The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [92]
I wandered off through the town, picking my way around little piles of horse manure. Without cars, the silence was almost complete. The whole island appeared to be on the brink of a six-month coma. Almost all the stores and restaurants along Main Street were shut for the season. I expect it’s awful there in the summer with all the thousands of day trippers. A brochure that I picked up by the harbour listed sixty gift shops alone and more than thirty restaurants, ice-cream parlours, pizzerias and cookie stalls. But now at this time of year it all looked quaint and restful and incredibly pretty.
For a while, Mackinac Island was the biggest trading post in the New World – John Jacob Astor’s fur trading company was based here – but its real glory dates from the late nineteenth century when wealthy people from Chicago and Detroit came to escape the city heat and enjoy the pollen-free air. The Grand Hotel, the biggest and oldest resort hotel in America, was built and the country’s wealthiest industrialists constructed ornate summer houses on the bluffs overlooking Mackinac village and Lake Huron. I walked up there now. The views across the lake were fantastic, but the houses were simply breathtaking. They are some of the grandest, most elaborate houses ever built of wood, twenty-bedroomed places with every embellishment known to the Victorian mind – cupolas, towers, domes, gables, turrets, and front porches you could ride a bike around. Some of the cupolas had cupolas. They are just incredibly splendid and there are scores of them, standing side by side on the bluffs flanking Fort Mackinac. What it must be to be a child and play hide-and-seek in those houses, to have a bedroom in a tower and be able to lie in bed and gaze out on such a lake, to go bicycling on carless roads to little beaches and hidden coves, and above all to explore the woodland of beech and birch that cover the back three quarters of the island.
I wandered into them now, along one of the many paved paths that run through the dark woods, and felt like a seven-year-old on a grand adventure. Every turn in the path brought up some exotic surprise – Skull Cave, where, according to a sign beside it, an English fur trader hid from the Indians in 1763; Fort Holmes, an old British redoubt on the highest point on the island, 325 feet above Lake Huron; and two mossy old cemeteries out in the middle of nowhere, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both seemed impossibly big for such a small island, and they consisted mostly of the same few names going back generations – the Truscotts, Gables, Sawyers. I happily wandered for three hours without seeing a soul or hearing a sound made by man, and only barely sampled the island. I could easily have stayed for days. I returned to the village by way of the Grand Hotel, quite the most splendid and obnoxiously hoity-toity such institution I have ever come across. A rambling white wooden building with the biggest porch in the world (660 feet), it is indubitably swish and expensive. A single room at the time I was there cost $135 a night. A sign in the street leading down to the hotel said GRAND HOTEL – PROPER DRESS REQUIRED AT THE HOTEL AND HOTELOWNED STREET. GENTLEMEN AFTER 6 P.M. MUST BE ATTIRED IN A COAT AND TIE. LADIES MAY NOT BE ATTIRED IN SLACKS. This is possibly the only place in