Around Michigan

Chapter 25 of A Kiwi on the Amtrak Tracks

OUR next stop was Alabaster, where there is a historical market and an offshore landing facility for an old gypsum mine which no longer operates. It looks like a huge barn, floating on the water. I stopped an old couple in a pickup truck who told us about it; the people around here are really nice. We stopped at a small antique mall, and I bought a fake fur hat. We went through East Tawas and Oscoda and then we stopped at the

Sturgeon Point lighthouse. It was a short trek, and it was worth it.

We talked to a couple from Gregory, in the west of Livingston County, who were looking for Petoskey stones. Petoskey stones are a remarkable form of fossilized coral. When polished, they look like a turtle’s shell, and they are the state stone of Michigan. These curious objects are called Petoskey stones because they were first found near a town named Petoskey. This sounds like an Eastern European name, but the town is actually named after a nineteenth-century Méti (part French, part Algonquian) fur trader and chief, whose Algonquian name was Pet-o-Sega.

Our next top was Presque Isle which, as the French name suggests, is not quite an island. The sky was just turning to dusk. There were two lighthouses, one from 1840 and one from 1870, it was quite beautiful. Michigan is girded by no less than 149 lighthouses. We got to another lighthouse just on dark, the Forty Mile Point Lighthouse — too dark to take pictures.

We pressed on to Mackinaw City at the northern tip of ‘mainland’ Michigan, known as the Lower Peninsula, at about 7 p.m. We checked into the appropriately named Lighthouse View Hotel. We had a good dinner at a restaurant called Audies, a couple of hundred metres from the Mackinac Bridge that spans the Mackinac Straits between the Lower Peninsula and the part of Michigan known as the Upper Peninsula to its north.

Mackinac and Mackinaw are different spellings for the same thing, pronounced Mackinaw. The name is thought to come from an Algonquian word, mikinaak, meaning snapping turtle, and could mean ‘many turtles’.

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