PHOTOBOMB: Around Lake Michigan in Five Days – Part Two

“We left with no glowing rocks and came back with several.”

Happy father’s day! Belatedly, of course. Before we get started, I’d like to pay my respects and my love to my dad, and thank him for being my father. Same as with mother’s day this year, I won’t be doing a long, public post of things that I’m feeling, but rest assured that those warm, fuzzy feelings are being felt. And happy father’s day to other fathers and father figures as well!

Additionally, happy (belated) Juneteenth to those celebrating! I did not have a chance to celebrate because I was stuck driving to Minneapolis back from Chicago (again) on the actual federally observed day, and also because I am white. NPR assures me that I can celebrate as a white person as long as I’m not getting in the way or commandeering Black celebrations, but let’s be honest here, I get in the way of everything just by existing. My nose is too big for my own good and blocks out the sunlight to my garden half the time anyway, so it’s probably for the best if I lock myself in a hot car for six hours instead. But hopefully next year I can get around to celebrating this culturally resonant holiday, as long as I, you know, try to support Black folks throughout the rest of the year. That should, uh, probably be some sort of a requirement for white people who want to celebrate, too.

But, now that I’ve got my weekly set of announcements out of the way, let’s get back to the meat of this post; the narrative of my trip around a big lake in the midwest somewhere, I don’t really know what it’s called. People seem to call it a “great lake,” seems kind of mediocre to me tbh.

Am I wrong in saying that it looks like a giant, flaccid dong?

Ah, welcome back! I take it you have had a safe week once again, judging by your presence and person being wholly in-tact as you stand before me. Well, as promised, let me grab those old photographic slides out of the closet and get on with the story. We’re wasting moonlight, and if you’re gonna have a whole story of my vacation around Lake Michigan with my dad and Nick put together by tomorrow, then you had better get cracking at it! And I suppose I had better keep on telling you about it, hmm?

Where we left off last week:

“After being neer-do-wells within the consecrated grounds of a cemetery, we left behind Mackinac Island, though I do hope to return some day. And when I do, I will also be returning to the Mystery Spot, a real place just north of the straits bridge on the Upper Peninsula.”

The Mystery Spot in St. Ignace, Michigan is very different from the mystery spot my partner keeps trying to get me to find, but at least this one shows up on a map. And for a place that names itself the “Mystery Spot” and has signs with giant arrows and big, bold letters proclaiming the faithful to “COME SEE!” and “BE AMAZED!,” it has exactly the same kind of bizarro energy that you would expect from a tourist trap. Now, to be fair, I adore tourist traps, I think they’re an integral part of the myth of the Great American Road Trip and I’d consider them to be almost a kind of folk art. There’s something special about seeing signs for miles around extolling the wonders of some confusingly-named roadside attraction, and then showing up to find something that is more gift shop than activity (except in the case of the House on the Rock, which is transcendental in its experiences). The Mystery Spot did not disappoint in this or any regard.

And remember; we put the FUN in “No Refunds!“

Don’t let these pictures fool you; something is happening here. The Mystery Spot’s main attraction is a twenty-minute tour detailing the strange happenings inside a gravity vortex, or a place where gravity pulls more strongly one direction than the other, allowing objects to roll up hills and people to get stuck to chairs. The cynic in me acknowledges that this is all a bunch of hooey; it’s a twenty-minute tour of forced-perspective optical illusion demonstrations taking place inside of a building that’s tilted fifteen degrees up. Balls still roll downhill and the plumb bob still does demonstrate the direction of gravity as “down,” but it’s you that’s different now.

Don’t let science fool you out of having fun, though. The illusions are put on well enough to be engaging, especially when you get members of the audience fumbling around in a chair like dying fish for five minutes. Although I still postulate that the real attraction is a sort of culturally-acceptable willful ignorance that you can pay to be a part of. Give a person twenty minutes alone in an illusory room and I’d argue 90% of people will figure out the truth sooner or later. But charge then twelve bucks for it and stick them in a tour with a bunch of strangers and it becomes a group experience in suspension of disbelief, where the feeling is as important as the illusion itself. Much like organized religion! I’m gonna get in trouble for that one, huh?

Where P.T. Barnum saw suckers, though, I see people having a good time. Nick and my dad had a good time! I had a good time! Presumably, the cash register had a good time! I’d take Cheyenne back to the Mystery Spot, if we can find it. It was worth a stop, and added to the culture of our trip. And something else that certainly enhanced the culture of our trip was having an opportunity to spend time with my cousin Jason.

I broke my “no faces” rule for this entire series *just* to include this picture.

Now, due to COVID and the fact that he lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (which, by the way, is where we are at for this part of the trip!), we haven’t seen Jason is quite a while, but it was just as easy as ever to get along with him. And it was pretty good that we stopped to see him, too, because he was able to take us out hunting. Yooperlite hunting.

When he first told us that he wanted us to come look for rocks with him, we were, admittedly, skeptical. Now, I like a neat stone as much as the next guy, but how cool can these supposed “glowing rocks” be? The answer: very, very cool. So cool, in fact, that we ended up combing the shores of Lake Superior for about three hours after sunset to try and find these crazy-ass rocks. Three hours! I mean, I like the beach, but it takes a lot to get me to stop and look closely at the ground for any extended length of time, but man, with Jason and his wife Ashley’s guidance, these rocks are worth looking around for.

Here’s our haul of rocks under regular visible light (we didn’t find all of these that night; some were gifts from Jason and Ashley)

…And here are those same rocks under UV light. Fucking wild. That bright green one is Uranium glass, actually. Not a rock! The ones that aren’t quite glowing are coral fossils. They are a rock!

It is hard to impart the bonkers nature of these rocks to you through digital screen. When Jason first pulled some out of a box, we just thought they were regular rocks. But under high-powered UV light? It is unreal how much they glow. And they’ve got these crazy patterns sometimes, too. A speckly one looks like the night sky. One Jason gave me has a line of glowing stone (called sodalite) running right through it. Some of the stones glow just under the surface, like they’re under a thin layer of skin. And some look like straight-up lava, a comparison Jason made that I agree with wholeheartedly. It is unbelievably cool in person.

See, the trick with these is that you need really strong UV light, like at least in the 365-nanometer range. Most standard flashlights that claim to have UV light are really around the 390 nm range, which just about tops out the visible light spectrum and barely toes its way into UV. It makes the rocks light up a bit, but not enough to really appreciate how cool they actually are. But once you power up that UV a bit and cut out the visible spectrum of light, they pop like nothing else. Though the downside of that is that you have to actually have a high-powered UV light on hand to appreciate them, which can be a bit pricey.

The upside is that you now have a great reason to go out to shore of Lake Superior at night and walk along the beach! Which is what we did for, again, like three hours. To be fair, it’s also nice enough to just walk along the water and appreciate the stares and the lapping of the waves next to you, but a little bit of an impetus to look closely makes a lot of difference.

Admittedly, I don’t have any photos of the lake at night because you can’t *see* anything at night. It’s fucking dark.

I also don’t have any pictures of the lake because, well, it’s water. What the hell do you want to look at, a cool wave?

We also did quite a bit of skipping stones. Don’t worry, we checked to see if they glow first.

After spending some time with Jason, Ashley, and a bunch of rocks, and after filling our pockets with just as many rocks both fluorescent and otherwise, we did move on with the rest of our trip. After a very eventful day of fudge eating, mystery spotting, and yooperlite hunting, the next day was rather relaxed by comparison. We mostly spent it at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which, much like Sleeping Bear Dunes, is really picturesque and worth taking a trip to if you’re of an outdoors predisposition. And even if you hate hiking you should still visit because the Pictured Rocks can be seen from the parking lot! Not when we went, of course, because the parking lot was under construction so we had to hike up a hill to get to the overlook, but, you know. Under normal circumstances. What the hell happened to normal, anyway?

And here we have a waterfall, made up of un-pictured rocks.

The shoreline of the great lakes are dotted with these little rivers and outflows from the forests, down where the dunes meet the shoreline. *Of course* we tried damming them up. Do you even need to ask?

I have an inordinate number of pictures featuring Nick at a distance.

Pictured Rocks is kind of split up into two or three parts, the northernmost one of which being a place kind of like Sleeping Bear Dunes. It’s got these shifting sands and a hiking trail that is slowly being swallowed by the advance of the dunes themselves, which has to be a metaphor for something. It’s also got a neat waterfall. But the southernmost section is where the actual “pictured rocks” themselves are, whatever the hell that means. As far as I can tell, they’re a bunch of cliffs that have been worn away enough to expose the colorful limestone and sandstone beneath. And here they are, rocks pictured by my phone:

It’s hard to get a scale of this cliff in the photo; I woulda thought we were on the Mediterranean if I didn’t know better.

My dad says he saw a fish here one time.

If I told you this photo and the one below it were a split-up panorama shot with the boring middle part cut out, would you believe me?

Pictured Rocks? More like Pictured These Rocks up Your Ass, amirite?

My dad says this rock outcropping looks like a fist; I thought it looked like the ruined, writhing, dead-yet-dreaming visage of an ancient eldritch deity. Potato, potato.

As it happened, Pictured Rocks ended up being the final stop on our trip, as it was the last full day we had before having to return home. It also didn’t help that Nick and I both came down with terrible head colds that were not COVID. I REPEAT, WE DID NOT HAVE COVID. We checked, several times. It just so happened that we had runny noses, scratchy throats, and buckets of mucus leaking from the faucets of our sinuses. Like a… regular cold. Do people still get those anymore? Either way, we thought about driving through Door County, Wisconsin or visiting the Chicken Joe Memorial Beach and Surf Shop in Sheboygan on our last day, but neither Nick nor I were feeling particularly up to it at that point. Don’t worry, my dad caught it later.

We did make one more fire out of random forest debris, however. This one required us to use a pocket-sized handsaw and cut up driftwood. Like tiny lumberjacks!

Excuse me, I almost forgot. We did make one more stop, and it was perhaps the most important stop at that. At the Mars Cheese Castle. Mars Cheese Castle. Let me repeat again: MARS CHEESE CASTLE! MARS CHEESE CASTLE, WOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

MARS CHEESE CASTLE!!!!!! HELL YEAH BROTHER!!!!!!!! MARS CHEESE CASTLE!!!!!! LET’S GO!!!!!!

MARS CHEESE CASTLE!!!!

There is little left in this dog-forsaken world that warms my heart quite like the Mars Cheese Castle. This is not your regular cheese curd shop in Wisconsin. No, no, my friend. This is the cheese Mecca. The cheese Cathedral. The beating-cheese-heart of Cheesemerica. It is the Mars Cheese Castle. And there is nowhere else like it on Earth. Except, you know, the brat stop, or giant mouse cheese town, or Cheese Chalet, but who’s really counting? I love the Mars Cheese Castle with every fiber of my being and I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I say otherwise.

Anyway, we stopped there for like ten minutes to use the bathroom and buy some curds before getting back on the road to Chicago. Real pick-up/drop-off kind of deal, if you know what I’m saying. But at that point, we made it back to my mom’s house, and the trip was over. But it was a pretty great trip!

Although it wasn’t the level of extra that our trip down Route 66 was last summer, and although this post has a disproportionately high number of photos compared to that one, it was still a lot of fun. It was a positive family bonding experience, a new was to see the Great Lakes, a chance to visit family (two families, even!), and a way to see some new sights in well-trodden ground that I might not otherwise have gotten to see. I really had a lot of fun on the trip, and I hope that these pictures do it some sort of justice.

PIctured: my mother, very much unimpressed/feigning excitement by our pockets of rocks.

The only big game we saw on the entire trip were the elk trapped in the Bussy woods when I went with my mom and my cousin the next day.

Ah, well, so concludes my historical slideshow. You think that gives you enough material to write the post for me, eh? I think I’ve gone and done the whole thing for you, right about now! What’s that? I have written the entire post out for you? Well, would you look at that! What an absolutely shocking turn of events that is! I bet you don’t even want to write my post for me, do you? You were just here to listen to me yabber on and take advantage of my barrels of licorice (not a euphemism), weren’t you? Well, fine then, be gone with ye! Back out into the victorian slums surrounding us and all that, let the ghouls have at you. Best watch out for the giant zombie sharks, though, they seem to be getting bigger every year. And don’t come back, until next week when I forget all of this ever even happened! You hear me?

Ah, well, so goes another reader in this weird futurescape. At least I’ve still got all this licorice to tide me over until the next visitor. If I ever have another visitor… muhwahahaha!