Tournotes: July 17-19, 2024

Wednesday, July 17

Just after highway marker 334 on I-75, the bridge suddenly appears on the horizon. Depending on the atmosphere it may be a hazy mirage jutting out of the woods or a sharp relief of cream-colored gates against the blue. Today the weather is dramatic and I make my crossing to Dina Ögon's pastoral "Oas" while freighters churn into the straits from sunny Lake Michigan. To the east, stormclouds fall across Lake Huron in a foreboding smear above the three nearby islands. Dead ahead is an uncertain mix of gray and white over the green expanse of the Upper Peninsula. Crossing the Mackinac Bridge is never not special. Midway through, the right lane is cordoned off where two workers in hazmat suits blast flakes of Federal Standard 595c #14110 (foliage green) off the massive suspension cables with a firehose. I don't think I have ever crossed without encountering some type of maintenance. At the toll booth in St. Ignace I pay my own fare and that of the car behind me, a custom I learned years ago from K.

Along Highway 2, past signs for smoked fish and pasties, a green kite is surrounded by a flock of gulls over the Dune Shores Resort. Carloads of summer tourists swim off Lake Michigan's sandy northern coastline. I pass in and out of dreamy little rainstorms, their petrichor perfume rising up into my open windows as Bernice's ethereal "No Effort To Exist" plays on the stereo. Up into the interior through Germfask and onto the Seney Stretch, a 25 mile portion of M-28 that is as straight a road as you will find anywhere. 

Up in Marquette, my gig is at a tiny brewery inside an old house on Third St. which, according to my friends, was once a dive shop called Diver Down. Each of them has a different personal memory of hanging out in the apartment that once occupied its upper level. It's so intimate and casual that I feel self-conscious just picking up my guitar and starting to play a show for my close friends. I feel like we should just be hanging out here together. As more strangers trickle in, the beer does its work and I loosen up. K is here, having flown up for the night to visit the recently returned-to-their-roost Smiths. After the show we stand around laughing at Nora's misunderstood reaction when her Northern California friends started talking about the Stanley travel mug fad of the past year. "I just don't understand why you're suddenly so interested in the Stanley Cup. I mean, who even is your team?!" 

Thursday, July 18

I run from my motel down busy Highway 41 to the harbor and marinate in the early morning glow coming off Lake Superior. It ends up being 6.5 miles, hungover and hungry. After checking out, I drive back down to the ore dock to say goodbye to K and Nora who is leading a morning yoga class on the boardwalk. It's about a three hour drive up to the tip of the Keweenaw, but I stretch it out, stopping in L'Anse for a stretch and again in Houghton, one of my favorite cities in America. 

I have such fond memories playing shows up here in Copper Country with GLMS. On Highway 26 along Torch Lake, I visit the Quincy Dredge No. 2, one of many industrial mining relics abandoned across the peninsula. A reclaiming sand dredge built for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company it was active until 1967 when, like its shipwrecked sibling Dredge No.1, it became mired in the shallows where it remains to this day. In the wildflower meadow on a still July afternoon I stand mere feet from its hulking dinosaur bones. Further up the peninsula I pass through Calumet, the former mining boomtown where we played one of my all-time favorite shows at the Calumet Theatre in 2008. I take a slight detour off 41 to see Mount Bohemia, the wild ski resort and Nordic spa just off Lac la Belle. I've followed them on Instagram for several years and always wondered what the place really looked like. A collection of yurts, pools, saunas, and a log cabin bar, I get the impression it's a party I'd have to be in the mood for.

At the Minnetonka Resort I check into cabin #3 and stretch my legs along the five blocks of 41 that serve as Copper Harbor's main artery. While exploring tiny shops like Swede's Keweenaw Minerals and the Laughing Loon, I pass a couple walking a jaunty labradoodle whom I will later learn are Tony, Julienne, and Bonnie (dog). At Brickside Brewery, I set up my P.A. behind an old camper converted into a food truck which will close before I get a chance to order dinner. A small crowd gathers in the makeshift beer garden and I'm delighted to see a couple faces I know. Nora's brother Greg and his wife Kay have driven up from Houghton for the evening. Also in the audience is an archeologist/letterpress artist named Daniel, a quartet of restaurateur sisters from Plymouth, a nice young couple from further down the Keweenaw who end up buying all my albums, and the previously mentioned dog walkers who are traveling in a VW Vanagon from Minnesota's Boundary Waters to their home in Ithaca, New York. I learn all of this because I'm playing an intimate show in a tiny village at the tip of a far northern peninsula where I am one of the only entertainment options. In contrast I will spend the next day driving 450 miles south to play America's third largest market.

Friday, July 19

I hate to leave this beautiful place. A true statement and the title of Howard Norman's 2013 memoir in which he so eloquently describes this emotion: "I have always felt a bittersweet foretaste of regret when getting ready to leave certain landscapes." 

I say goodbye to my little knotty pine cabin at the edge of the woods and buy a coffee and a thimbleberry turnover at Jamsen's Bakery on the harbor. The Isle Royale Queen IV announces its departure for Michigan's only national park with a mighty hoot from its foghorn and slips through the harbor out into open water. I use hunger as an excuse to further prolong my departure; 30 minutes later I'm at another bakery in Eagle Harbor chatting with the owner who asks where I'm from. "Ypsilanti, Michigan." He exclaims that a good friend of his is a professor at Eastern Michigan University which is just blocks from my house. The blueberry scone I buy tastes like sawdust which stirs in me an unreasonable feeling of guilt. They were so nice to me. I eat it anyway.

Over the next nine hours the piney northwoods fade into Upper Midwestern farmland, highway sprawl, and eventually the industrial ports of Green Bay and Milwaukee. It's been a while since I've done a long haul like this on my own. Despite its congestion, Chicago is a relief. I roll into Lakeview just as the Cubs game lets out and walk the three blocks down to the ballpark to take in the energy. Somehow I've still never seen a game at Wrigley Field, though my cousin Eric invited me numerous times when he was still in Chicago.  I take a photo in front of the iconic red sign and send it to him in Honolulu where he now lives.

At the venue I meet the opener, Wyatt Edmondson, who came up from Nashville on a Greyhound bus. We sit at the bar and over beers discuss gigging, recording, co-writing, and the general grind of trying to make a musical life. He says he sometimes plays three gigs a day on Broadway and it shows in his strong stagecraft. But I'm glad I'm not living that life, not in my 40s, at least. Not for the first time, I feel grateful for my day job which still allows me to head out on short pleasure tours around Lake Michigan and play as little or often as I like.

I was at this same venue last December, playing for many of the same fans, so I lean on my new material to keep the set fresh. I honor a couple requests from an old high school friend who has been following my music since 11th grade. I spend the night in Andersonville with another high school friend and former bandmate and her family. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I love this remarkable city which Randy Newman (via the Everylys) called “the heart of the nation, the start of the West.”