My friend Jim, an avid hunter in Michigan’s Western UP, first told me about Hurley, Wisconsin with its myriad bars and legendary whores, gals that not only serviced a succession of miners, hunters, and now snowmobilers, but also were the town’s historical business entrepreneurs. They ran the place and made you welcome — a reputation I wanted to test.
After hunkering down in resplendent luxury in Duluth during a two day Lake Superior gale (Fitzers Hotel had a well-stocked basement wine shop), we crossed the Blatnik Bridge into Superior, Wisconsin then headed east on the lakeshore road to Bayfield and finally Hurley. The wind had died but the wounded air was wrapped with a mucous fog. It was the first time any of us rode in fog and it soon held a high place on our “bad things to do” list: on a motorcycle you get just as wet as in a downpour, and you can’t see a damn thing.
For seventy-five miles I felt Big Ruby rise and fall beneath us, which I interpreted to be picturesque rolling hills. Occasionally an opaque gray wall appeared on our right that we judged was Lake Superior. Animals are a motorcyclist’s menace — even small birds can knock you senseless — so I’m always looking ahead for movement in tall roadside grass; Nell is an invaluable help in maintaining vigilance, since she clamps down on my hips if she sees something she thinks I’ve missed. In this fog we were without recourse and at the mercy of Fate and Nell’s clenched fists never relaxed.
At times I couldn’t tell if John and Jill were still following, discomforting because I was leading this day and responsible for insuring that the group remain together. As we rounded the Bayfield Peninsula we went through the old fishing village of Cornucopia (pop. 220) with its guidebook extolled “beautiful sandy beaches and wonderful sunsets.” We didn’t see a thing. When we pulled onto the road shoulder to take a bum break Jill asked, “When are we going to get to Cornucopia?” Things were not good.
Several miles outside Bayfield the fog lifted and a New England-like village appeared as pleasant as a kept promise. The place was loaded with tony shops and had several restaurants; we picked the one looking most like a corner bar and had good Lake Superior whitefish while drying our clothes and mending our nerves. From Bayfield it was an easy seventy-mile ride to Hurley despite occasional rain, which we didn’t mind. After what we’ve been through, a little rain ain’t shit.
In Ashland, our final stop for gas before reaching Hurley, we spoke with a biker couple making the Lake Superior tour in the other direction. We’ve met many bikers on this trip and sometimes feel like we’re part of two concentric merry-go-rounds moving in opposite directions, occasionally stopping and exchanging information on weather, road conditions, and sights to see, while inspecting each other’s bikes. They told us we’re in for better weather and we said they’re not so lucky. The weather cleared when we reached Hurley and a full fulgent moon rose like a new flower creeping through a dark blue sky.
Her name was Peachy Yoeder (sorry guys, I changed her name) and as she restocked the liquor shelves and cleaned the bar she moved with what old-timers called “carriage,” her shoulders pulled back making her ample breasts leap; she was not the sort of woman consumed by regret. She’s now a bartender, but descended from a long line of working girls. I had gotten up early and taken Big Ruby to a do-it-yourself car wash to remove yesterday’s filth, then, with everybody still sleeping, I walked the mile or so from our Ironwood motel to Hurley.
I passed a bar with a human skeleton astride a motorcycle busting from its second story but the door was locked when I tried it. A bit farther down, a door to another bar was open because an emaciated man with greasy stringy hair was sweeping barroom debris through it into the gutter. I walked in because I wanted to say I was in a Hurley bar; time was running out since we were leaving as soon as the others got up, showered, and ate.
“We’re closed,” Peachy said when I entered.
“I just want to say I was in a Hurley bar.”
“So you are. Now leave.”
I laughed and said, “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
She sighed and nodded with a restrained smile and produced two cups and poured coffee from a pot hidden under the bar. The place smelled of booze and smoke and cheap perfume, or was it aftershave? She never stopped cleaning and restocking and rearranging but she talked all the while once I asked her to tell me about the town. I like to think it was my magnetic personality but it probably had something to do with the twenty I slapped on the bar for the coffee. Honest to god she took it and placed it in her canyonesque cleavage, never suggesting change. My attention lingered for an extra beat where the twenty disappeared and Peachy smiled at her still available power. The lady knew how to handle men.
“Wadda you wanna know?” she said. Long silver earrings inlaid with green turquoise swung like pendulums.
“From the beginning.”
She told a brown bread story, salt of the Earth, that sort of thing.
Her description of early Hurley brought to mind history I’d read of the late 1800’s when loggers and miners from the Gogebic Iron Range — men with dirty pores brown and green like the trees they cut and black and gray like the ore they mined, men woven with their elements and larded with desires — needed somewhere to slack their appetites in places like Hurley with its sixty saloons, one for every thirty-eight residents (today there are a mere forty bars and strip joints). Prohibition had no effect on Hurley; the town simply ignored it by converting the saloons into “soft drink parlors.”
Federal Investigator Frank Buckley reported in a 1929 Prohibition Survey of Wisconsin:
Tucked away up in the wild lumber and iron section of Northern Wisconsin, right on the Michigan State line, (Hurley) has the distinction of being the worst community in the state. Gambling, prostitution, bootlegging and dope are about the chief occupations of the place. Saloons there function with barmaids who serve the dual capacity of soda dispenser and prostitute.
Al Capone and other Chicago gangsters vacationed in Hurley and I asked her about that.
“I never met Capone,” said Peachy, “but I did know his older brother Ralph “Bottles” Capone.”
“Bottles?”
“Yah, ‘Bottles’ because he was in charge of the gang’s soft drink operation. He died here in Hurley in I think 1973 or four, I can’t remember which.”
“Of what?”
“He died natural. He was an old guy. He died in an old folk’s home. It’s funny you know. I mean people think these gangsters all died violent deaths. But it ain’t so. Most died of old age or cancer or something. He was a nice guy. He spent money and treated women good.”
She hollered to Lenny to leave the front door open “to let in some goddamn fresh air.” Welcome sunshine slanted in from the street illuminating golden dust motes kicked up by Lenny’s broom, and enough light to see Peachy wore little make-up and had a smooth, soft complexion for a gal carrying her mileage.
“So who’re your customers now,” I asked, “now that the lumber and iron ore are long gone?”
“Oh, mostly hunters, and in the winter snowmobilers. The town’s trying to make itself over as some kind of snowmobile capital of Wisconsin. And we get a fair number of tourists like you. It’s enough to make a buck. Speaking of which,” she added, “are you looking for some company?”
Am I looking for some company?
After three score years of shedding identities like a snake sloughs skins I’m sure whoremonger is one on the wayside; I mean pick any way you ever remember being — are you still that same person? But do we really discard our old selves? Or do new identities pile on the old ones like ocean sediment, and can we “read” a sliced psychological cross-section to reveal an essential identity. “Who am I?” is no more answered in old age than in youth or middle age. And “Am I looking for some company?” is the same question. Besides, Nell and Jill and John would soon be ready to roll and an hour romping through that cleavage was not in the cards.
“No, I’m flattered but that’s no longer me,” I said, despite the realization that hers was just a commercial offer and will-power is best bolstered by external constraints.
“You never can tell,” she replied as I followed the shaft of sunlight to the open door. “You know where to find me.”
She had a big heart. She was being kind. And she’d be riding my thoughts tomorrow when I again encountered Hemingway.
