By LORAINE ANDERSON
I don't know exactly where I got lost in what I now call the Copemish Triangle. I do know I was trying to find the "shortcut" from Manistee to Traverse City.
Life is a mystery and so is that territory between Kaleva and Karlin in northeast Manistee County. It has no north, no south, no west, no east if you miss a fork in the road in Copemish. Roads on maps vanish and reappear in places they aren't supposed to be. They take you places they aren't supposed to go.
I generally am not directionally challenged. I can read maps. I have lived more than half my life in the north country. I am a camper, a cross-country skier, a kayaker, a hiker, a bicyclist.
And this was not my first tangle with that triangle, which is probably why I confidently decided to tackle it again on my ride back from an information-gathering trek to the Manistee Historical Museum and the Kaleva Bottlehouse Museum.
I'm willing to stop and ask for directions, but what do you do on snowy afternoon on an unnamed road that doesn't seem to be on your map in what appears to be a house-less, people-less region?
Keep going, enjoy the drive and see where you arrive, I told myself. Follow thoughts that come and go like Robert Frost poems about stopping by woods on a snowy eve or taking the road less traveled. Ask yourself what stories these reforested timber cutover lands and northern farms tell:
-- About 19th century federal treaties that set up reservation lands for Grand Rapids Ottawa Indians in Manistee and Mason counties?
-- About Kaleva, a village settled around 1900 by a colony of Finnish immigrants lured by false advertising of rich farmlands and named for Finland's national epic, the Kaleva?
-- About Copemish, a town that developed in the early 1900s at one end of the Arcadia and Betsy River Railway and once had three different rail lines coming through?
-- About the Manistee & Northeastern Railroad, constructed from 1887 to 1910, that crisscrossed this part of the state and linked area logging and farming towns in Leelanau, Benzie and Grand Traverse counties to main railroad lines in Manistee, Traverse City, Grayling, urban markets and the world?
-- About the creation of the Manistee National Forest in the 1930s and the thousands of young Civilian Conservation Corps men who planted millions of seedlings to give a fresh start to this land devastated by lumbering, greed and frequent forest fires?
-- About the community-building work of historical societies and local libraries that preserve these whispers, photos, diaries and stories?
-- About the importance of places like this today?
Associate editor Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com.
