The Lake Where You Live

When asked, “How did you come to live on a lake up north,” you no doubt have a back story. Here is mine. 

My family took summer vacations on a mostly wild lake just inside Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at a place we called Read’s Cottage. Its owner, Read Eldred, was a co-worker of my father at an electrical equipment company in Two Rivers. Read allowed a few friends to rent the cottage for a week at a time, between his own family’s summer vacations there.

To call the cottage a place of rustic luxury is in no way a contradiction. Though it had no plumbing or electricity, it was nearly as comfortable as home, and in some ways more so. A simple look around revealed Read’s pride in the place, the wood floors always swept, never a dish, a book or a kids’ toy out of place. 

The woodshed outside the back door held work tools hung on hooks; split fireplace logs stood in neat stacks along one entire side. A tar-paper path led a few dozen yards into the woods to the two-hole outhouse called the Morning Star, a sturdy structure, its gloss-varnished knotty pine interior always impeccably clean and odor-free, the pit liberally and frequently dosed with lime.

The cottage, a long rectangle built on a gentle slope down toward the lake, had a simple floor plan: full-width screen porches front and back, a kitchen with master bedroom opposite, and a spacious great room with half-a-dozen twin and double beds along one wall. 

We drew ice-cold, iron-tasting water at the kitchen sink from a pump with a cast iron handle. A pair of propane refrigerators kept our food cold. The only lights were wall-mounted kerosene lanterns and, over the dining table, a pair of white-gas globe lamps.

The cottage stood on a slight rise, two majestic white pines framing the view of the 610-acre lake. The only other cabin in plain sight was on an island a quarter-mile out. From the lakefront porch we enjoyed brilliant sunsets.

Mature conifers, the brisk winds, the wide sky, all lent an aura of wildness. We never saw bears, though we knew they were out there. Bald eagles were endangered and rare then, loons far less common than today, though both visited from time to time. 

For me, and in fact for all of us, the fishing mattered most. Until Read’s Cottage, fishing to us meant dragging bullheads and carp out of the muddy river a few blocks from our house. This lake, on the other hand, held bass, perch, bluegills, sunfish, all in abundance, the constant action enough to instill in a boy like me an outsized notion of how fishing should be.

We simply anchored on a rock and sand bar about a hundred yards out from the cottage and dangled a piece of worm straight down. The fish congregated on and around the bar, especially in the evenings as the sun sank low. We reeled in whatever bit. That was all. 

From the first week at Read’s Cottage I was addicted to the north. And I still make a point to fish that lake at least once a year.

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.