I had a ridiculously beautiful morning on the Leelanau Peninsula last week that was actually beautiful and completely ridiculous. I’m currently up north, away from sv Ruth Ann, earning some boat money, and freezing my ass off. It was easy for me to get another driving job because I drove a semi for so many years while working on boats. In the last couple weeks, I’ve spent several days helping out the Traverse City location of the company I drive for. That location has a contract with Amazon and they are overwhelmed with holiday deliveries. Luckily, there are relatively few residential deliveries. Instead, Amazon sends pre-palletized loads of packages that we deliver to rural post offices so that the men and women of the USPS can deliver to the actual retail customers. More than once I have ended up on the Leelanau route.
When I, or one of my fellow Grand Rapids drivers, is sent to help out the Traverse City guys, the process is daunting. We leave our Grand Rapids terminal at 1:00 AM to drive about three hours up to Traverse City. After scanning the ubiquitous bar codes, the pallets and packages are loaded on our truck for us to cover one of their routes ... and then drive all the way back to Grand Rapids. It is almost always a thirteen or fourteen hour day.
On one particular morning last week there was a Winter Storm Warning. I got to do the Leelanau route in all the snow and ice that such a warning implies. But the route also took me onto that beautiful peninsula where I stopped at the little storefront post offices in Lake Leelanau, Suttons Bay, Leland, and Northport. I also had a rug and a treadmill to deliver to specific addresses; the rug to a house and the treadmill to an apartment complex. My first stop on the way out of town was the main Traverse City post office. The roads were fine on that first short leg in town but I had to use a bunch of ice melt and all my rusty winter driving skills just to get my truck out of their dock.
The rest of the trip around the peninsula was daunting but doable. The downtown Post Office was the only one with a truck dock. Everywhere else I had to lower the skids to the ground with the truck’s lift gate and unload all the Amazon packages onto carts that could get through the door and into the buildings. All the while getting soaked with sweat and pelted by snow.
When it came time to deliver the rug out in the middle of the peninsula, I had to watch the overhead power lines for the last couple miles to make sure that I didn’t yank the electricity off of someone’s house in the middle of a winter storm. When I finally got to the last turn, my delivery was up a hill into a swanky looking neighborhood; each large house barely visible through the woods was down a quarter mile long driveway. Halfway up the hill, the truck’s tires began to spin as the back end shimmied. My forward progress had not only stopped but the truck and I were slowly sliding backward. I surrendered, backed down the hill, and tried to call dispatch, but I was so far out in the boondocks that there was no signal for my phone or the company tablet. I drove back into Suttons Bay and was able to make the call. Eventually, my dispatcher in Grand Rapids just had me return the rug to our Traverse City warehouse.
But first I had to find the apartment complex back in Traverse City and wrestle a fancy -- heavy – treadmill through a slushy parking lot and into the leasing office.
The Leelanau Peninsula is a beautiful area. I would have much preferred it in the summertime, but I will concede that the snow clinging on the trees and the sight of the grey, slightly foggy Grand Traverse Bay were sublime. I spent much of the morning on M-22, a state highway with its own brand. I’ve spotted M-22 stickers on cars all over the country and I even have my own M-22 story.
Years ago, while in high school in Charlotte, Michigan, my best friend Doug and I hatched a plan to do a bicycle camping trip around the Leelanau Peninsula. We were young and invincible but were somehow smart enough to make a test run rather than just head north with a couple bikes and a tent. In preparation, we decided that we would ride our bikes over to Eaton Rapids from Charlotte and back. It was about 10 miles one way and I think we had planned to stop for lunch or something and then head back. We might have even planned to stop at Miller’s Ice Cream Shop. It wasn’t carb-loading or anything planned, we were just going to do it. It must have been a weekday too, because, as the story ends, we’ll learn that Dad wasn’t home.
We had no gear but we each had a bike and a water bottle. One decent summer day, we just started pedaling east down M-50; another storied state highway. This was over forty years ago and I have no way of knowing for certain, but I don’t think we paid much attention to the weather forecast. It seemed like a decent morning, we had talked about doing it, and ... hey, you wanna go today? Sure.
We both lived on the east side of town and several blocks to the south, we would have turned onto Shepherd Street, as M-50 was called on that side of town. Over the bridge at US-27, now I-69, we passed some gentlemen farmer houses with big beautiful yards. The well-heeled lived on the north side of town near the country club but this stretch was a close second; although today there is a Meijer store over there and I imagine - lots more traffic. Soon we were cycling out into corn and cow country. Big farms spread out on each side of the road with giant “wolf trees” along the ditch and in the yards of old farmhouses.
We passed a big grain elevator and then a gravel pit on the other side. There was a lonely, run down country market; really just a party store with bait and ammo. And then more corn and more cows. We weren’t racing, the riding was fairly easy, but as we cruised along the sky was darkening to the south of us. It was concerning but we were already about halfway to Eaton Rapids, so we pressed on.
When the first chilly downdrafts hit us, I think we might have stopped to rest our legs and take a closer look at the clouds. It was then that we could see that the weather straight behind us was just as bad. Tall, dark clouds loomed over Charlotte where we had started, but we were so close by then it only made sense to continue. If we needed to take cover or something, more cover was closer where we were headed. The dark horizon ruled out running back toward home. We mounted our bikes and got going again.
The storm swallowed us up in a pincer move as it swept over us from the south and then swallowed us up from behind. Horizontal rain came at us and hit like rubber bullets. The wind blew across the open fields picking up debris and smattering it against us. We were soaking wet and covered on one side with leaves and dirt. Fighting against the cross breeze, we struggled to stay demurely on the shoulder as cars and trucks flew by. The big trucks would cause a maelstrom of leaves and debris that threatened to cover the rest of us in the detritus of the fields.
The squall had passed by the time we made it to the edge of Eaton Rapids. As the sun started to peek back through the clouds, our clothes started to dry off. We had bitten off a bit more than we knew how to chew and were exhausted by the trip but especially from battling our way through the storm. Up ahead, around a curve near the river, was the old Miller’s Ice Cream Parlor. We pulled in, shook the last of the leaves out of our hair and found a table inside. The old parlor was a classic ice cream shop with dozens of ice cream flavors in buckets behind the glass of a long row of coolers. The counters were marble accenting the black and white tile floor. Even our little table had a black and white marble top on a wrought iron frame. We sat on round cushioned chairs with curly wrought iron legs that would have fit at a woman’s vanity table as well as it the matched the parlor decor.
I don’t remember what we ordered but this was long before cellphones, so I called Mom from the payphone back by the shop’s restrooms. She had been distressed by the weather and was quite happy to know that we had stopped. Before I could even explain how tired we were, she was sending Uncle Gord to get us with his pickup truck. Mom had the family station wagon but also had my younger brother and sister at home. Dad was at work but luckily Uncle Gord, a truckdriver, just happened to be in town that day and he was on his way.
Whatever we might have ordered, I don’t think we ever got our food. Just as I was returning to our table after calling Mom, smoke started coming through a floor vent behind the ice cream coolers. After a few moments, the smoke seemed to surge into a billow. A young waitress grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and headed into the basement. A couple minutes later, she returned, white as a ghost, and holding the fire extinguisher before her like an injured child.
“It doesn’t work,” she whispered of the extinguisher as if it could have been hurt by her words.
The decision was quickly made to call the fire department – which was right next door. However, the fire engines could literally not make the tight turn out of their station and into the parking lot of the ice cream parlor. Instead, they burst out of their building, sirens blaring, and screamed down the street past us. They went around a block, and came back to turn left into the parking lot. Just as the firemen jumped off their trucks and burst into the shop, I could see Uncle Gord’s old pickup with the extra tall bed topper slowly pull in behind the fire trucks. He greeted us with a smirk and we quickly loaded our bikes.
Uncle Gord was a bit of a free spirit, especially in his younger days. As a truck driver, he had surely seen stranger things than an ice cream parlor parking lot filled with fire trucks. Back in the day, he had water-skied in the shows at Cypress Gardens down in Florida and had taught all of us kids how to ski behind his boat. We all learned to step off onto a slalom ski rather than getting up on two skis and then dropping one. It was a special time and place to grow up. One time out at “The River” he casually picked up my guitar and played an Eagles song. Before then, I had never even known that he played. He was one of my heroes. He was also probably part of the reason I smoked Camel Lights for a time.
Doug and I never did make that Leelanau trip.
Small Town Midwest Life – long before we had hashtags.
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