, I obey the call of the highway, following the M-35 down Lake Michigan’s west flank towards the Wisconsin state line, and the bright lights and football crowds of Green Bay.
Ultimately, there will be even greater illumination, and many many more people, where Interstate 94 drops me into Chicago. I am no further from the Upper Peninsula here – around 300 miles – than when I set off from Detroit, but the comparison is no less jarring.
Essentials
The “Journey the Great Lakes” holiday offered by North America Travel Service cuts across the Upper Peninsula as part of an epic 15-day road trip in and out of Chicago. From £3,092 per person (including flights).
For further information, see nps.gov/slbe; michigan.org; uptravel.com; visitdetroit.com
