When you move to your new home, you and your younger brother meet the two children whose grandparents live across the street. They are from the country, and they don't talk like anyone you've ever met. In the summer, they pluck strips of tar from the road in front of your house, and chew them like candy. They smile at you, and their teeth are black. You glance at your brother, who looks to you, bewildered. "Come on," they say. "It's just like tobacco." The sun beats down, mirages ripple along the horizon. Brown liquid drips from the children's mouths, and steams as it hits the hot pavement.
You drive to the southeast side of the state often. Sometimes, it feels like every weekend, and as you get older, it's not as often. Driving through Flint, you observe seas of cars in a lot as far as the eye can see. The railroad moves. Every weekend, for years. One day, all the cars are gone. The train tracks are abandoned.
Northern Michigan is desolate in the winter. Your family drives along the vast, white expanse of beach on US-2. You are not sure how long you've been driving. Your father is pulled over for speeding. The cop has a thick accent. People here speak the language of the moose. The road is covered with snow, the beach is covered in snow, the dunes are covered in snow, the people are covered in snow.
When you're fourteen, your cross country team camps in this same north. "It's moose country, up here," your coach says. "Twenty dollars to the first person who spots one." A group of you runs through the trails next to Tahquamenon Falls, through the woods, over rocks and roots sticking out from the dry dirt, past thick stands of white pine and spruce, to the next waterfall in the river five miles south. Out here, it is quiet. There are predators in these woods, black ones, with giant paws, and silent ones with pointed noses and yellow eyes. They all have teeth, but the ones you're afraid of stand ten feet tall, with crowns of bone. You don't see them, but you swear you can hear them, snorting in the woods; large, hot breaths steaming from their velvet snouts as they watch you from the trees.
You've thumbed through pages of books about your haunted state, about the abandoned buildings, about the ghost towns. What town isn't a ghost, here? you think, as you flip through the guides. You travel to Fayette, on Big Bay de Noc. You walk through the furnace building, past wind-worn houses. The structures are hollow, skeletons of a mining boom. The parking lot was full, but you and your family seem to be the only ones in the town. You hear waves crash upon the rotted posts from old docks. The dolomite cliffs loom across the harbor, and you can almost smell the faint, bloody scent of iron on the air.
In your town, it's a rite of passage to Tube on the Chip River. Teenagers and college students lash their tires together. In the July heat, you dangle your toes into the brown water. You pass a sludge-covered river beach, where a group of townies grill meat on an upturned shopping cart, over an open flame. They wear cutoff t-shirts and rebel flag bikinis. The smell of sizzling flesh floats over the water towards you. You paddle a little faster, escaping the staticky country music pouring out of radios. You continue to slide your fingers into the water, pulling them back out when you remember the reports of e. coli. It's bad, this summer. It's bad, every summer. The river swallows everything the town spits out. The dead fish are bloated, and some have extra fins.
On Mackinac Island, you live in a hotel, white, sprawling, with holes in the roof. It should be condemned, but every year, the state packs its halls full of workers. On the island, it feels as though you exist in two separate dimensions. The horses are the same ones that have been here since the beginning of time. Costumed cyclists in tall bikes roll through the main street, ancient spokes clicking. Tourists paw at their smart phones, stinking of fudge. You merge through the flow of people, and no one seems to notice you're there. The island is full of ghosts, they say, and you're not sure you haven't become one. The blacksmith tells you of a demon that lives on Rifle Range trail, who pulls your hair as you trek toward Fort Holmes at night. You roommate tells you of a man in a cowboy hat who comes at night to rearrange her towels. On one of your first nights, another resident takes you and a couple friends on a tour of the basement. This is where they kept the children with tuberculosis, he says, and they all died here. In the corridor, there's a circle of chairs, under a bare bulb. He pauses. "That wasn't here when I left," he whispers.
One autumn, you go to deer camp with some friends. In a field, you're laying in the grass, an old bolt-action rifle nestled into your shoulder. There's a container of tannerite in the trees a few yards away, and you're going to shoot it. Three jars for the three of you. Yours is the first to explode. The sound echoes across the farmlands. When it quiets, you realize you can't hear any birds, any of the cows that were in the field one over. In fact, you haven't heard any other sounds for days, and no cars have driven past the farm. At night, you have to park your vehicle far from the little white house. "Why?" you ask. "The cows will come to lick your windows at night," your friend says. In the middle of the night, when you go outside to pee, you glance over at your car. The cows stand around it, silent, unmoving.
Since you were young, you've heard stories of the End of the World. They've all been different, but they were all strange. Cars dying on the way into the woods, rabid dogs, roads in dense forests that go in circles, villagers living in tiny huts. You're not sure which road it's at the end of, but you know it's north of town. You drive out there with some friends one night, in an old beater. The driver swears you're on the right road. The cornfields are covered with fog. You drive north for what feels like hours. The same white farmhouse, over and over. The same mud-covered cows. Eventually you decide to turn around, your friend says it's because you'll never find it, but you know, it's because the forest will not reveal itself to you in the way you want, tonight. At the crossroads to get back into town, you can't remember where you turned. The moon is obscured by clouds, and the cornfields are the same in all directions.
You're driving around the reservation with your best friend. It is fall, and the smell of burning trash wafts through your cracked car window, in the otherwise clear night. You stop in the middle of a housing development north of town. Unlike the ones in the city, there are no lights shining from inside these houses. Dark skeletons, their bones indigo in the shadows of the moonlight. You smoke cigarettes in the empty culdesac. They keep building these houses, all over town. Apartments too. No one lives in them; hollow, cavernous structures fanning out around the city. People will come to fill them, in time, they say. But every year, more people leave, and the empty buildings are left to rot.
Grand Marais lies on the shore of Lake Superior. You drive north one fall day, on a whim. The town appears as you emerge from the forest, towards the open water. A bay, some cottages, a pickle barrel. A lone brewery, far from any real civilization. There's nothing here, but somehow, the town still thrives. You walk through the streets, and no one speaks to you. They only stare. The bartender smiles wide, pushing a blueberry lager towards you. The beer is supposed to be sweet, but you only taste the fishy swill of the inland sea. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald plays softly in the distance, and you realize, it's always been playing, and always will.
A freighter runs aground in the straits one afternoon, while you're at work. "How long has it been there?" people keep asking. The thousand-foot ship stands still, cocked to one side. You can't remember when it came. No one remembers seeing it hit the rocky bottom of Lake Huron and slow to a stop. "Forever," someone says. Under the silver waves, the wrecks loom, sleeping.
You move to Grand Rapids, into a house on one of the rolling hills, across the street from an enormous abandoned school. You have neighbors, but you never see them. There is no one walking on your street. Craft breweries dot the landscape, between the bungalow houses and giant trees, hospitals and fair trade coffee shops. Crowds of bearded men and girls in loose sweaters swarm the breweries. "What can I get you?" asks the bartender at your favorite place. You cannot decide. The taps go on forever, stretching across an infinite bar. You want an IPA, but they're all IPAs. Someone whispers about the hops shortage, and the rest silence him. We don't speak of it here, not in Beer City.
