Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
never heard from again. Now, like all the other islands in the group except Beaver, it is un-
inhabited. I felt a strange pang of regret that I couldn't go over and explore them. In fact,
the whole of the Great Lakes was exerting a strange hold on me, which I couldn't begin
to understand. There was something alluring about the idea of a great inland sea, about the
thought that if you had a boat you could spend years just bouncing around from one Great
Lake to another, chugging from Chicago to Buffalo, Milwaukee to Montreal, pausing en
route to investigate islands, bays and towns with curious names like Deadman's Point, Egg
Harbor,SummerIsland.Alotofpeopledojustthat,Iguess-buyaboatanddisappear.Ican
see why.
AlloverthepeninsulaIkeptencounteringroadsidefoodstandswithbigsignsonthemsay-
ing PASTIES. Most of them were closed and boarded up, but at Menominee, the last town
before I crossed into Wisconsin, I passed one that was open and impulsively I turned the
car around and went back to it. I had to see if they were real Cornish pasties or something
else altogether but with the same name. The guy who ran the place was excited to have a
real Englishman in his store. He had been making pasties for thirty years but he had never
seen a real Cornish pasty or a real Englishman, come to that. I didn't have the heart to tell
him that actually I came from Iowa, the next state over. Nobody ever gets excited at meet-
ing an Iowan. The pasties were the real thing, brought to this isolated corner of Michigan
by nineteenthcentury Cornishmen who came to work in the local mines. “Everybody eats
them up here in the Upper Peninsula,” the man told me. “But nobody's ever heard of them
anywhere else. Youcross the state line into Wisconsin, just over the river,and people don't
know what they are. It's kind of strange.”
The man handed me the pasty in the paper bag and I went with it out to the car. It did seem
to be a genuine Cornish pasty except that it was about the size of a rugby ball. It came on a
Styrofoam platter with a plastic fork and some sachets of ketchup. Eagerly I tucked into it.
Apart from anything else I was starving.
Itwasawful.Therewasn'tanythingwrongwithitexactly—itwasagenuinepasty,accurate
in every detail-it was just that after more than a month of eating American junk food it
tasted indescribably bland and insipid, like warmed cardboard. “Where's the grease?” I
thought. “Where's the melted cheese patty and pan-fried chicken gravy? Where, above all,
is the chocolate fudge frosting?” This was just meat and potatoes, just natural unenhanced
flavor. “No wonder it's never caught on over here,” I grumbled and pushed it back into the
bag.
