Basura: 1981 was the year I almost joined Yooperhood

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life.  It goes on.” — Robert Frost

In 1981, we went on vacation to Trout Lake in the Upper Peninsula. Our accommodations were somewhat challenging – but we made do.

We had the good fortune to discover a county park that was seldom used. In a week of frequent visits, we had the park to ourselves, but for one brief time. The summer weather was perfect.  We spent a lot of time there.

Next to the park boundary there was a for sale sign on the adjacent property. I happened to speak with the man who owned the property.  He invited us over to see the place. I said we weren’t looking to move.  He said, “Come on over anyway.”  We did.

The house itself was not large, but large enough, and perfectly maintained. The owner was in the home building and repair business. He’d done things like using piano hinges on some of the interior doors so that they operated smoothly and didn’t squeak.

“I know it’s a bit much,” he told me, “but I get the builder’s discount, and put ‘em in myself.”

That was emblematic of the care and attention to detail he’d put into the home over the years. There was a wood burning stove to supplement the conventional heating.  If you’ve ever visited the UP, you know there is no shortage of firewood.

The homeowner was in his 60s, he said, and he’d had a heart attack the year before. He and his wife wanted to move closer to prompt medical care. It was a half hour drive to the nearest city where that might be found. He really didn’t want to move, but felt it was the right time to do so.

I should mention The Lake. The property’s southern edge was 270 linear feet of the northern terminus of Lake Michigan. That’s a lot of shoreline.

“If you like to fish,” he told me, “this is a great spot. If you like to shoot geese, or ducks, or deer – you’d never go hungry, even if the fish aren’t biting. I have a couple of big freezers; they’d stay with the property. I’ll get a small one when we get settled in somewhere else.  If you like to sit in an Adirondack chair and stare at the lake with your choice of beverage – well, you could do a lot of that.”

All summer long, I thought, both weeks of it. The rest of the year you could look out through the big window from the living room.

Winter didn’t really scare me. I like to read.   went snowmobiling once, and thought it was fun. I owned cross country skis and snowshoes. My Ford Taurus was fine in snow, especially with good snow tires, but for a UP winter I might want a four-wheel drive vehicle, perhaps a Ford Explorer. With a winch.

The property had a two-stall garage, built with lots of extra room for things like snowmobiles and a fishing boat. There was a utility building, and also a smokehouse; he froze a lot fish and game, but he smoked plenty, too. He spoke of smoked goose breast which he said he loved. He had an old youth model single shot .22 caliber rifle that he used to scare the Canada geese away.

He liked the taste of smoked goose, and keeping the big birds from getting too comfortable was a good guano control measure. Just the loud report was often enough, as long as he’d take one now every so often; otherwise the geese would get on to an empty threat.

I’ve never had an interest in shooting at things that aren’t shooting at me – but I confess I’ve never tasted wood smoked goose breast. I haven’t hunted, and I imagine I wouldn’t care for it. But there are a lot of geese up there, fouling (fowling?) the lakeshore. I eat meat, I just don’t think I’d take much pleasure in blasting away at furry or feathered creatures. We are, after all, whether primates or not, all earthlings.

An additional building looked like a garage, but it was the bait shop. He showed us that too. A small creek ran through the property, and he’d built a garage-like structure over it.  Inside, he used mesh screening to separate sections of the creek for small, medium, and large minnows.

The biggest problem keeping live bait, he said, was keeping the water good. Aerators are usually employed to oxygenate the water where bait is kept, and the water must be filtered constantly and changed frequently. But there was no need for that here, he said; the water changes constantly. Of course, in the bait shop, he has available tackle and equipment and licenses and other things that would appeal to fishermen.

There was a comfortable chair or two in the bait shop, and TV and a radio. There were a couple of refrigerators for things like worms or lunch. One was very well stocked with beer. For his personal consumption, he reported. I suggested that sometimes fishermen might want to purchase a sixer or so. Well, he said, I don’t have a license for that. There was no wink, but there might have been a twinkle.

“Sometimes I’m open, sometimes I’m closed,” he said. “Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s her, sometimes both of us, sometimes neither.”

When inspired, his wife bakes some pies and sells them too, at the bait shop.  They don’t advertise, but people know, and they put up a board marked OPEN or CLOSED alongside the road. There’s another board they put up if they have PIES.

How might our lives have been different? My employment at the time allowed for transfers. It was likely one could have been arranged. It would have been a bother, selling our house, moving up there, arranging a transfer of employment, but that was all doable.  My wife was a teacher by profession. They have schools in the UP.

But that brought up another consideration. We happened to live in a city with the best public school system in Michigan. That was important to us. How would the schools compare? Would the winters start to wear us down? Now we’re in a position to travel during some of the time of winter, but then we operated on a school calendar, for our son’s benefit, and for Mrs. Basura’s career.

I was at least a semi-serious racquetball player. I played in leagues, occasional tournaments, on challenge courts, and with gym friends. The facility was a mile from our home. Would I find new activities? I love to eat fish, but would I devote myself to, as my doctor friend describes it, matching wits with a fish? I don’t know.

The man and his wife wanted $65,000.00 for the property. We probably should have tried to arrange to buy it as an investment, though we were still early into our mortgage on the home we where we were living. But yet, it doesn’t seem to me like we could have gone too far wrong buying property with Big Lake frontage.

But proximity to medical care was a consideration. Schools were important. It all might take a few months to arrange. Might I get caught with a house in the UP and a job in Grand Rapids?

We spent a lot of time considering, and chose to stay in a home we liked, in a community we liked, in jobs we liked. Could we have made the change and had it work out nicely?  Probably.

Should I have boldly taken that chance, and become a member of Team Yooper?  Fortune favors the bold, right? As it was, we stayed in the GR area. We bought a house in a nice community, where we lived for many years. Our son came home from the hospital to that home, went to the excellent public schools, and my career, in three iterations, went well.

I always had interesting work, which was something important to me. I don’t regret not having become a Yooper, but I do recognize things would have turned out differently.  Some differences would have likely been positive, and some maybe not so much. Many choices had profound implications as life unfolds.  That’s true for everyone,

I think.  I selected Grand Valley State College, for example (from a rather narrow list of options), and it was there I met my wife. That was clearly the best fork-in-the-road choice I’ve ever made. I did a hitch in the Marines, which certainly had some far-ranging implications. But then I had the GI Bill.

After five years of marriage, we made a conscious decision to move from couple-hood to family-hood. This too was profound. We had the good fortune of being parents to a guy who  has turned into a very fine human being, of whom we are very proud. He is kind, ethical, and thoughtful. There were resources for him in our large metropolitan area which would not have been available in the UP, but I’m sure he would have done well anywhere.

We still enjoy visiting the U.P. And, always, we reminisce about our almost Yooperhood.