Fisherman have been out in droves, enjoying the tail end of a prolonged Indian summer. Then came last week’s early snow. The sportsmen quickly packed up their Orvis rods and headed home, mostly downstate. But the locals? Most stayed on the water, however cold. For them it’s less about fun than home economics. They have to stock their freezers for the winter.
Few Americans, especially those who live in cities, appreciate the degree to which we are still a society of hunter-gatherers. Visit Michigan’s north woods after the leaves turn, and you see it. You also begin to understand the political change that’s hit Michigan—and other bellwether states—and why polls are showing that the Republican Party is in trouble.
Michigan went narrowly to John Kerry in 2004. But that’s because Detroit and other cities are heavily Democratic. Rural Michigan has long been Republican country, the more so the further north you go. This Nov. 7, though, that looks less and less likely to be so.
The town of Seney (pop. 180) in the heart of the Upper Peninsula was once a lumber capital. Hemingway immortalized it in a short story, “Big Two Hearted River.” Today, there’s a granary and gas station doubling as a general store, the sort of place that sells a lot of cigarettes and beef jerky. A pair of hunters stand chatting about the coming deer season. It had better be good, one says. Construction work down south has grown scarce, and the family larder was getting bare.
Trout Lake, 40 miles further along US 28, known for its snowmobiling, is slightly bigger and boasts a weather-beaten tavern with a wooden bear outside the front door. The woman who runs it says she could bring in more money by closing the place and collecting unemployment. But she won’t. “This wouldn’t be a community without it,” she says, nodding at the crowds of farmers and workmen with their families enjoying Sunday dinner. According to state statistics, roughly one in 10 people up here live in poverty, a number that’s been growing in recent years and even now is almost surely understated. At the bar, a trucker speaks of heading to Canada to bag a moose. “Heck, that’ll feed the whole pack of yiz for a year,” says a companion. Another told how, last year, he shot a black bear. He kept the head, pelt and claws and turned the rest into steaks.
I’d passed through this neck of woods last year on a fishing trip of my own. But there’s been a palpable change since then. Detroit’s troubles are part of it. Everyone in Michigan depends on the auto industry in one way or another. Everyone knows more losses and more layoffs are coming. FOR SALE signs have sprouted in yards across the state. At Detroit airport, I listened to a man talking to his mother-in-law over a cell phone. Her husband had died, apparently, and she wanted to sell their home. But prices in Macomb County, north of the city, are down some 30 percent or so. The woman’s neighbors had twice reduced the price they were asking for their house. After six months there were still no takers. “Mom, we’ll just have to hope for the best,” the man was saying.
A recent headline in the Detroit Free Press tells how employers in Wyoming, suffering a labor shortage, are recruiting workers from Michigan. Readers of the Petoskey News-Review seek advice. A woman from Alpena can no longer afford the premium on her medical insurance. Another, who has no health insurance at all, wonders whether her house is protected under state bankruptcy law from medical creditors.
The Iraq war seems far away here. But it isn’t, not with so many Michiganders in the military. In the swampy headwaters of the Jordan River, near the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, a late-season trout fisherman pauses amid a stand of hemlocks. “We never had no business there,” he says flatly. It’s time to get out. A wealthy lawyer who summers in Charlevoix, a resort town on Lake Michigan, tells me he’s never, not once, voted anything but Republican in his life. He’s making no promises, but he says this year may be different.
It isn’t merely a war gone wrong that makes people mad. Nor is it the latest sex and corruption scandals, or the widespread impression that Republican leaders are covering up. Michigan’s sense of malaise goes deeper, even beyond worries about jobs and the local economy. No, the real sticking point is at once broader and more amorphous. Two of three voters think that Michigan and the country are on a wrong course. Increasingly, they feel the nation’s leaders are out of touch with the problems and needs of ordinary people, especially those whose livelihoods depend on such things as the whimsy of the salmon run. As that fisherman in the swamp told it, “They just don’t give a damn.”
All this is a bit hard to judge from the polls, since incumbent Democrats look set to win in November. But it can be glimpsed, perhaps, in the way Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm has pulled away from her challenger, conservative Republican Dick DeVos, son of the billionaire founder of Amway. From a dead heat in August, the latest surveys show Granholm now up by 8 to 17 points. A Detroit woman, explaining her choice in the Free Press, described the GOP candidate as a “selfish millionaire” cut from the same cloth as George W. Bush. Much for the first time this year, I heard similar sentiments Up North.
Yes, there’s been a weather change in northern Michigan. It’s coming elsewhere in the country, too.
