Travel Reference
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tagesclimbing upthesteephilltooldFortMackinac, builtin1780todefendthestrait, still
standing guard over the town.
I wandered off through the town, picking my way around little piles of horse manure.
Without cars, the silence was almost complete. The whole island appeared to be on the
brink of a six-month coma. Almost all the stores and restaurants along Main Street were
shut for the season. I expect it's awful there in the summer with all the thousands of day-
trippers. A brochure that I picked up by the harbor listed sixty gift shops alone and more
than thirty restaurants, ice cream parlors, pizzerias and cookie stalls. But now at this time
of year it all looked quaint and restful and incredibly pretty.
For a while, Mackinac Island was the biggest trading post in the New World-John Jacob
Astor'sfurtradingcompanywasbasedhere-butitsrealglorydatesfromthelatenineteenth
century when wealthy people from Chicago and Detroit came to escape the city heat and
enjoy the pollen-free air. The Grand Hotel, the biggest and oldest resort hotel in Amer-
ica, was built and the country's wealthiest industrialists constructed ornate summer houses
on the bluffs overlooking Mackinac village and Lake Huron. I walked up there now. The
views across the lake were fantastic, but the houses were simply breathtaking. They are
some of the grandest, most elaborate houses ever built of wood, twenty-bedroomed places
with every embellishment known to the Victorian mind-cupolas, towers, domes, dormers,
gables, turrets, and front porches you could ride a bike around.
Some of the cupolas had cupolas. They are just incredibly splendid and there are scores of
them, standing side by side on the bluffs flanking Fort Mackinac. What it must be to be a
child and play hide-and-seek in those houses, to have a bedroom in a tower and be able to
lie in bed and gaze out on such a lake, and to go bicycling on carless roads to little beaches
andhiddencoves,andabovealltoexplorethewoodlandsofbeechandbirchthatcoverthe
back three-quarters of the island.
I wandered into them now, along one of the many paved paths that run through the dark
woods, and felt like a seven-year-old on a grand adventure. Every turn in the path brought
up some exotic surprise-Skull Cave, where, according to a sign beside it, an English fur
trader hid from the Indians in 1763; Fort Holmes, an old British redoubt on the highest
point on the island, 325 feet above Lake Huron; and two mossy old cemeteries out in the
middle of nowhere, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both seemed impossibly big for such
a small island, and they consisted mostly of the same few names going back generations-
the Truscotts, Gables, Sawyers. I happily wandered for three hours without seeing a soul
or hearing a sound made by man, and only barely sampled the island. I could easily have
stayed for days. I returned to the village by way of the Grand Hotel, quite the most splen-
