Dinner in Paradise, But Someday Going to Hell

I need to say I’ve been to Paradise. Paradise, Mich., that is, which is just south of Whitefish Point. In fact, I ate a whitefish sandwich in Paradise, and it was good, but not paradisiacal. To balance things out, I have to visit Hell sometime. Hell, Mich., that is, which is near Ann Arbor.

Paradise is not tropical. (Who says it is, anyway?) Paradise is temperate, and probably gets a lot of snow in winter. Paradise for cross-country skiers and snowmobilers, then.

Another of the UP’s many sub-peninsulas is Garden Peninsula, which juts southwestward into Lake Michigan and separates the main body of that lake from the wonderfully named Big Bay De Noc. As we were driving down the peninsula—a slight detour on the way home last Monday—I thought it looked familiar. A mix of small towns and small farms, attractively green this time of year. A landscape mix that reminded me of where? I puzzled it over for a few minutes, then remembered our trip to Door County, Wis.

Garden Peninsula is Door County’s opposite number in Michigan. Door County sticks out from Wisconsin like a large splinter and essentially defines Green Bay as a partly separate body of water. Garden Peninsula reaches down toward Door County, but the two don’t touch. If they did, Green Bay would be a sixth Great Lake, or maybe a near-Great Lake, since it would be smaller than even Lake Erie.

Door County’s a pretty place, and easily accessible from Chicago and Milwaukee, and so it has a highly visible tourist industry to go with the small towns and farms. Garden Peninsula is pretty too, but not conveniently located, so it doesn’t have a highly visible tourist industry—it’s Door County without (many) antique shops, artisan colonies, famed cherry pies or heavily promoted Saturday-night fish boils.

It does have Fayette State Historic Park, which, to judge by the dozen or so people wandering its spacious grounds on Memorial Day, not many people know about. It’s a ghost town, but not the sort of tumbleweed ghost town that we all know from Hollywood. It’s an industrial ghost town, the remains of a place that smelted pig iron in the years after the Civil War, but did not last past the end of the 19th century. More about which tomorrow.