Mackinac Island - II

The next day we woke up bright and early around 7am, which meant we were missing the earliest ferry to the Island. After a light breakfast that the motel provided and a few snaps of the lake in the early morning sun, we got out of the motel to catch the ferry at 9. There are quite a few companies offering ferry services for $18 or so the round-trip. The ferryboat was quite cool as they had an observation deck high up, standing on which we got a spectacular view of the lake and small humps of islands dotting it all round. Snap-time again and we braved a light drizzle, cold air and swarms of insects to admire the small infinity in space and time that the lake in its calm expansiveness portrayed.

It took us about 20 minutes to reach the Island and even as we landed there was this cabby with a Lincoln-beard on a 3-horse carriage. Talk of a quaint island! And there weren't any motor vehicles on the island and the only means of transport was the horse-carriage or the bicycle. Maps are freely available at the Tourist Information Center and the lady manning the desk was quite helpful as she pointed out a few of her favorite spots and marked a route for us to take.

Bicycles are as easy to obtain as fudge on the island and come in as many flavors; we got the 7-geared cycles that sit low and have a basket attached to the handle-bar, making you feel like a spinster going to church on Sunday. Anyways we pedalled out of the docks with a plan of going along the Shoreline Road to either Arch Rock or Fort Mackinac. The houses on the road were quaint(did I use the word again?) and the shoreline simply breathtaking. There is an old forlorn lighthouse standing out a small distance out to sea and a few projections of land jutting out of the lake on all sides. And if we but ignore the small piece of land we were standing on, borrowed from the lake in some prehistoric period when man was still learning to balance himself on two legs in a remote corner in Africa, a sense of the all-swallowing nature of water and its wilfulness teaches us the first lessons in futility. But it is beautiful too with its green and blue and the haze that settles every now and then, sometimes obscuring, at other times revealing, the content of our dreams.

The road leading to the Fort and Arch Rock is a real strain and leads up a steep hill. An elderly gentleman living in the island offered that it became harder each passing year and we weren't making much more headway than him. Then an alley of colonial or late 19th century houses with mock columns and colonnades and spacious patios looking towards the sea(). Trails crisscross the whole island and after an eyeful of the pretty houses and the far-out sea, it was getting late so we hit a few that seemed to take us to the Fort quicker.

Going is tough in this stretch as the road and the trails go up and down. But we reached Skull Cave in one piece without much adventure. This Cave is where an English fur-trader is supposed to have hidden when the Indian Wars erupted in the Island. There is not much to it as the Skull seems to have been chipped away by time and the elements and we climbed a few flights of rough wooden stairs to reach Fort Holmes. The Fort is a rough stockaded enclosure that the English wrested from and held against the American troops in the War of 1812. Not much but enough to provide some fun to kids playing Indians and Cowboys with plastic darts and guns. The place affords yet another view of a vast portion of the lake and a plaque provided us with the history of the Lake Algonquin and the breaking of the land and the surfacing of these islands. Indians native to these parts won't agree but we heard their story only when we got to Arch Rock, where some great God had breathed life into the world.

Fort Mackinac is only a little way from Skull Cave and Fort Holmes. It is grand though no castle but the entry fee was forbidding enough at $10 or so for us to witness a demonstration of the firing of a real cannon and a guided tour of the rooms where the quartermasters hid their young girls. Cycle back and we reach Arch Rock: I had assumed all this time that it was 'Arch' as in 'First' as some God is supposed to have created life here. But as all deductions from internal evidence go, it is superficial and a rock in the shape of a huge arch a hundred or two feet high loomed up in our sights. More pictures and more sea and more awe and then back to the Main Road for lunch.

Lunch was pizza again for me and a few glasses of wine and we basked in the afternoon sun on the lakefront. Then fudge-shopping and fudge-eating on the green meadows with a few more snaps of some old bloke in bronze hiding our view of the whitewashed fort entrance. A few calm minutes, fudge in mouth, grass under feet, brooding over the lake splashing its waters in disquieting calm, and back to business. This time we take the shoreline road going the other way round the island and a few minutes into it, stop at a stretch of pebbly beach, tossing stones into the lake and feeling the cold wash up from afar on waves. There is a Devil's Kitchen here too and a few charred boulders hanging on. Some fine words written about this being an ancient burial ground and a keynote in the geographical history of the area; we pass on.

Trails again and I run into the forest in search of the source of a brook. After a few falls and a few more snaps(we really took only snaps of ourselves all the time), we decide that trails are fun. So, after reaching the British Landing Point, where they have a cannon pointing at the lake for no apparent reason, we decided to split up, with Srinath and Mahesh taking the shoreline Road while I, Ganti and Sheetal plotted our way through Swamp Trail and Tranquil Bluff and what-else-not, promising to meet the others at the Tourist Information Center.

This was supposed to be fun but we found out soon that Swamp Trail actually led us through a swamp and we got through brambles and missed trail junctions and after huffing and puffing through the best part of an hour reached a beautiful avenue. The Grand Hotel is situated here and there are a few mansions too but mostly it is meadows and quaint(not again!) roads that transported us downhill at breakneck speeds and earned for us the snorts of disapproving horses. There is a museum on our way and a roadsign indicates a blacksmith working nearby but it was getting dark and we hurried past cabs and bikes moving peacefully, gawking at unearthly sights, and so back to the crowds on Main Street. The cycles are duly handed over and some sludge and cola partaken of. The crowd seems to have swelled and there are lots of Indians(the Asian kind), apparently on honeymoons or a quiet vacation and with the least disturbance, we return on a ferryboat back to Mackinaw City.

It was already 8pm by now and so we decided to stay back and start off early for home the next day. Before crashing, however, we went across to St.Ignace on the Mackinac Bridge, the third longest bridge in the world, passing on our way the historic Fort Michilimackinac, founded in 1715. There was also a beach for celebrities to frolic on but time, as they say, was dear.

St.Ignace itself was a boring, sleepy town and costly too compared to our motel of last night. A dinner of subs in St.Ignace and we hastened back to Mackinaw City. Other places were either costlier or rooms were not available so we went back to our cheap motel spending another $49 on a night's rent.

Not much to plan for the next day and a long road home with me as the navigator. I plot a way through some 'scenic routes' but all we get is a county jailhouse and lots of biker babes. Anyways Detroit is only a few hours away and we all have fun on the road, each in his own way. Detroit itself, we don't get to see much of as it is dark by the time we reach Sheetal's hotel and we book a ticket from Toledo, Ohio to Notre Dame on Amtrak. A light dinner at Chili's and a failed attempt to visit a nightclub, and it is time to start off for the Toledo railway station. Its about an hour and a half's drive from Warren, Sheetal's place, but only 35 minutes from downtown Detroit, and a few missed turns don't matter as the train is only at 4:50 in the morning.

Toledo seems like an interesting town with a nice bridge across a river and a fine skyline. There seems to have been some problem in the area as we pass quite a few police cars on our way to the railway station. But the cops are helpful and we reach the station at around 4am. The train is late as usual but Sheetal takes his leave and we curl up for a light nap.

Finally, around 5:30am, the train chugs in and we are home by 8. We take a cab home and then its back home again. A fine vacation it has been and a long break from the drudgery that is life in research but everything can wait as we take a long, peaceful day of rest and sleep.