THE WAKE BLOG

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and spent some time in Buffalo and Syracuse before moving back to Minnesota. By the age of seventeen, he had left home for good. The Great Gatsby is famous for pitting Midwestern values against the opulence and corruption of the wealth of the East. As the narrator Nick Carraway points out in the last pages, every one of the principle players are transplants from the Midwest.

The book could be read as a warning for those tempted to leave one’s roots, Midwestern roots in particular: beware, lest thou wind up dead and disgraced after having thrown a number of fabulous parties which ultimately will leave you — and all who attend them — unfulfilled.

Fitzgerald himself possibly felt similarly as an artist leaving his homeland. Did he too operate under the belief that one must leave one’s home in order to go to a place that “mattered”? In Gatsby, in spite of the untimely end for our main character, the allure of fame and the big city is clear.

Manitoulin is the largest (1,068 square miles) of a swath of islands shotgunned across Northern Lake Huron from Sault St. Marie to just short of the Bruce Peninsula; it is the Earth’s largest freshwater island and, together with the Peninsula, guards and defines Georgian Bay. Manitoulin is part of the Niagara Escarpment, a dolomite and granite cliff formation that runs all the way to Lake Ontario.

It rained during the night and next morning in Mackinaw City. We again planned a 9:30 am departure and I was sure the Bob Jensen good-weather mojo had failed as I stood on our hotel’s balcony watching a torrent of rainwater leap from the roof dead on-target to a car parked below. Big Ruby was safely covered and parked two spaces away. At 9:25 the clouds parted and revealed a lake gull hovering in a rain-freshened blue sky like Botticelli’s Venus. Ah me of little faith.

John Highhill, coffee cup in hand, approached us across the Port Huron, Michigan, Comfort Inn parking lot. A gift from Canada, the sun breached the east side of the Blue Water Bridge’s arc and warmed John’s determined unsmiling face with an incongruent rosy glow. He had the expression of a man ill at ease with his circumstance; I could tell this was not going to be a good morning greeting.

“Did you see Jill?” he asked.

“No” we said in unison. “Why?”

This was day two of our Lake Huron circumnavigation and his wife Jill was on her usual early morning jog. Nell and I just returned from our morning walk and were removing the cover from Big Ruby, our 2009 Harley Road King, preparing for an agreed upon 9:30am start on today’s ride to Saginaw, Michigan, along the west shore of Lake Huron. John and Jill, Bob and Emily Jensen, and Nell and I comprised the Old as Hell’s Angels making this motorcycle trip.