On the Upper Hand

To be poet laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is to be in need of a good map, or perhaps, to be a good mapmaker. Where to begin, but with the popular Michigan parlor trick of making a state map using just your hands. Begin by holding your own in front of your face, palms in, fingers together and pointed skyward, thumbs slightly akimbo—mittens, if you will. In this pose, your right hand is already a fair approximation of “The Mitten,” or “The Mitt”—the easily recognizable Lower Peninsula of the state. Now, turn your left hand perpendicular, thumb toward the ceiling, fingers pointed to the right, and gently touch the tip of your left ring finger to the tip of your right middle finger. Your left hand now operates as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or “The U.P.” Wiggle your left thumb and you have more specifically located the Keweenaw Peninsula, sticking up into the middle of Lake Superior, which is to say you have located me at about your left thumb’s knuckle, in the small college town of Houghton, from whence I write. It is a handy trick—cue the comic rimshot—but one that orients us too little.

While I grew up in downstate Michigan—in deeply rural Montcalm County, dead center of the Mitten—for almost the entirety of my adult life I have been haphazardly banging around the U.P. by foot, canoe, or old pickup truck. At 16,377 remote and rugged square miles, it is larger than the state of Maryland, and represents thirty percent of Michigan’s landmass, with 300 miles of densely forested two-lane road between Sault Ste. Marie and Ironwood, east to west, and another 250 miles of it between Copper Harbor and Menominee, north to south. In terms of people, there are none too many, only about 311,000 compared to Maryland’s six million, and a scant three percent of Michigan’s total population of ten million. The U.P. does have a lot of cedar swamp, boreal forest, white-tailed deer, wolves, moose, black bears, bald eagles, brook trout, and 3.5 billion-year-old exposed bedrock, all tucked in between inland, sweetwater seas—Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron. It is not quite Canada, but it sure as hell ain’t Wisconsin, nor even really Michigan for that matter, except by political proxy and the threat of state-sanctioned violence. We are a grab bag of settler colonial transplants, castaways, and misfits like myself inside the larger Ojibwe (Chippewa) homelands and ceded-territory established by the Treaty of 1842. Indeed, the U.P. is just a piece of the shared lands and waters of the sovereign Native American nations of Gakiiwe’onaning (Keweenaw Bay), Gete-gitgaaning (Lac Vieux Desert), Mashkii-ziibing (Bad River), Odaawaa-zaaga’iganing (Lac Courte Oreilles), Waaswaaganing (Lac Du Flambeau), Miskwaabikong (Red Cliff), Wezaawaagami-ziibiing (St. Croix), Zaka’aaganing (Sokaogon Mole Lake), Nagaajiwanaag (Fond du Lac), Misi-zaaga’iganiing (Mille Lacs), and Gaa-mitaawangaagamaag-ininiwag (Sandy Lake). It is a place where land, history, language, and culture are inextricably borrowed, mixed and mingled, sometimes confused and muddy, all too often bloody, but always place-proud, and true.

“Yoopers,” we mostly call ourselves—a phonetic play on “U.P.ers.” Amongst us are “Troopers,” like myself, who are Yoopers born in the Mitten as “Trolls,” but migrated up from beneath the Mackinac Bridge (see how that works?). “Trooper” serves as double entendre signifying one’s commitment to being reliable and uncomplaining in the face of adversities often climatic. The Finnish immigrants who came in the nineteenth century for the copper mines (alongside Black Americans, Chinese, Cornish, Irish, and Italians, among many others) left us the word sisu to describe our peculiar kind of Yooper fortitude. Not to be confused with jääräpää, which a Finnish friend tells me directly translates to ram’s head, and is used to describe someone who is foolishly stubborn (another common Yooper trait). Meanwhile and more contemporary, “Fudgies” are not sticking anything out except their bellies. These folks are a specific subspecies of Troll bound only as far north as the fudge shops of Mackinac Island, a kind of Disney U.P. for mostly white, suburban downstaters. “Cheeseheads” are Wisconsinites, the northernmost of whom were almost Yoopers except for a border dispute settled by a Supreme Court decision back in 1926. “FIBs” (pronounced like ribs), those F!@#ing Illinois Bastards, like to buy up million dollar “camps” on the big lakes and drive around back roads like they are en route to put out a second Chicago fire. Minnesotans do not visit much at all, in possession as they are of their own Lake Superior frontage, and they are too Midwestern-nice to have earned themselves a slur. As for the rest of yous guys, Yoopers are mostly just curious about how the hell you found out about us and got yourself here. We are all welcome for a spell to enjoy the scenery, pull a walleye out of a lake, drink a pint of the local, and work out our various and sundry Nick Adams fantasies. After all, the only people among us with any real claim to place are the aforementioned Ojibwe who justifiably want their stolen land back.

Regardless, come winter, the snow here will bury us all and break our backs in the bargain. In my hometown of Houghton we get over 200 inches of the white stuff, more or less, heavy and wet, Keweenaw concrete. We do not really get a spring as most imagine it, more a mud season, though our maple sugaring time is grand. Elsewhere, one might reasonably expect flowers, but we more generally observe the emergence of dog turds and beer cans from our long suffering and increasingly dirty snow banks. Somewhere between my daughter’s birthday in April and my son’s in May, we expect the snow to have finally disappeared, but there can still be ice on Lake Superior in June. Climate change is messing with all of it, here as anywhere. Out in the bush, spring is a mostly inaccessible bog, trout lily, and trillium. June and July are the exclusive domain of  black flies and mosquitos, our inglorious state birds, both of whom will drain you dry and drive you mad. Lon L. Emerick, a Yooper himself, once jokingly wrote, “If you seek a polar climate, have a need to make yourself miserable or if you need to atone for a life of sin, then maybe you’re a candidate for our glacierland.” All joking aside, while high summer to autumn is a fleeting and glorious dream of blue- and thimbleberry, over the years I have come to love the various subtleties of all the U.P.’s mercurial seasonalities. God knows it is not an easy place to cheerlead for, though thankfully it says nowhere in my mandate as U.P. Poet Laureate that I need to perform with pom-poms.

From the log lodge fairy land of the Huron Mountain Club to the grinding poverty and post-industrial destitution of small villages all across the U.P., ours is a land of startling and complicated contrasts where language is woven into the fabric of, and is inextricable from, what it means to live in and understand this place. “Pure Michigan,” the state’s tourism slogan, goes in for a peculiar, ahistorical, if not unexpected myopia, reducing an entire region to a playground of pristine wilderness and crystal clear waters, ripe for a new round of capitalist exploitation. One of Michigan’s worst cultural exports, Kid Rock, leaned hard into this reductive myth mongering in the music video for his song “Born Free,” which prominently featured scenes of natural beauty from throughout the region, most notably the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore between Munising and Grand Marais. Kid Rock probably exposed more Americans to iconic U.P. imagery than anyone else ever has. As a self-styled fellow hillbilly, Yoopers might have expected something better of him than being yet another Troll carpetbagger, in for a dollar, but missing the point. Or maybe not.

After Harvard zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz and the geologist Douglass Houghton (after whom my hometown is named) had filled his head with tales of immense tracks of virgin timber and the unbroken Anishinaabe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned his ludicrous Hiawatha, which Jim Harrison once referred to hilariously as “doggerel.” Harrison himself, arguably still the U.P.’s most famous author, was another Troll-cum-Trooper like myself who kept a bush camp near Grand Marais for years and set numerous of his works here—most notably the novel True North, and its sequel Returning to Earth. Like the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, Kid Rock, and Longfellow, Harrison liked to wax poetic about the purity of our wilderness and our freedom in it, often bragging that he liked to drink water directly from Lake Superior—a habit I don’t recommend, tempting though it may be. Do not get me wrong, I love me some Harrison, but to get a sense of the real U.P., I would direct you instead to the fantastically weird stories of Ander Monson (another Houghton native)—in particular his book Vacationland. Or I would point you toward the transcendent poetry of Margaret Noodin and her bilingual verse in both English and Anishinaabemowin. When Roxane Gay (another writer who briefly called the U.P. home) and I founded the literary magazine [PANK] in 2005, we borrowed the magazine’s title from the local idiom—pank, a verb meaning to pack down. Yoopers pank down the snow to the mailbox rather than shoveling it. Miners panked their dynamite into blast holes. A “panker” was a large horse-drawn steel drum pulled over the snow to pack a runway for sleighs. Roxane and I loved the regional specificity of the word, even as we stretched out beyond the U.P. toward the cultural poles with our peculiar aesthetic of startling quirk, anomaly, and juxtaposition—the selfsame you will find in the work of writers throughout the U.P. diaspora, from Monson to Noodin, back to Hemingway, back to our immigrant forebears, and back even further into Anishinaabe storytelling. Lorine Niedecker, perhaps the best of the cheeseheads, got to the heart of the thing with her aphoristic line, “The North is one vast, massive, glorious corruption of rock and language.”

Meanwhile, that chain link fence I inexplicably drive past every day in the middle of the woods: that is a superfund site, one of many, a parting party favor from the almost-but-not-quite-extinct mining industry here. The pristine forest I like to hike through, well, it is mostly second or third growth, a pale shadow of the cathedral forests that once stretched unbroken across the entire region, logged off more than a century ago and shipped south for dubious purposes. This spring I have been advised by the state to not eat the Lake Superior rainbow smelt—a local delicacy, albeit a nonnative one—because they contain elevated levels of PFOS, that “forever chemical” associated with reduced fertility, thyroid disease, and liver damage. And the U.P.—my solidly red, Gadsden flag loving region—is filled with its share of jääräpää who think the earth flat, the pandemic a hoax, and masks an invasion of their self-styled and mostly illusory liberties. Frequently, the U.P. is literally just omitted from maps altogether, sometimes from Jeep commercials aired during a Super Bowl, but often from our own state’s graphic representations of itself. It is a long standing and oft repeated carto-demographic erasure, one Yoopers get simultaneously furious about and are oddly proud of. While there are certainly social and political ramifications to being forgotten and left off the map, there are advantages, too. Amid all the contradiction, there is nothing quite like a little slice of nutty terra incognita in which to lose oneself, if privilege or happenstance allow, to retreat to a remote cabin off a two-track road where one can lie awake at night hearing naught but the sound of a river, lake, or inland sea, peepers, loon call, and wolf song. We have all that snow to shovel, after all, and fish to catch, manoomin to harvest, those maple trees to tap, cordwood to split, saunas to take, and poems to write. In the U.P., there is a heap of time and quiet for it all, transcendence or trouble, depending on what we are after in the first place, how much we have overestimated ourselves, or how much we have overstayed our welcome in the bargain. You should visit someday.

Here is a poem from this place, offered up humbly and with gratitude from my neck of the woods to yours, wherever you may be.