Bridge and Story Spine

On a cloudy day last week I got a photo or two on a bike ride into Mackinaw city, which mysteriously loaded today. (The others didn't; and these haven't until now. What motivates a blog's inner workings?) The important thing about Mackinaw City is of course the Mackinaw Bridge, linking Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas. This photo looks east at the bridge; I’m standing, with my bike, in Lake Michigan, and on the other side the water mysteriously becomes Lake Huron.



I find it remarkable, after traveling in places like Copenhagen and Istanbul, and living in Seattle, to come back here to where I spent my childhood and see how comparatively UNdeveloped this place is, given that it shares with those other locations an incredibly strategic spot on major waterways. On the other hand, the straits here literally freeze over every winter, so that you can drive a car out onto the ice (maybe they don’t really need the bridge, that time of year!), which I don’t think happens in those places. But even more, the issue is the historical period of development; Istanbul developed way, way, way back when, Copenhagen a little more recently, but still it was the age of sail. The best possible way anybody could get anything anyplace, in those days, was by boat. In Mackinaw, the history is quite different; the settlement here started in the mid-1700s, with the Jesuit Father Marquette (and his sidekick Joliet) stopping up here, founding the little town of St. Ignace on the other side of the bridge, and blessing Fort Michilimackinac (nowadays a tourist trap), which played a role in the French and Indian War. But by the time there were enough people living up in this part of the world for the straits to become strategically important, cars had taken the place of trains, and sailing was a rich man’s hobby. In the 1950s, as superhighways were taking over America, the Mackinaw Bridge was built. This shot now from the Lake Huron side, looking west (and a little north) at the bridge and Lake Michigan behind it.



I grew up with the bridge and never considered it anything particularly special, even each year when we biked across it to celebrate Labor Day. My father, who used to work on the car ferries that once connected the peninsulas, always hated the bridge. It may be that that's why he built our cottage a long ways outside of Mackinaw City, on idyllic, remote Trailsend Bay. We're close enough that you can bike into town to get an incredibly delicious fresh trout or whitefish to grill; but quiet enough that you can really bear down and get some work done, too. That's progressing well, I'm happy to say; Herr Wagner's bio is gradually yielding its secrets. In terms of my screenplay, it's become clear to me what the protagonist's chief desire is: he wants to be a god. What's scary about this story is that in a sense, he got what he wanted.