By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water, 

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest, 

Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

Rose the firs with cones upon them;

Bright before it beat the water, 

Beat the clear and sunny water, 

Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

-Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha”

Over the giant Mackinaw Bridge is the upper peninsula of Michigan. Referred to as the “U.P.,” this remote area is populated by people who call themselves “Yoopers.” Not only were the folks here immune to my twang, they seemed suspicious of it. A popular book in tourist shops is entitled You Wouldn’t Like it Here. There’s a sequel, too: You Still Wouldn’t Like it Here.

As we drove along, the evergreens grew thicker and taller on either side of the highway. It felt like the RV was climbing higher with every mile. Not far over the bridge, we saw another RV parked haphazardly on the roadside. As I strained to see if there’d been an accident, a big brown motion in the woods caught my eye. “A MOOSE!” I screamed. “It’s a MOOSE! It’s a MOOSE! It’s a MOOSE!” Brandon jerked our RV off to the side of the road as well, and everyone mashed their faces against the windows. It was a moose. It was huge, and it sported a wide rack of antlers. The big creature stood looking back at us for a long moment, and then it turned and trotted off into the woods, it’s quick movement as astonishing as its imposing appearance. Everyone in the RV was still screaming when it disappeared. Suddenly, we noticed how loud we were, and we all fell quiet and still. Brandon chuckled as cars zoomed past us on the highway. “I guess they see them every day. Probably think we are idiots.” I didn’t care. I’d just been thinking how great it would be to see a moose, and moments later it had appeared. I was sure it was some sort of divine appointment.

I think of water as sitting low in the ground. When we go to the Gulf of Mexico, I get the sensation of driving down to the edge of the earth. But in the U.P., the water often seemed to tower above us as we approached it, like blue mountains on a distant horizon. It was a little disorienting.

Our first stop was Whitefish Point, home of the Shipwreck Museum. We toured the lighthouse, once occupied by a mild-mannered keeper who discovered his 1918 assistants were German spies, and we examined artifacts from famous Lake Superior shipwrecks. “Lake Superior,” Nan told us in her report that night, “is the coldest, largest, deepest body of fresh water in the world, by far, and it has swallowed up over 550 ships.” The Edmund Fitzgerald, immortalized in song by Gordon Lightfoot is one of them. We know the Lightfoot song because a comedian we like makes fun of how many verses it has. He summarizes the song in one verse, concluding, “and the people all died…bummer.” We were snickering about his version of the song as we approached the museum. One of the first exhibits featured a short movie about that very shipwreck, which happened in 1975, not hundreds of years ago, as we assumed. The color drained from our faces as we watched surviving family members tearfully ringing a bell in remembrance of lost loved ones on the screen. We are thinking of emailing that comedian a warning about what-sketches-not-to-perform-in-Michigan.

Glass-bottom boat tour of local shipwrecks on Munising Bay

Besides a moose, the other thing I was itching to see was Northern Lights. I’d been doing a little online research, and I thought there was a chance. I mentioned my ambitions to Brandon, and he became determined that we should see them. Finding a dark shore proved harder than expected. In fact, finding any place to camp was a challenge. The U.P. is booked on Fall weekends. Finally, we found a spot just across the highway from a large, empty stretch of lake outside Marquette.

Brandon monitored solar weather patterns and added alerts to his phone. In the wee hours of the morning, he woke me up, and we stumbled up a dark path out of the campground, across the highway, and over the dunes to Lake Superior. The sky was completely clear, and the few constellations I can normally pick out were crowded with gazillions of other stars. Along the horizon, we could see silvery movements. They had the shape and motion of video clips we’d seen, but there were no brilliant colors. We debated whether we were just seeing clouds, but we really didn’t want them to be clouds, so we cautiously overruled that notion. It was cold, and we were shivering. Then Brandon’s flashlight went out, and it was really dark. We heard a car door slam and a low voice cough and some feet shuffle. We could just make out the shape of a man leaning against a vehicle along the side of the road. I couldn’t tell if he was an axe-murderer or just a lights-hunter, like us. That’s difficult to discern on a pitch-black night in the middle of nowhere. His presence kind of killed the romance of the moment, and we decided to head back to the campground. As we stumbled along in the dark, straining to see the skinny path through the woods, it occurred to me that if I was not murdered by the stargazer, a bear might eat me. When we finally found the RV, we locked the door and dove under the covers. “I’m sorry I didn’t kiss you out there under the Maybe Northern Lights,” Brandon confessed. “My nose was really running. And I was trying to keep an eye on that murderer.”

Georgia, giving her report on a Graveyard Coast shipwreck

Munising water fall, where we ran into some people from Austin