Saturday, July 29, 2006
A Week in Michigan: Part 2
Palisades Park, where we're staying, is located about fifty miles from the southernmost part of the Lake Michigan, and about five miles south of South Haven, Michigan. The whole are was a popular resort from before the turn of the century, when large steamships would cross the lake from Chicago. South Haven was also a prominent port, particularly for the lumber that was used to rebuild Chicago after the great fire in 1871, as well as for agricultural goods. It was still a thriving place in the 1950s, when my mom was spending the whole summer here waitressing, running the summer programs at the Palisades Park clubhouse, and hanging out on the beach.
By the 1970s, the area had declined pretty hard: the internal combustion engine was both taking vacationers to more exotic locations and killing Great Lakes shipping. But in the last 30 years, things have improved, and today South Haven and the whole shore are a thriving resort again, particularly for folks escaping Chicago's heat. Just about the only boats in the harbor, at the mouth of the Black River, are sailboats and yachts.The town is also the commercial hub of the area, and since Palisades Park itself has no grocery store and only a snack bar near the beach, it's where we go for supplies and a homeopathic dose of town life. To the extent possible, we try to patronize the businesses in the center of town, but increasingly unless we're looking for beach towels, souvenir shirts, sunblock, or the cinnamon rolls from the Golden Brown Bakery, it's increasingly difficult to do. On one of my shopping expeditions, I'm looking for a cable to connect John's camera to my computer, the one he lent me having apparently been lost somewhere near Toledo. "Is there a camera store in town?" I ask at the visitor's center. No, I'm told. "You probably have to go to Wal-Mart."
So off I go to the outskirts of town, crossing over, yes, the Interstate, to arrive here. I'll leave debates over the relative merits and evils of Wal-Mart to other sites. For now, suffice it to say that within five minutes of entering the place, I'm so depressed I want to scream. I don't know what it is, exactly. The bad lighting? The enervated stares of other customers and employees? The insistent, ubiquitous happy face? Need I mention there's a McDonald's inside?And yet, to their credit, there's also a very helpful employee in the photo department who finds me exactly what I need, any of which is more than I can say for the Radio Shack on South Haven's main drag.
I escape and convalesce by going around the corner to Sherman's Dairy. Back when, Sherman's was located way out of town in a cow pasture that presumably was occupied by the happy cows whose great joy was providing milk for our ice cream; now, of course, their meadow is somewhere underneath the parking lot above, and Wal-Mart and its neighbors are redefining where the center of town is. Be that as it may, Sherman's still makes pretty damn good ice cream, which today comes in the form of a strawberry shake.
The blue cow on the roof, incidentally, is a tribute to the local specialty flavor, Blue Moon. You would think that Blue Moon would have something to this being the blueberry capital of the world. You would be wrong. A couple of years ago, I ordered some, purely out of scientific interest, and determined that it tastes nothing like blueberries. My neice Emily informs me that it's just vanilla ice cream with blue food coloring, and that pretty well jibes with my recollection.
But whatever its exact ingredients, the stuff is basically crack to anyone under the age of 10. It's astonishing. We'll go into the soda bar at Palisades Park, and everyone under 48 inches is ordering Blue Moon. There might as well not be any other flavors in the world. There's no considering the relative merits of rocky road vs. Oreo. You don't even have to ask. You do, however, have to clean up. Here's my nephew Mac in the aftermath of a relatively benign Blue Moon episode.(Note the streak of ice cream going up his left nostril. Incidentally, the stuff tends to stain not merely clothing but skin.)
Back at Palisades Park, we do things like climbing trees in the woods:
...and hiking in the dunes...
...and going to the beach.
