The Hidden Culture of Upper Peninsula Michigan - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Hidden Culture of Upper Peninsula Michigan – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Along the way to Mackinac Island, my mother would stop at a restaurant where we could sample some of the history of the Upper Peninsula. 

As we spread paper napkins on our laps for lunch, she remarked, “Paper napkins are a paper product from the lumber industry.”

“The Swedes, the Finns, and Cornish from England worked in the iron and copper mines, farming, lumber, and freight ship industries here,” she said.

“Didn’t our ancestors come from Cornwall?” I asked.

“They did, but they did not work in the tin mines of Cornwall or in the iron and copper mines here.  There were ship captains, who sometimes sold gin to miners,” she said with a shake to her head.

At almost every diner along the way to Mackinac Island, you can order the following three items in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan:

-Cornish (English) pasties filled with beef, potato, turnips, and onions.  The folded over crust has a braided edge and looks like an empanada.

-Finnish keralian pastry made with rye flour crust and filled with potatoes, rice, or carrots

-Swedish cinnamon rolls with confectioner’s sugar frosting

All this can be eaten with mild Vienna roast coffee with cream.

After lunch, we set out for Mackinac (pronounced “Macinaw”) Island.  Mackinac Island is located in the Mackinac Straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.  You have to take a ferry out to Mackinac Island and leave your car behind; Mackinac is a pedestrian-only vacation spot.

Fort Mackinac has its place in history as an easy victory for the British in the War of 1812 when the 50 soldiers at the Fort faced an army contingent.  They surrendered without battle.

Since that time, Mackinac Island has had a decidedly English flair.  You can buy tea everywhere, but not coffee, the American beverage.

The 19^th century Biddle House has re-enactments of curing meat for winter, which you had to do to survive Michigan winters.  I learned that bacon comes from a pig here.

The freighters that glide from one lake to another form the constant picture show for the Grand Hotel where we went for afternoon tea after visiting the hotel’s carriage museum.

We sat in the lobby and sipped Darjeeling tea that we ate with scones and marmalade jam and clotted cream for the scones.

I knew I was getting deluxe treatment as a kid in this lovely hotel that is still owned by the same family today.

On the way back to the ferry, we bought caramel candy and saltwater taffy.  My mom drove across the Mackinac Bridge to the Lower Peninsula and Detroit.

The drive in the UP was a vacation all by itself I felt even as a young girl.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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The Hidden Culture of Upper Peninsula Michigan - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Hidden Culture of Upper Peninsula Michigan - Part 1 -by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When my mother and I would visit our relatives in Wisconsin in fall, she would drive back over the Upper Peninsula to see the fall colors.  I was eager to do the “nature” drive since I had seen the aurora borealis dancing in the night sky in yellows, blues, greens, and reds from my grandparents’ house in the “Northwoods” of Wisconsin.

My grandparents lived in a community of descendants of immigrants from Switzerland.  Breakfast before the Upper Peninsula tour was half English and half Swiss: eggs and bacon followed by hot chocolate and has browns that resembled Swiss roesti potatoes with sour cream on top.

After breakfast, my mother and I boarded the Thunderbird she drove with an armload of baked goods and magazines for me.  As we drove down the driveway, my mom turned on classic rock that she played till she reached the Michigan borders where she began her travel log.

“The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is attached by land to Wisconsin and not the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.  Politics and business needs created the borders here,” she said.

“How did business get involved?” I asked.

“It all began with the glaciers,” she began rather facetiously.

“Glaciers covered Michigan.  When they began to melt and retract they left gouges in the Earth that became the Great Lakes.  Water transport is inexpensive compared to overland transport.  There are iron and copper mines in the Upper Peninsula that industry needs,” my mom responded as a diligent and knowledgeable person who worked with the advertising department at The Detroit Free Press newspaper.

“Are other things transported on the Great Lakes?” I asked trying to use the same “grown-up” vocabulary she did.

“The Free Press can get newsprint by the Detroit River and over land,” she said.

My mother spent time talking with me, because she knew you can usually get your foot in the door in many industries in sales.  The best salesmen know their territory and their product or service very well.  I was getting a “territory” lesson on the ride home.  Cold, rural places often have trouble finding employees sometimes.

As we drove along inside Michigan, signs likes Ishpeming, Marquette, and Mackinac Island showed up to give some indication about part of the history of the Upper Peninsula.

There were several Native American tribes in this area including the Pottawatomie, Chippewa (Ojibwe), the Sauk, the Foxes, and the Mascoutens.  The French came to this frigid area to trap animals for fur used in the fashion industry and set up trading posts.

The English always seem to compete with the French, so they soon followed with trading posts as well.  To this day, Canada, which is nearby, is a bilingual English and French country with the province of Québec as its main French-speaking province.

End of Part 1.

To be continued…

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about the Runes and the Edda with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about the Runes and the Edda with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

As I read through the first half of A History of German Literature by Calvin Thomas on Google Books, I felt like I was reliving many of the experiences I had shared with my daughter when she was a grade school student at a Waldorf School. 

This is not a farfetched claim when you consider that the founder of the Waldorf Schools, Rudolf Steiner, was Austrian and founded his first school in Stuttgart, Germany in 1919. Steiner’s philosophy focuses on the performing and visual arts as a means for teaching, which makes the mystical and medieval texts of the German language come alive.

Thomas relates in the very beginning of his book that the German runes are a form of paganism. He says that no extant literature exists which uses the runic alphabet. When my daughter and I made clay pebble tablets and inscribed runic symbols on them, which resemble Sumerian hatch marks, I told her, “People who could read runes were thought to be magic by everyone else. That’s why reading is still magic now.”

I believe that runes hid codes and showed my daughter how to set up codes similar to vignière ciphers to communicate with me. These codes may have been beyond her years, but they provided us with afternoon entertainment during long winter nights. 

The entertainment for the Germanic peoples most probably came from what were eventually written down in the thirteen century Icelandic Edda that formed the corpus of the Norse myths. Thomas deals with these myths only briefly as he was focusing on indigenous literature, but these myths appear to be important to German speakers as well.

Thomas writes that it was only in the twelfth century that “gleeman’s or minstrel’s tales were written down.” The two most famous tales were The Niblung Lay and The Lay of Gudrun. What is interesting here is what Thomas shares about how storytellers memorize their tales for presentation. Storytellers use “stereotypical phrases and prolixities which stamp the gleeman’s style.” (Google page 33, Book page 48). 

This creates flat characters, but allows the storyteller to focus on action and plot, perhaps accompanied with body movement.

Thomas further notes that “the gleeman’s art is discernable in this repetition, also in a marked fondness for fantastic adventures, hair-breadth escapes, cunning tricks and disguises, and in general for the wildly fabulous.” (Google page 48, Book page 63)

As I watched school performances where young children recited poetry each in turn, I understood why their teachers had them do this from reading Thomas’s A History of the German Language; Literature is based on the foundation of oral literature’s strong plot structure, especially when accompanied by music.

By Ruth Paget,  Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I had the chance to visit Wisconsin’s Door County, located northeast of Milwaukee on a peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan with my family when I lived in Wisconsin.  Door County is famous for the fall colors of its trees, and since it was September I naturally wanted to visit.

When my daughter would want to join the conversation, I would say, “Tell me when you see cows, too,” so our talk was interspersed with cow sightings along the way.  As for me, I did not want to miss anything related to gastronomy and worried that I would miss the fish boil as we passed all the secondary roads we had to take between Madison and Door County to get there.

We arrived an hour before the fish boil, but that was not much time to get dressed for dinner.  I got my hotel room key and went to my room in the sprawling complex that made up the resort.  I arrived at the room, inserted my key, and broke it in half, leaving a piece in the lock.  My daughter started crying, because we would not be able to get into our room.

I called from a hallway courtesy phone and explained my predicament.  The hotel staff person arrived promptly and told me that I was trying to get into the wrong room.  He took me to the right room without lecturing me.  Time to get to the fish boil was slipping away.

I met my long-suffering car companion downstairs, and we drove to the restaurant where we met our spouses.  The telephone book in our room had a good explanation of this culinary specialty that put all the essentials in a nutshell.  I have paraphrased and supplemented the information as follows:

The Legendary Fish Boil

Scandinavian settlers and lumberjacks in Door County prepared fish steaks with potatoes and onions.  They threw it all in a pot and boiled it over an open fire.  Just before serving the fish boil, you throw gasoline over the fire and let the flames cause some of the stew to boil over .  You eat the fish with plenty of melted butter, a favorite beverage, and cherry pie.  Door County is famous for its cherries. 

The next morning my husband, daughter, and I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  We sat by a window and looked out over the tops of trees that were already turning orange, red, and golden yellows.  I castigated myself for being such a city girl and not knowing the names of the trees.  I could not take my eyes off the scenery.  I felt very fortunate to see this spot and understood why so many people from Chicago came here to escape the big city.

When my daughter and I came back to the room, I made plans to go into Egg Harbor.  Egg Harbor I discovered is trendy with many of shops selling clothing, crafts, and souvenirs.  There was no historical museum in town, or maybe I just could not find it.  I did get a small brochure at the information center that described how the town got its name in 1825 in one sentence, which basically said that there was a fight with eggs between six men on a trading flotilla. 

I was on a quest to buy a guide book about Door County and its history.  I went to a fabulous market on Main Street.  I only had a few minutes to look around, but a few items caught my eye – big city newspapers in the doorway, roasted chicken, anchovy paste, a great selection of wines from Europe and California, freshly baked muffins and breads, and vegetables carefully displayed in woven baskets.  I bought some postcards of Door County for my journal.

After that I went to several trendy shops.  I bought a great, inexpensive book at a store about the wood stave churches of the world.  Most of these churches are found in Norway, and I hoped I would visit them someday.  Until then, I would soak up what I could from the little book.  I walked down to the harbor through Harbor View Park.  The yachts would soon be stored I thought as I felt a slight chill in the autumn air.  We returned to the hotel to discuss lunch plans.

I told my husband how great the market was that I found, and we decided to go buy our lunch there.  We bought a roasted chicken, a pound of pasta salad, a bag of freshly baked wheat rolls, and a dozen apples.  We ordered dishes for our room from housekeeping and had a feast.  My daughter loved the chicken and was delighted to get the big piece of the wishbone when we pulled it.

After lunch my family took naps while I wrote.  When they woke up, we drove to Gill’s Rock.  My daughter played at the rock beach with her dad.  I checked out the tourist spots.  You know you are in tourist territory in Wisconsin when you can buy plaques with Chicago Bears insignia on them less than fifty miles from where the Green Bay Packers rule. 

On our return home, we concentrated on playing “Find the Barn” and “Count the Cows” with my daughter through a forest of blazing fall colors dotted with farms.My husband left before me to go to a meeting and arranged for the spouse of one of his colleagues to drive me and my daughter to Door County.  I chatted about raising children and the fish boil that we were supposed to attend once we arrived. 

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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