Help!

Let me just say that I cackled a little when I read your post :)

That said, I'm attending university in Marquette (northern coast of the UP) but grew up at the northern tip of the lower peninsula. Awesome local details: we're very dependent on tourism. And we hate it. In October, when tourism season is officially over, most of us have parties to celebrate XD Even though it means that essentially half of our town closes for the winter soon after.

One of the other things about the people in this area is that we like to see how early we can go swimming. I've done it in March, myself :) The inland lakes and rivers warm up before the Great Lakes, and Lake Superior never really warms up. I'm convinced the frigid water has healing powers, though: there's a place nearby where there's cliffs that everyone jumps off of in August and September (the kind of area that might be useful for the sirens, with or without the people). I've jumped in with a chest cold and come out healthy again :)

And yes: the cold is ridiculous when it gets to be February (I think we had -30 Fahrenheit last winter), but a lot of us still really love it :)

Hope this helps! I've lived in Michigan my whole life, so let me know if you need more info :)

Now I know how the moon feels when the sun comes up.

Well, I grew up in Iron Mountain, which is on the southern border of the UP. It's pretty rustic up here. As howthemoonfeels mentioned, we rely a lot on tourism. Mostly people come up in the summer to camp or in the fall to see the leaves changing color or to hunt. And we do a lot of outdoor sports: camping and fishing in the summer, hunting in the fall, and then ice fishing, skiing, snow shoeing, and snowmobiling in the winter. (We have a lot of winter sports because our winter lasts for about five months: Dec. to April)

As for the people, in general, we've got a lot of people of Swedish, German, Polish, and Finnish descent. So you get a lot of those kinds of names: Kinnunen, Kowalkowski, etc. Yoopers actually have a distinct accent, which sounds a lot like a Canadian accent (we use Eh a lot). Old-timers especially have a thicker accent. For more on accent/culture, I refer you to the band Da Yoopers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50IgzksUqpQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9yhhflmvY

There are also several Native American reservations around. We have Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes up here. I'll let you consult wikipedia, which I'm sure is as good a source of information as an outsider like me. Just don't believe what you see on television shows. Half the time you wouldn't even know you're driving through a reservation unless you happen to pass a casino (gambling is illegal in Michigan except for on reservations) and you might not even know you're talking to a Native American unless they show you their tribal card for some reason.

A lot of the towns up here sprang up around mining, so we've got a lot of small towns with names like Iron Mountain or Copper Harbor. But there's basically no mining anymore, so if your sirens were interested in hiding, there are plenty of abandoned mineshafts and such.

That's about all I can think of. You could also check out the sites towns up here, like http://www.ironmountain.org/ or in the Northern UP http://www.cityofhoughton.com/ or http://www.cityofhancock.com/

Hope that helps.

I'm from Houghton which is in the southern end of the northern tip, if that makes any sense.
I can't think of any local chains besides Vollwerth's and that's not technically a chain. Vollwerth's is pretty big around the UP and neighboring areas though. Take a look and http://www.vollwerth.com if you're interested in learning about the meat industry.
In smaller cities like Houghton it's hard to go somewhere with an adult without meeting a couple people said adult knows. One of the worst things (in my childish opinion, ha) is going into town with my grandpa. It takes us quite a while to get where we're going and back with all the catching up and gossiping that goes on. That's another thing: gossip. If something even semi-important happens up here, the whole city will know eventually. I don't really see how that's interesting (says the high school girl), but I'm just telling it like it is. How I see it, anyway.
As far as local restaurants go, I'd rather go to Armando's in downtown Houghton (they have the best French toast <3) than McDonald's or some other fast-food giant. I've always liked the local places better. They usually have a friendly atmosphere too, as opposed to the I'm-in-a-rush-let's-go-go-go atmosphere at fast-food places. It may take a little longer than Burger King, but it's so very worth it.
I hope that helps :)

As an official transplant from a HUGE city downstate, I can give you the outsider opinion. Don't know if it will help much.

First major thing that I've noticed, is that you don't think anything of driving long distances to get to thing. 2 hours to the nearest Arby's? I'll do it. I've been known to drive 5 hours into wisconsin just to go to an IHOP (international house of pancakes) and a "real" mall. Second, and big depending on the age of characters would be the drinking age. It's 21 in the states, but the drinking age in Ontario (the connecting part of canada) is 19. So it's not uncommon to make a trip across the boarder to hit up some bars.

Cliff jumping is a huge thing. As far as I can tell, everyone wants to do it, but most are afraid of hitting the cold water of Superior. (it's 56 Fahrenheit at it's warmest) Other random facts... If we make it to Thanksgiving (end of November) without snow, I would wonder if something's wrong. Most people won't put on a real winter coat until January when the temperature really starts to drop (-30 Fahrenheit or so). In early winter it's really easy to spot new people because they all have their mittens and scarves on. Oh, and one of my favorite memories from living up here was when the university had a snow day on April 1st. No one knew whether to believe it or not!

That's what I've come up with right now. If you want to know more just ask!

I'm from the Menominee, Michigan area, which is on the border of Michigan and Wisconsin. My family's been here since 1869 or so (so we were in time for the great Peshtigo fire of 1891 which killed over a thousand people.

Menominee is about 2 climate zones warmer than Marquette. My grandmother used to say she lived in the Banana Belt. (It's still cold as heck here in the winter, though.)

Like most folks, my dad had to leave the area to find work, so I grew up in places like Colorado, Washington State and California. When we went back to visit the grandparents every year I was amazed by the local accent my cousins had.

One thing that's popular out here is ice boating. An ice boat is similar to a sailboat but goes on ice when the bay (Menominee is on the bay of Green Bay) is frozen. There is a lot of ice fishing and the ice gets dotted with ice fishing shacks. Every year some one doesn't get his ice fishing shack off the ice in time.

The really big event around here is gun deer season which is 15-30 November. In a lot of businesses it's taken for granted that the men will take time off work for hunting. A lot of men hunt from deer blinds--- small shacks about the size of a phone booth. Near my farm, one fellow has a deer blind with a satellite dish on it.

In Menominee, because it is on the Wisconsin border, we get all our news and our television channels from Wisconsin. Most folks here are fans of the Green Bay Packers football team (based in Green Bay, Wisconsin). During the football season, at my mom's church her pastor has to keep the sermon short when there is going to be a Packers game. A lot of people wear clothing with Green Bay Packers emblems on it--- sometimes as much as 1/3 of the people you see on the street.

2009 - The Aether Key: Christian steampunk
2005 - Viridians: Alien invasion story (didn't win)
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Wow!

Thanks so much for all your recollections and facts... the more i hear about the UP the more I want to move there, it sounds like an incredible place.

Love all the bits about hunting, ice boating, cliff diving and mining. I think i might put some old ex-mining 'ghost' towns into the story. I might even put in a character from the Vollwerth & Baroni dynasty! Plus i've GOT to work the casino's in somehow!

My characters haven't reached Michigan yet, they've still got to wrestle some alligators in Florida and possibly learn how to hot-wire a car. But they're on their way!

Is forestry a big industry in your neck of the woods (sorry, i couldn't help myself!)

Thanks again for all your help. I'm sure i'll think of lots more in depth questions before the month's out, but you've given me loads to think about in the mean time.

If any of you need to know anything about the UK i'd be happy to reciprocate

x V x

Lots of people think that they would love to move to the UP. However, if you ever visit in the winter, it is really bone-crystallizing cold, some areas can get over 300 inches of snowfall in a year, and many people often shovel their roofs. Winter can hold tight for 6 months or more in some areaswith temperatures regularly below freezing and sometimes far below zero (F).

If you think that is OK, just wait for the summer to arrive it involves hot temperatures, high humidity, thick flocks of mosquitoes, black flies beyond belief, ferocious sand flies, and "no-see-ums" (they're the little ones that seem to take chunks of skin with them). In fact I just read an account from the late 19th Century that stated it like this: "The ceiling, the bedticks, and everything in the room would be covered with them at times. O horrors, covered with the little biters, how can one sleep? This is a fine country for bedbugs, mosquitoes, black flies, and Cornishmen."

Other than that, a couple of days that are kind of nice get mixed in once in a while. Then there are thos eof us who think of all this as home - which there is no better place, really! :)

One of the things that I think would be funny for your story is that the locals might not know what a "siren" is. For many, the only sirens they might have encountered were the ones on the Conservation Officer's patrol vehicle when they were getting chased for poaching -or- the one that goes off at noon on the first Monday of every month to make sure the air-raid early warning is still functioning OK.

Yep, we've got a lot of logging up here. So much so that my boss (at a non-logging company) has a bumper sticker that reads: "If you object to logging, try using plastic toilet paper."

But we've got lots of untouched forest, too. You can tell which patches of trees are replanted after logging because there's just a bunch of pine trees in perfectly straight rows.

shovel the roof?
that's for transplants......we lifers park a second snowblower on the roof. LOL!

7th year participant
5-time Nano winner
5th year ML
Municipal Liason for Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Hi Victoria...I've lived my whole life in the U.P. except 3 years in the Army (spending 30 months in Germany).

I was born and raised in Norway, MI that is nine miles east of Iron Mountain and the County is Dickinson that borders the state of Wisconsin. The seperation of the two states is the Menominee River which crookedly travels from northwest to southeast. Population varies between 6,000 to 20,000 people; Iron Mountain has a twin city south called Kingsford and the main road is M95 that starts just west of Marquette, MI and travels straight south to Iron Mountain and then through Kingsford,MI and then across a bridge into a small town of Aurora, WIsconsin.

I moved to Iron Mountain from Norway after the Army in 1972 and my life has been set. The main road for 400 miles is US2 that begins at the bridge that separates the two Michigan peninsula (upper & lower) travels west through many towns. Iron Mountain is 200 miles from the bridge (halfway point for US2) that continues west all the way to Duluth, Minnesota.

Iron Mountain has been considered the Bahamas of the U.P. as the average snowfall through winter is about 60 to 80 inches. The two Great Lakes that borders the U.P. Lake Michigan 50 miles to the east of Iron Mountain and Lake Superior 80 miles to the north causes much of the snowfall and the towns near these Great Lakes will receive anywhere from 100 to 400 inches of snow in the winter.

I hate winter, especially as I near 60 years of age, however, I believe from the bottom of my heart that this is God's country and am set to finish my life out right here in Iron Mountain. My works in progress in the past ten years are novels that take place right here in my back yard. I, too, have a main fictious town called Rock Hill that is east of Iron Mountain about where Norway is located.

Some of the towns close along US2 are to the east, Quinnesec, Norway, Vulcan, Lorreto, Wacedah, Hermansville, Powers, Bark River, Escanaba, and onward to the bridge for another 150 miles and to the west along US2 is Spread Eagle, WIsconsin (YES) (Spread Eagle is a chain of nine lakes that from the air the image is of an eagle with spread wings), Florence, Wisconsin, back into Michigan to Crystal Falls, Iron River, Bessemer, Iron Wood onward for another 120 miles to Duluth.

Happy writing...

http://www.thecliffchamber.com/deathbydenial.htm

Clifford P Wollum
Pen: Thecliff Chamber

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the food! There are a few things that are distinctly UP cuisine and I'm just a native of downstate!

The first thing you have to know is that the UP, especially around the Straights of Mackinaw, is famous for it's fudge. Just about every tourist trap-ish store I've ever set foot in has it. Tourists are actually quite famous for buying it in great numbers and it makes a great last-minute Christmas present when you're at the bridge and you realize you haven't bought anything for your father yet.

The second fairly famous food we export are pasties. That's PAST-ie not PASTE-ie, mind you. We eat them instead of covering our nipples with them. A pasty is a full meal in a crust like package. Traditionally, it's ground beef, carrots, onion, potato, and rutabaga mixed together and baked in full shell made up of flour, butter (or lard), and water. The recipe is supposedly based on a Finnish dish and became popular during the mining heydays. A pasty, taken fresh from the oven and wrapped in newspaper, could be carried in a miner's hat and still be warm for lunch. The best pasty shops typically have more then just the traditional pasty recipe though. And I'm more then willing to claim that the best pasties in the entire UP come from Roy's Bakery in Houghton. Their breakfast pasty is to die for and their Thanksgiving pasty is so good it's criminal.

Besides that, people up here tend to eat a lot of heavier foods, especially in the winter. There's also a fairly large problem with drinking and high depression rates (at least in Houghton.) Crime is nearly non-existent except for the occasional big crime that shocks everyone. Trash cans that are bear-proof are fairly common in park and outlying areas and I'm personally still waiting for the day when I finally see a wild wolf, damn their shy ways. I've seen bear, moose, and elk, but those stupid wolves still elude me.

I can also second the fact that driving distances that would normally be insane for trivial things become secondary. I too have driven two hours to go to a restaurant, but for some reason my roommate and I agreed that we couldn't survive much longer if we didn't get Red Lobster cheesy biskets. Luckily for us, our server found this declaration to be hilarious so he hooked us up with two carry out boxes filled with them (and got the hugest tip I've ever left for a server) which we froze and enjoyed for quite a long time.

http://mimzy-tulgeywood.blogspot.com/

Actually pasties were imported to the UP with the Cornish miners and they are still really common in the UK. You can find them in just about every train station and famous public area in London. Though, it may seem blasphemous to my fellow Yoopers, I like the pasties in the UK better than those in the UP (I've had Roy's and I agree they are among the best in the UP - but even the one I had this summer from a little booth at King's Cross train station was far better.)

Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_people#Cuisine

I'm a big fan of the pasties, especially the traditional minced beef and veg ones.

we have a chain here called the cornish pasty company which pretty much sells nothing but pasties! Never had a thanksgiving pasty though - they sound awesome (turkey? cranberries? pumpkin pie?)

I had no idea they were so popular over in Michigan, nor that fudge was such a big seller. So thanks for the info.

I've been inspired by your descriptions of winter to be really mean to my sirens... i think I might trap them in a blizzard perhaps. Plus i love the idea of the locals not really understanding what a siren means - that's a great idea!

Hope your writing is going well, i'm seriously behind because i've been out celebrating bonfire/Guy Fawkes night - lots of fireworks, firecrackers, flaming torches and drunken revelry.

On that note... are there any interesting local festivals or traditions that you think might be fun to include in a story?. For example, round where I live we have an annual pea throwing contest and the 'burning of the clocks' to mark the winter solstice. A recent addition to local celebrations is the mass zombie 'breakout' every halloween.

So, I really should crack on with the writing!

Thanks once again for all your help and inspiration.

Victoria

Victoria,
What is the Burning of the Clocks ceremony? Can you describe what happens, how it unfolds or plays out?
Thanks!

can anybody here accurately describe the Trenary Outhouse Races for Victoria? I have not actually been to them.....

7th year participant
5-time Nano winner
5th year ML
Municipal Liason for Michigan's Upper Peninsula

That was the first thing I thought of, too. I've never been to the Outhouse Races, so I won't do them the injustice of trying. The other thing I thought of, Victoria, is Winter Carnival. Every February, student organizations at Michigan Tech University go to great lengths to build some incredible snow statues. If you google, you can find some great photos of some of the statues. I don't know anyone who lives in the U.P. who doesn't make a point to visit Houghton for the snow statues!

I lived in Houghton for several years, and I have to tell you--it is the greatest place on earth. I will tell you two quick things, just to make you smile--even though they may not be at all helpful to your writing process.

First, when I was 15, we had so much snow that year that I literally would crawl out my second-story bedroom window to sneak out at night, and I'd just slide down the pile of snow. :)

Second, when I was...uhm...a little bit older--17, maybe?...a friend of mine's family owned a cabin with a sauna out in the middle of nowhere. So one weekend in the middle of winter, a bunch of us went out to the cabin, and we thought it would be fun to play a game of naked tag. So we stripped naked, went into the sauna and got as hot as we could stand it...and then rushed outside and ran naked in the snow. It wasn't a LONG game, mind you, but it was fun. I later confessed the story to a Yooper friend of mine, only to learn that they'd been doing that for years! Hahaha!

It really is a great culture. There are a series of jokes about two great mythical Yoopers named Toivo and Eino. Snow is often referred to as "albino mosquitoes." Someone mentioned language--yes, we say "eh" a lot; we also say "you's guys."

Bonus Points to whoever mentioned Da Yoopers! ...on the Road to Gwin... :D

Agh...you got me distracted. I've gotta get back to writing!

There are tons of fudge shops in the southern UP...when you walk down the boardwalks and downtown the smells greet you and if you're a chocolate lover it's hard to resist. Lots of ice cream shops as well. Down by the water the winds are generally very high. It's brisk and refreshing, if that makes sense. The thing I love most is that everyone is really friendly and open. If you walk into a store to find something it isn't unusual to hear the life story of one of the patrons that you've never met before. There is no need for you to talk, they just start and keep going. The sunsets are the loveliest, but sunrise is nothing to bat an eye at. It seems as though the sky is always a fuchsia pink/red combination. I might have some photos if you'd like. If you want a feeling for the people, try Somewhere in Time, which was filmed on Mackinaw Island, or Escanaba in da Moonlight, which is a comedy, but is quite accurate of the hunter/yooper types I know. The towns are small, most of them are coastal, near the water, fishing in the summer, and ice fishing in the winter. The streets are horrid. Generally lots of pot holes, seventy degree inclines and narrow. Winter is harsh. We get anywhere from five to ten feet of snow at a time, and by the end of winter the snowbanks are taller than most people. It makes driving extremely difficult, especially when turning onto busy streets in a small car.

Hope this helps...

"Memory believes before knowing remembers...."

Hey RootyToo,

Burning of the clocks is a big procession through the streets of Brighton. Hundreds of people construct paper lanterns, often with a clock motif but often just totally random - people, animals, random objects.

Candles or lights are placed in the lanterns and the whole procession walks through the main streets of Brighton accompanied by various drumming bands, dancers etc.

They slowly make their way down to the beach where all the lanterns are amassed into a huge pile and then set alight (accompanied by music, fireworks and dancing).

It's quite a recent tradition, probably only been going on for the last ten years or so. But it's quite beautiful and dramatic and for one evening totally transforms the city of Brighton into this amazing procession of light. I think the concept was to mark the end of the solar year, you can find out more from this website (plus check out the gallery of pictures):

http://www.burningtheclocks.co.uk/index2_new.php

Wow! the outhouse races sound amazing! I've been checking out some youtube videos, very amusing.

Plus Semmie, thanks so much for your stories about the snow, i love the idea of sliding out a bedroom window into the snow. Here in Brighton we get excited if it snows once during the winter and we go delirious if the snow sticks around long enough to make snow men. Last year the whole city ground to a halt when we had about a foot of snow!

V

Hey Victoria,

I recall a newspaper article from about 6 or 7 years back about an elderly Upper Peninsula man getting stuck in a snowbank when the snow from the roof of his house slid down on top of him. He lived way out in the country, so few people ever made to where he lived, though he did have one neighbor (whose house was short distance through the woods). When the neighbor returned from work at about 6 pm (which is after dark in the winter) he could hear a sound through the trees that he had never heard before. Because it was a bit eerie sounding, he took the time to go get his gun out of the house to go and investigate.

After looking around for a while (and actually pointing the gun at his neighbor), he discovered that it was his neighbor yelling for help that he initially heard. He had been stuck in the snow right outside the window where his telephone was for about 7 hours. Now, I am sure that it was quite a frightful experience for the old man...and initially a bit nerve-wracking for the neighbor who saved him. However, given that your story is about sirens - I thought that the "beautiful sounds to lure sailors to their death" combined with a siren being trapped in a snow bank for hours - howling (or singing) for help - could be a really funny scene.

-Tom

Has anyone mentioned what a big deal snowmobiling is up here yet?

This is something you can't get away from around here. There are some communities (Munising, on Lake Superior, comes to mind) where the important season is really the *winter* season, because it brings snowmobilers from downstate and the Chicago area. They dump *tons* of money into the local economies. I think that somebody has pointed out that this relationship between monied outsiders and the locals who rely on them is sometimes rocky.

Something that has also gained in stature over the past decade and a a half is dogsled-racing. Here, in Marquette, we have a major race every February--the UP 200. Mushers come from all over the country, including Alaska (it's a qualifying race for the Iditarod). It's a 200 mile race that covers a lot of territory, on both the northern tier and southern tier, of the central UP.

You may have gotten the idea that snow is a big part of our lives up here. We talk about it all the time; it's a perverse point of pride for some people to come from one of the snowiest places in the midwest. People still talk about the time, about fifteen years ago, when five feet of snow fell in St. Ignace in just one weekend.

See? I'm doing it right now....

It's not uncommon to see second floor stairways on the outside of some of the older houses in the Houghton/Copper Country area. In the days before snow removal (yes, we have snow *removal* here--they don't just plow it to the side; they occasionally scoop it up and truck it away, otherwise our city streets would be down to one lane by February) people's houses would get so buried that the first floor doors would become non-functional.

People up here either get good at finding ways to occupy themselves or they go crazy. People tend to be pretty self-directed (at least the happy ones do). We don't have a lot of easy sources of preconfigured amusement that folks in bigger communities might be used to, so we have to be much more self-contained. I went to a tiny college downstate, maybe an hour and a half from Detroit, and I used to take great amusement in the fact that many of my more urban peers there felt isolated on the small campus.

If you want something of the flavor of local attitudes, read the Hemmingway Nick Adams stories. Lots of them ("Big Two-Hearted River" for example) are set up here, or at least nearby in the northern tip of lower Michigan.

Victoria,
Your story sounds very fun! You got some good info from the fine folks here. Living in Marquette for a few years, Tennessee a few years, Georiga a few, Northern tip of the Lower Peninsula a few (I'm a rolling stone.) I think you picked a great setting. One important thing to put in your story...the small town bar!! I met some of the most memorable characters of my life in small town UP bars!