Destination Dreamland, Day Five
I've always hated coming home. Growing up, my family took frequent road trips--down to the Keys, up to Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina. We had a red Volkswagen Vanagon, and as the eldest of three kids, I was the one who commandeered the “way back,” stretching out across the rearmost bench seat (in the days of lax seatbelt laws), reading and re-reading every book Madeleine L'Engle ever penned, and always, always daydreaming.
Lying in the seat I couldn't see out the window, but I could feel the familiar pull of the van turning a complete circle as my father exited the Florida Turnpike—a sign that we were almost home. I would refuse to sit up and look out the window, instead I'd keep my head low and pretend that he'd decided to extend our trip on a whim. That the exit wasn't our exit. That in a few minutes, he'd pull the van to a stop and announce that we were someplace new. Someplace exciting. As long as I didn't pick my head up, as long as I never looked out the window, I could pretend that I was still on vacation. Still away.
I'm still no good at coming home. This might be the reason I left Mackinaw City in a tearful funk. Dreamland was behind us. The Dark Sky Park was behind us. Our only plan was to work our way back south, back towards Detroit. We figured it would take us two days to get home, but the significance was there. We were leaving.
We ate breakfast in Mackinaw City at a place with some wonderful looking pies. Unfortunately, there's no room on the bike to carry a pie (I asked), so we left empty handed.
Back on the motorcycle, it didn't take me long to cheer up. It's pretty hard to stay in a funk when the wind is all around you and you're riding out in the open air right along the shoreline. Riding on the motorcycle, I frequently close my eyes and tune in to my other senses. The air gets cool, we're surrounded by trees, and I imagine that I am a bird, flying through the woods, dipping below and then soaring above the treetops, feeling the wind all around me, hearing it rush into my ears.
I tell this to Jason and he is shocked.
“YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES?!”
The luxury of being the person on the back of the bike.
We're about an hour south of Mackinaw City, working our way down the eastern Michigan coast, when Jason pulls into a rest stop and we hear a funny noise—something is dragging under the bike. I assume it's a branch or something we've run over, but it's not. It turns out to be some kind of bracket that has come loose. There are spaces for four bolts, but only one is still hanging in there. Jason recently had the bike tuned up for the trip and it looks like the garage didn't adequately reattach all of the bolts. He has tools, but no spare bolts, and the one that is left is missing the nut that makes it reliable.
A kind soul at the rest stop offers help, but he also has no bolts, only tools, in his RV.
Jason troubleshoots the issue and determines exactly where the bracket is supposed to go. We're traveling light and have no zip ties or anything. I pull out my phone to look for the nearest mechanic or auto parts store and find a shop 20 minutes away. But I'm no help in getting us there safely.
It's cool along the water, so I'm wearing my aforementioned bear ranch hoodie. Jason suddenly looks at me and gets an idea.
“Take that string out of your hoodie,” he says.
I pull the cord from the hood and hand it over. Jason goes full MacGyver and uses the string to tie the bracket up where it belongs so that it won't drag on the ground. It's an impressive, and bright blue, fix. It gets us back on the road, and within minutes we see an auto repair shop on the side of the road. Jason pulls in, and although it's a car repair shop, the owner offers to look at the bike and see what he can do.
Lutz Auto Repair is conveniently located across the street from a cute little bakery, because this is northern Michigan, and everything is cute up there. Jason and I jog across the road and eat a cookie, a scone, while the owner lets the pipes cool and then determines what he can do for Maude.
In the end, he doesn't have the locked bolts the bike needs, so he welds his own. The bracket is back in place, and we are safe to ride on. The owner charges us a ridiculously minimal fee, Jason hands him the thank-you cookie he got for him at the bakery, and we are back on the road with only an hour lost to the whole ordeal. Jason keeps the hoodie string as a reminder.
We stop shortly thereafter in Rogers City to celebrate, sitting at an empty town park and reveling in our good fortune. Back on Maude, I put Guy Clark's Texas Cookin' album on our joint headphones. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the air is cool. Everything is perfect.
Half an hour later, we make two roadside stops in Presque Isle, just because it's so damn pretty. The first stop is on the shores of Grand Lake, a beachside park, where I spy an incredibly high swing set tucked away in the sand.
Any lingering remnants of sadness disappear as I swing, pumping my legs again and again until I get butterflies in my stomach and can see the shore appear and disappear over the horizon.
We ride on and I switch to the Beach Boys. Wouldn't It Be Nice comes on, Jason nods his head in approval, and we listen to Pet Sounds in its entirety as we ride homeward, sure, but it doesn't feel so dire to me anymore.
Communicating while riding on the motorcycle is difficult at speed. I realize this early on the trip, when we stop for the day and I ask Jason things like, “Did you see that giant cherry pie on the side of the road? Or that man in the moose suit dancing in front of a fudge shop? I pointed to it!”
Jason comes up with a high-tech solution: He suggests I tap him twice on the left shoulder when he should look left, twice on the right to look right. It works.
As we head due south along the cost, we drive into a dense fog that hugs the shoreline. At first it looks like smoke, but there is no smoke smell, and the air feels impossibly cool and damp. Ninety minutes south of Presque Isle, we stop to stretch our legs in Oscoda, in front of a giant Paul Bunyan statue, standing tall above the town, his head disappearing into the haze.
It's getting late, we're getting road worn, and rain is on the forecast, so we decide to stop for the day half an hour down the road in Tawas City.
We stop for dinner at a roadside diner. Liver and onions is the special, but we pass. Jason stopped earlier in the day to buy a couple bags of local cherries on the side of the road, something I've been bugging him about since we left Detroit days earlier.
We get a room at a real hotel, with a lobby, air conditioning and Internet access, drink another bottle of wine and nibble on cherries as we relive the day and our good fortune, rinse off the road dirt, and watch something terrible on the television as we fall asleep on this, the last night of our journey.
