Tag: aging

Someone I was dating in college made me watch a movie I had no interest in seeing. Somewhere in Time. I went along with it the way you go along with things in college, more interested in the company than the film. Then Christopher Reeve fell in love with a photograph, Rachmaninoff started playing, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a man traveling back through decades for a woman he’d never met, I stopped being polite about watching it and started actually watching it.

The hotel looked like something from another century, which it was. I didn’t know its name yet, but I knew I wanted to stand inside it someday.

Not long afterward, I bought some cologne, and four mugs came free with the purchase, each printed with a different historic hotel. I couldn’t tell you the other three today, but I still have the fourth. The print has faded from years of dishwasher cycles and daily use, but it still says Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island.

That mug’s made every move I’ve made since. It went with me through law school, to Pierre, to Canton, to Sioux Falls, and then to another house in Sioux Falls. Almost forty years have passed, and it’s never once been left behind.

Years later, my wife and I were trying to decide where to go on our honeymoon. I suggested Mackinac Island. When I explained why, she told me she’d seen the same movie. Not a similar movie. The same movie, with the same hotel and the same Rachmaninoff. Neither of us knew anyone else who’d watched it, so we booked the trip.

The day we first crossed over was cloudy, late May, with fog low enough to swallow the island whole. Standing on the shore in Mackinaw City, I couldn’t tell which direction to look because there was nothing out there to see yet. Then the ferry pulled away from the dock, and somewhere in the middle of the strait, the fog thinned enough to let the island through.

Fort Mackinac appeared first, high on the bluff. Then came Grand Hotel, long and white and exactly like the movie, except it wasn’t a movie anymore. It was real, and we were finally close enough to walk to it.

We stepped off the ferry into the combined smell of horse manure and fudge, which isn’t something anyone warns you about but is something you never forget. We didn’t know which way to walk. There were signs pointing travelers toward Grand Hotel, but half a mile feels different when you’re new somewhere and don’t quite trust the directions.

We kept walking and waiting for the hotel to appear the way it had from the ferry. It took longer than it should have for a half mile covered on foot at a reasonable pace. Excitement does that. It stretches distance instead of shortening it.

Grand Hotel has a dress code for dinner, including a jacket and tie for men after six, and walking into its dining room for the first time was its own kind of time travel. Some men wore sport coats, while others wore tuxedos. Women arrived in evening gowns, and the entire room had a formality that’s difficult to find anywhere else now. Nobody seemed uncomfortable with it. It felt like the natural way to end a day on an island where nothing else moves very fast either.

My wife loves to dance. After that first year, we signed up for lessons so we could actually do it properly, the foxtrot, the waltz, the jitterbug. She took to all of it. I took to it the way a man takes to something his wife loves more than he does, which is to say I learned the steps and stopped complaining about them. We still dance when we’re there, though not every night anymore. Some nights one of us is simply too tired, and we’ve reached the age where we admit it.

That first trip belonged entirely to discovery. We splurged on a bottle of French wine with dinner one night, the kind of extravagance that felt enormous to two people just starting out. We walked more than either of us had walked in years, enough that my legs ached in a way they never had before, but every mile felt worth the ache. The island made us feel as though we’d discovered something no one else knew about. That feeling remained even with a hundred other honeymooners making the same discovery a few feet away.

The boys came a few years later, and with them came a different kind of walking. The first time we covered the full 8.3 miles around the island, we did it on bicycles. Our older son was ten and pedaling behind us on a bike with no gears. He was working three times as hard as we were to cover the same ground, and somewhere along the shoreline road, he began narrating the injustice of it out loud. I couldn’t tell you whether he was whining or simply providing an accurate report of his circumstances. It was probably a little of both.

The perimeter loop was only part of the walking we did during those family trips. We walked to the Woods, not for the restaurant but for the duck pin bowling alley next door. We walked downtown for fudge and whatever souvenir had become that trip’s obsession. We walked to the fort and actually toured it, including the reenactors, cannon fire, and entire production, which is exactly the sort of thing my wife and I tend to skip when it’s just the two of us. On ambitious days, we walked to British Landing on the far side of the island. It was about as far as small legs could go before turning back made more sense than pushing forward.

The shape of the day depended on the weekend. Memorial Day, when we first visited, had very little scheduled around it. We’d begin with an enormous breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and spend the rest of the day working it off. Lunch was wherever we happened to find ourselves. Then came a nap, because you can’t dance all night without one, followed by dinner, dressed properly, and dancing afterward. Labor Day eventually became our favorite. Mornings belonged to walking, while midday brought a cookout and jazz concert. Then came the nap, dinner, and dancing. It had the same bones as our first Memorial Day trip, only now there was usually a saxophone playing somewhere in the background.

The weather never signed on to any of it. We’ve packed for one season and lived through three, worn sweatshirts in the morning, rain gear by noon, and shorts by late afternoon, sometimes all in the same day. You learn to bring everything and expect to use it.

That kind of day, replayed with small variations, is what comes to mind when people mention books I’ve never actually read. I’ve never read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve read enough reviews and commentary to understand the idea, and several people whose judgment I respect consider it one of the greatest books ever written. I don’t know whether I’ll ever actually read it. But if I ever tried to write a book in that style, following people through the ordinary events of a single day, my day would take place on Mackinac Island. It would begin with breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and move through the paths, the fort, the horses, the fudge shops, and whatever lunch presented itself. There would be a nap in the afternoon, dinner after six, and music somewhere in the evening. Nothing extraordinary would have to happen, because on Mackinac Island the day itself would be enough.

Earning that kind of day on foot, though, took years. For a long time, walking the full 8.3 miles in one stretch seemed excessive when a bicycle could cover the same ground in a third of the time. It wasn’t until we were older that walking became the point rather than the obstacle. The perimeter is flat, paved, and wide enough to walk beside each other, but the interior is different. Paths climb toward the cemetery, the fort, Sugarloaf, the natural arch, and the governor’s summer residence. Some narrow into dirt trails just wide enough for one person. Others open into gravel roads where we can walk side by side again. Five minutes from the shoreline, the island becomes a completely different place.

The Woods has changed too. It was once where we took two tired boys to go bowling. Now it’s a quiet place where the two of us walk for dinner. The fort is still there, but we no longer feel compelled to tour it. Downtown still smells like fudge and horses, although we’re less likely to come home with a souvenir. The island has remained much the same, but we’re the ones who have changed. The walking that once seemed like something to endure has become one of the reasons we return.

Our last two trips came after Covid and after Grand Hotel changed hands, sold by the family that had owned it for nearly a century. There have been updates, some we like and some we don’t, but the bones of the place remain the same ones we fell in love with from a ferry deck in the fog. We stopped booking the basic room somewhere along the way. On one trip, we upgraded to a suite so magnificent that it remains one of the nicest rooms either of us has ever stayed in. Another trip put us in the Teddy Roosevelt room, and I’ll leave you to imagine what that involved. No two rooms at Grand Hotel are decorated alike. That may be the whole point of the place. We can walk the same 8.3 miles a dozen times and never have the same day twice, and sleep in a different room on every visit and never run out of ways to see the same hotel again.

The far end of the island is where it gets quiet. Most people never make it out there, and if you time it right, early enough or late enough, you can stand at the north shore and have the whole thing to yourselves. The water stretches north toward Canada, and there’s nothing to hear but the wind and the water against the rocks. We stood there on our last trip, the two of us, not saying much.

I don’t know what my wife thinks about when we stand there. I’ve never asked. I think about the Ojibwe who crossed this water long before there was a hotel or a fort or a fudge shop, the early travelers in canoes making the same crossing we made on a ferry, looking at the same strait we were looking at. Twenty-five years of marriage and I still can’t tell you what’s going through her head at that railing. That’s not a complaint. It might be the reason we keep coming back.

When we first started coming to the island, we were some of the youngest people staying at the hotel. The crowd has always skewed older, and back then we noticed it. We don’t notice it the same way now, because we’ve become it. The clientele never really changed. We did. These days I find myself watching the young couples, the ones on their honeymoons, and hoping a few of them are falling for the place the way we did, so that someday they’ll be the older ones standing at the north shore, wondering where the years went.

In a few weeks, we’ll move into a new home, and the faded Grand Hotel mug will make the move with us, just as it’s made every move since the mid-1980s. It’ll be wrapped in paper, placed in another box, and carried into another kitchen. The hotel on its side is harder to see than it once was, but it’s still there, holding the memory of a movie, a honeymoon, two boys, many trips, and all the miles we’ve walked together.