Eerie Erie

These past few weekends I've been hankering to go to the beach, something I haven't done all summer. Sadly, the closest I usually come is Googling "Michigan beach" on a Sunday afternoon and then letting laziness or indecision get the better of me. But with the reappearance of medical students outside my lab window at work, I've started having visions of the harvester readying his scythe to fell summer. The days don't seem to last as long now, and on some nights, you'd swear there was a nip in the air.

The problem is that the nearest beach you'd call nice is about 2.5 hours to the west, in the vicinity of idyllic but notoriously race-divisive St. Joseph. For your troubles, you get towering dunes of natural sand, brought on by Lake winds that ferry the stuff from west to east, stealing grain by precious grain from Chicagoland and beyond. But if you just want to see one of the Great Lakes, you don't have to drive so far -- you can settle for Lake Erie. Despite having bacterial counts high enough to qualify it as a chemostat, Erie still manages to give you the illusion of ocean, if you can disregard the nuclear reactors that dot its shores.

Today the weather was nice enough, and I was feeling restless enough, to make the drive to fecal, nuclear Erie. About 45 minutes southeast from Ann Arbor lies Michigan's only state-owned park on Erie, Sterling State Park. I'd driven by it once several years ago -- it'd been closed -- but never thought to try again until today.

At about 4:30 pm, I turned off I-75 onto Dixie Highway (wait, I am in the North, right?), passed two bait shops, and made a right into the park. The weather remained beautiful, but it could only do so much to sweeten the view. With a coal plant on the right and a nuclear plant on the left, it wasn't difficult to take a shot that looked like an ad for An Inconvenient Truth:


Despite my best efforts, I never was able to achieve the illusion of being on the ocean. Nearing 6 pm, I stuffed the paper I was reading into my backpack, got up from the park table where I'd been sitting, and drove out of the park. I decided to explore the city of Monroe a little bit and found its downtown not without its charms:


This place wasn't actually open, but it triggered an olfactory memory all the same. In Franklin, Louisiana (pop. 10k, give or take) where I taught high school for two years, one of the two Chinese restaurants in town was located just off the freeway, attached to a gas station. It made a passable lo mein, but passable meant you had to get past the idea of spaghetti noodles masquerading as lo mein. Here, maybe it was the slashing font, maybe the words CHOP SUEY in red (chop suey being an American invention), or maybe just the rusted-out edifice -- I don't know, but something about the scene reminded me that here (in Monroe? in Michigan? in the US?) I was "other" in a way I hadn't felt in a long, long time:


By about 8 pm, I was back on the road again, headed for Ann Arbor. As I passed the Detroit airport and airplanes streaked overhead making their landings, I lost myself in a fantasy of attaching myself to the bottom of one, like a remora to a whale, and getting away for real: