October 22 - Sandusky, Michigan

For the morning newscast, the local station tried the order of newsweatherobituaries, but that made some sense as they immediately followed the obituaries with an advertisement for cemetery monuments and I can see the logic in that. My impression of the Upper Peninsula as a bucolic paradise was somewhat shaken by the news report of a trial of two men for murdering two hunters in the UP. An eyewitness testified that despite the fact that the hunters begged for mercy, the two men beat them to death, cut up the bodies, and then fed the remains to their pigs. Goodness. I’m sure that case is atypical, but it does give you pause about wandering in the woods.

The weather report forecasted continued cloudy for the next day or two, which was depressing, but then I saw the sun start to peek out thru a hole in the clouds and I grabbed the camera and ran down to the beach. There I found an enchanting vision of dawn sunbeams streaming from gaps in the clouds and lighting up the waves as they crashed onto the beach. Wow. We spent a few minutes taking pictures of it all before we were sufficiently cold that we retreated back to the trailer and spent the next few minutes transferring the pictures before we paid for the campsite and took off for the day’s explorations with a county road map

The goal for our exploration was to trace some of my roots in this area. As we drove south to Port Sanilac we stopped off to take pictures of Aunt Ella and Uncle Jim’s house just south of the golf course. I clearly remember going for walks on the links when I was a child and starting to play with the golf balls that were to my eye just lying around. That made the golfers who were playing that hole, naturally enough, quite irate and they yelled at us so we dropped the balls and continued on our walk.

Just to the south was Leah’s house where I played Lego blocks with her daughters Brenda and Mary who were about my age, as I recall. Curiously enough, the thing that sticks in my memory about the house was the big pump for fresh water in the kitchen. It was a cast-iron pump with a big handle and you really had to pump it hard to get the water flowing and I guess I had never seen such a thing inside a house before. Leah was a real country girl who had grown up on Uncle Jim’s farm, so she had a haughty disdain for some city customs—she said tomatoes tasted better when ground in the dirt while eating them, for instance, altho I never tried it. She also boasted of being able to sink a 10-penny nail with a single blow of the hammer—she laughed and said I was “choking the hammer to death” when I grabbed it by the neck and tentatively tapped the nail.

Leah also drove us to and from the Grand Trunk Railroad train station down at Port Huron as well as on side trips during our visit. We usually drove up north to a fishing port to find a fresh catch of whitefish for a fish fry at some point during our visit, and those were great meals. We always ate well at Aunt Ella’s home and that was very important to a growing boy. I remembered toasting bread for breakfasts in an old-fashioned flip-side type of toaster, which was fun but you had to be careful and turn the bread before it burned. As I thought of it, I wondered where I could get one of those old toasters for the trailer because it would be both simple and quite compact—perfect for out situation. The only place I have seen them in the recent past has been antique stores, but maybe I can still find one for a decent price at a yard sale somewhere.

During these visits my brother and I got to sleep on a bed up in the unfinished attic that Aunt Ella used for storage. It had a lot of spiders, which was a bit scary, but it was also a big adventure because we quite alone up there. I’m pretty sure that’s where I read Harry S. Franck’s “Vagabonding Down the Andes”, which was one of the books that made me want to travel. The other influential book that pushed me into wandering was Richard Halliburton’s “The Magic Carpet” where he took an early biplane around the world and flew it in different places. For both of these books I was just fascinated by the few pages of photographs of places like Timbuktu, the Taj Mahal, and the Himalaya Mountains. It is curious how some small, early influences can set the life themes for many decades of an adult’s life. I have always liked to travel, for instance, and part of what I was doing on this trip was revisiting some scenes from my childhood.

Some of the loose ends were our experiences in Port Sanilac, of which I have many fond memories. My Mom bought us toy sailboats that were made for really sailing in small ponds and had working rigging and adjustable steering. I don’t think we actually sailed them very on ponds very often, but we certainly sailed them a lot in our imagination! I also remember buying a very tiny birch bark canoe with “Port Sanilac” stamped on it, but that was strictly a tourist item and not meant to really float on water. Another time we went fishing on the docks in the harbor and I was the only one who caught a small fish! Faced with the prospect of cleaning and filleting it myself, which Leah insisted on, I was too squeamish and turned the little guy loose, making us both happier I’m sure.

Since I wanted to revisit the site of my one (and only) fishing triumph, so we drove to Port Sanilac and walked around for an hour or so. Altho there is a new marina at one side of the harbor, the dock on which I went fishing is still there and you can watch boats put out to sea thru the gap in the breakwater just as we used to do. From the docks we circled around the marina to get a good look at the very picturesque harbor lighthouse. The sign said it was government property, so I imagine it’s owned by the Coast Guard, but it would be nice to see what it is like inside.

Having satisfied my curiosity about Port Sanilac, I turned my attention to some loose ends I wanted to tie up. First, I didn’t know where Aunt Ella and Uncle Jim were buried and I definitely wanted to stop by and pay my respects. But my roots are even deeper here, because my Mom was raised by her grandmother and step-grandfather here somewhere in the area. Not only that, but my Mom had her first paid job; it consisted of teaching all 8 grades in the same 1-room schoolhouse that she had graduated from 5 years before! The schoolhouse was built on a 1 acre corner of her grandpa and grandma Meddaugh’s farm that he sold to Sanilac Township after the old schoolhouse burned down. My Mom was an eyewitness to that event, but that’s another story and one best told by my mother in her autobiography. I wanted to locate the old Meddaugh farm, that 1-room schoolhouse where my Mom’s professional life began, and the family graves. We started our quest in the Sandusky County Courthouse, where we interrupted a birthday party for one of the workers. The folks there definitely didn’t want to do any work for us, which contrasted with the county clerk in Kansas when I was tracing my grandfather on my father’s side (see Wanderung 3), so we didn’t find anything there. But they did mention that the city library had an entire room dedicated to genealogy so we repaired hither to continue the search. Here we hit pay dirt. First Monika found the marriage listing for the Meddaughs, which confirmed the odd spelling of their name and gave us exact dates. Then I found the obituary for grandpa Meddaugh, which gave us years for their deaths, and Monika found a county plat from sometime between 1906 and 1969. Altho that covered quite a span, we did find the Meddaugh name on a couple of plots of land that roughly corresponded to our preliminary guesses, so we made a copy of the map to guide our search.

Finally, we found cemetery gravestone records that indicated Aunt Ella, Uncle Jim, and the Meddaugh’s were all buried in Sanilac Cemetery, so our next problem was simply finding it. We drove around the northwest corner of Port Sanilac until we stumbled on it, and then wandered around the cemetery for the next hour or so until we found all the graves. I paid my respects to great-grandmother, her husband, and my aunt and uncle, and that was very satisfying.

Next we checked out all the Meddaugh’s properties on a copy of the old county plat and tried to find one that matched up with our memories of the one time we had visited this spot with my Mom a decade back. We even have a picture of her in front of that old schoolhouse, but finding it again after almost 10 years (and without the direct guidance of my Mom) was surprisingly difficult. All we could recall was a small, sturdy building right beside the road and about ½ block to the west an overgrown lane that led back into the woods beside a stream where the grandparent’s home had stood. Nothing was left of it on our previous visit except a couple of foundation stones and a depression where the root cellar had been, so we weren’t even going to try to locate that, just find my Mom’s school. I finally found a small old cement building being re-sided that had something very unusual for any building but an old school: a row of windows all along one side. Given the placement near the road and a ½ block from Dey Drive that led the right direction back into the woods, I thought we had our quarry and we called it quits for the day.

Stopping off in Port Sanilac for some groceries at the old IGA (I remembered shopping there with Leah and Aunt Ella—some things really don’t change), we drove back to camp and settled in for our usual evening activities. The trailer was quite cold when we returned, about 50 degrees, so we used both the overhead heat and our portable heater to heat it up—it took about an hour but when we were done it was again a comfortable shirt-sleeve environment. We have consistently found that hand work like crocheting or working on the computer is just so much easier at temps in the 60s or 70s—it really becomes impossible with temps below 50 because your fingers just get too stiff. We read a short story by Balzac, and it reminded me in both style and content of Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado” except Balzac told the story from a 3rd person viewpoint and embellished the story line into a much longer exposition than Poe. It was interesting to contrast the styles—Poe’s first person version was quite brief and spare, and perhaps harder-hitting due to that.