0:06 [SPEAKER_01]: So the Motel I stayed at, in Eagle Harbor, Fletchies' otter belly lodge, formerly the shoreline Motel, was apparently the location of a well-known feud between a local doctor and the president of the most powerful mine in Michigan, because it speaks to some of the tensions that existed between the mining companies and the general population. 0:28 [SPEAKER_01]: I'll add a brief episode to black label to tell the story. 0:32 [SPEAKER_01]: I learned of it through the motel owner who said someone had given him a book about it, who was more of a sign, the UP and Zines, who knew. 0:41 [SPEAKER_01]: One of Eagle Harbors' more famous residents was a man named Samuel Hill, as then, what in the same hell is going on here? 0:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The use of his name is a reference to the legendary swearing, according to a history published by the state government, Samuel Hill, was an adventurer, explorer, minor and surveyor. 1:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Although he was a rough character, he possessed a big heart, and in the fall of 1847, had risked his life to help divert a threatened food shortage, in the copper harbor district. 1:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Generally, he was regarded as a hero throughout the entire copper country. 1:20 [SPEAKER_01]: however he was contemptuous, of all the praise that was heaped upon him. 1:25 [SPEAKER_01]: He'll also gain a reputation as being one of the most blasphemous and obscene swears, and the key would not peninsula. 1:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Although he had a colorful vocabulary and told many a good story of his early adventures, his use of lured curse words became legendary. 1:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Whenever friends or neighbors, we told his colorful tales, and more polite society, they had to tame his unmentionables by substituting the sinless sounding words, Sam Hill. 1:57 [SPEAKER_01]: In time, the expression, what the Sam Hill spread far beyond the copper country. 2:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Today, it has become part of the American language. 2:06 [SPEAKER_01]: few who utter those words ever heard of Samuel Hill, or know that he was the unconscious or originator of a sinless synonym of profanity. 2:16 [SPEAKER_01]: To be fair, other explanations have been given for the origin of this phrase. 2:21 [SPEAKER_01]: But this claim is the oldest and likeness. 2:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Over the course of long winters, Eagle Harbor saloon keepers were famous for watering down their whiskey. 2:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Until the spring when new shipments could arrive, as the last bail of whiskey was broached, the bartenders began adding water. 2:39 [SPEAKER_01]: At the end of each day's business, the barrel was filled to the brim again, so towards the month of April, all the whiskey on Lake Superior could not down a tenderfoot at any range. 2:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Old timers in the area wouldn't touch it. 2:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Leaving Eagle Harbor on the following morning, I went north on 41 again, in the direction of Copper Harbor, which I was told would have food and gas, and anything else I might be needing. 3:08 [SPEAKER_01]: I promptly dumped my Apricot monastery muffin on the floor of my truck, and spent a brief moment, morning that loss, the kind of elegance that would make Samuel hell blush, before it occurred to me that I would be eating it anyway. 3:23 [SPEAKER_01]: On another note, it is really hard to beat driving out into a sun-spircled forest, early in the morning. 3:30 [SPEAKER_01]: In a new place, knowing that a hot pot of coffee is just a half hour away, and beside that pot of coffee is a woman or man, or a couple, or an adventurer, on the outmost frontier who have never met, and may never see again. 3:46 [SPEAKER_01]: and yet they have brewed that drink without yet knowing it. 3:50 [SPEAKER_01]: For me, an hour later, coughing in hand, I entered the Estevent Pines, the oldest surviving pine forest in the upper peninsula. 4:01 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just south of Copper Harbor. 4:03 [SPEAKER_01]: On the opposite shore, across the narrow tip of the Cuban open peninsula. 4:07 [SPEAKER_01]: But rather than strolling through the pines, absorbed in oblivious of my own pace, I found myself rushing through the woods, like I was being chased by a forest fire on a arroyal. 4:20 [SPEAKER_01]: You see, the night before, I did a dastardly thing. 4:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The kind of thing people tend to do, and they're traveling alone, is staying a blade in hotel rooms. 4:31 [SPEAKER_01]: I made a plan. 4:32 [SPEAKER_01]: I looked ahead to the coming day, and I looked at the map, 4:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Then I gathered up the fist full of brochures that had grown over the inside of my truck like barnacles. 4:43 [SPEAKER_01]: And I combined all of this into one unholy union and gave it my freedom. 4:50 [SPEAKER_01]: The resulting treaty, the midnight accord of August 25th, was a commitment to reaching no less than 13 different objectives in the span of a single day, and so, at about 930, the following morning, I found myself racing through the woods over root and rock. 5:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Not to the pines, but pass them in order to complete the loop and move on to the next thing. 5:13 [SPEAKER_01]: I've always been a tree lover, have pined especially, pined nuts, pined needles, pines all, I love it all, but I was so preoccupied with the list that I lost my sense of the moment, and my sense of proportion. 5:27 [SPEAKER_01]: In the span of one night, I had become enslaved to a monster of my own making, one which had absolutely no authority, or animation, or volatation, that I myself, the Dr. Frankenstein of this Gothic morality tale, had not given it. 5:43 [SPEAKER_01]: So rather than walking and enjoying these woods like a normal person, I was virtually running it sweating, eyes on the ground, charging this loop like a rampaging and twisted door, all for walks. 5:55 [SPEAKER_01]: I have a few pictures of the pines, but all I remember is the look in the field of the boardwalk, being dehydrated. 6:02 [SPEAKER_01]: As I realized that, and at least for me, hiking and hot coffee, do not mix. 6:09 [SPEAKER_01]: But there is a lesson in this, making plans is not such a bad thing, but following them, it's lavishly dumb, sweaty, oblivious sort of demon possession, and not a good thing to do, moving on. 6:27 [SPEAKER_01]: I stopped at a few more quote ghost towns on my way back down, and the long short of it is this, mundane Wyoming, beat griss, not ghost towns. 6:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Delaware, on the other hand, is. 6:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Delaware is small, but there's enough there for at least an hour of exploration, including the self-guided mind tour underground. 6:49 [SPEAKER_01]: They basically give you a helmet and point it a hole in the ground, and off you go. 6:54 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not nearly as deep as the other mind tours up here. 6:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Probably a half hour tour, a hundred steps down, there's something to be said for being alone that deep underground, which I was until I found a woman named Joyce, taking selfies in the very back of the mind. 7:10 [SPEAKER_01]: She was also stuffing rocks into her brawl, but I promised I wouldn't tell anyone about that part. 7:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Everything a Delaware apart from two houses on Highway 41 is in ruins, but there's enough going on here to comfortably call it a ghost town. 7:25 [SPEAKER_01]: It's nowhere near as extensive as Fayette or Central, but it's still cool, and if you see it, I think you'll agree. 7:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Leaving Delaware and the relative boomed arrows of Mending Wyoming and Beatgress, I drove ahead to gay. 7:42 [SPEAKER_01]: I should pause to say that one of the quaint little touches appear is the official historical signage, which is handmade from planks and sticks from the woods. 7:52 [SPEAKER_01]: I took pictures of a handful of these signs, including one for point is about, and Jacob's falls, and the one where Kathy's husband was tired of her missing the driveway. 8:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Just outside of Gay, I saw a woman in a pink shirt, with a bucket on the side of the road, picking wild blueberries. 8:11 [SPEAKER_01]: So I joined her for a little while, and only left when I began to be concerned that she would not have enough for her pies. 8:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Margaret, if you're listening to this, thank you again for allowing this stranger, who also happens to be a lurching berries on bay, into your berry patch. 8:28 [SPEAKER_01]: I hope I didn't eat too many. 8:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Just below the sign announcing your entry into GAY is a reward of $500 to anyone reporting the oldest, lamest Job in Kewenark County. 8:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Specifically, the reward is for the arrest and conviction of anyone defacing, removing, or damaging this sign, which simply reads, GAY, and large block letters. 8:57 [SPEAKER_01]: I did consider the obligatory photo of the simply named gay bar, but you guys are better than that, so I took some of the gay fire department in the gay school house instead, as well as the gay sands. 9:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I did eat at the gay bar, though. 9:12 [SPEAKER_01]: as it was the only open restaurant I'd seen in the last hour, and it even worked closed. 9:18 [SPEAKER_01]: For whatever reason, the lights were off inside. 9:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The grill was off too, so I ate a pair of sloppy jose at the horseshoe bar. 9:27 [SPEAKER_01]: In the relative dark, it honestly felt like hanging out with neighbors during a power outage, which is, I imagined, a fairly eloquent microcosm of life in the 9:38 [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't really pry as to why the lights weren't on, the drinks were cold, so they must have had power. 9:44 [SPEAKER_01]: It turns out that while the mayor and road commissioner are not fans of gay jokes, the gay bar is really, really leaning into them. 9:53 [SPEAKER_01]: I'll post a couple images on our Facebook. 9:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Wanting to leave a few more dollars inside this apparently struggling establishment, I bought souvenirs for my happily juvenile co-workers, and I pray it will be the last time I ordered a condom with a plate of sloppy jose. 10:09 [SPEAKER_01]: When the barkeeper handed it to me, she looked surprised and said, hey that's a max pro. 10:16 [SPEAKER_01]: That's a good one. 10:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Apparently, the most colorful era in the history of the gay bar followed its purchase by Norm and Tillie Dix in 1973, who sold it again in 1983. 10:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's right, for 10 years from 1973 to 1983, the Dix owned the gay bar. 10:40 [SPEAKER_01]: Get it all out of your system. 10:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Throughout that decade, the interior of the bar was literally covered with weaponry. 10:49 [SPEAKER_01]: According to Monette, there were over 240 guns, which Norm had been collecting for decades. 10:56 [SPEAKER_01]: He lined the tavern walls with pistols, rifles, bayonets, hang grenades, flare guns, crossbow, a variety of swords, knives, and minerals. 11:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He set up a German machine gun on top of the piano, sabers, handcuffs, muzzle loaders, 11:12 [SPEAKER_01]: and mortar shells decorated the bean sealing. 11:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Nail two walls and burched on shelves were also bare, beaver, skunk, rabbit, weasels, mint, bobcat, and a noun. 11:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Gate isn't really a ghost town in the proper sense. 11:30 [SPEAKER_01]: They're still a community here, but the ruins are seriously epic. 11:34 [SPEAKER_00]: When I asked Dylan about places he'd prioritize, as a first-time visitor, he listed Gate as one of them and said, So the stamp sand up at a gate is from the Mohawk mine they had large amounts of arsenic in the rock. 11:50 [SPEAKER_00]: So that's why the sand's that you find elsewhere if you go up to 11:55 [SPEAKER_00]: McLean or breakers on either side of the portage canal, that rocks pretty safe, but the amount of arsenic that was coming out of the mole hawk, it makes that sand toxic. 12:07 [SPEAKER_00]: And I can't remember who it was that described it, but that basically called the stamp sands, especially the ones that fight gay, referred to it as a hellscape. 12:17 [SPEAKER_00]: And it was not that far off. 12:24 [SPEAKER_00]: There's nowhere for any plants to grab hold inside that stamp sand. 12:28 [SPEAKER_00]: It's just empty, it's just open space right on the shore, empty. 12:34 [SPEAKER_00]: And all the sand that you saw out there at GAY, that's about a third of what they initially put down. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So the rest of it's all moved around. 12:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And the answer is with it covering up white fish and lake trout spawning grounds actually. 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: It is a very powerful place, just to be there and experience it. 12:55 [SPEAKER_01]: It feels like a bombed out military beach head, at the end of a successful invasion after World War II. 13:02 [SPEAKER_01]: I've been on some of those beaches, but it's really not that different. 13:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Rather than a defunct industrial work site, the Mohawk Bine at gay feels like a great defensive fortress sheldon to oblivion, the fact that it's on the coast of Lake Superior only accentuates this feeling. 13:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Along with the different piles of shatter concrete, there's a huge smoke stack, 265 feet high and more than 10 feet wide and no grass can grow in it. 13:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The black sand feels spacey and lunar. 13:33 [SPEAKER_01]: According to Clarence Monat, riding in 1988, these sand are the locations of much donut making these days. 13:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Automobiles and 3 and 4 wheelers make dozens of them as they drive over the loose surface, which allows their vehicles to spin as if they were boats on Lake Superior. 14:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The gay ruins also feature one of my favorite graffiti art installations. 14:05 [SPEAKER_01]: It's this strange minimalist sequence of mining imagery, commentary that feels intelligent, and yet, agnomatic in its message. 14:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The gay ruins are so wild and apocalyptic. 14:17 [SPEAKER_01]: they start to feel surreal. 14:19 [SPEAKER_01]: You imagine the long skeletal remains of the wind dock as the spinal column of some prehistoric dinosaur stretched out for a drink at the water's edge. 14:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The end of a massive concrete terminal used for fearing or onto freighters for Detroit looks like a chain of derailed train cars partially visible in the clear water below. 14:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Really, if you see a picture, tell me that isn't what it looks like. 14:47 [SPEAKER_01]: And the silence is big. 14:49 [SPEAKER_01]: For the lack of a better term, it surrounds you. 14:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And all you hear is the small, repetitive crash of crystal clear waves. 14:57 [SPEAKER_01]: You might hear that you're standing in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. 15:01 [SPEAKER_01]: You might contemplate your own mortality and the rise of fall of empires in the sweeping anonymous deconstruction of this fortress and also of so much raw into toxic sand 15:16 [SPEAKER_01]: and thinking of things to say, like I did, it's entirely up to you. 15:24 [SPEAKER_01]: From 1906 to 1931, the Mohawk Mine at Gay paid out nearly half a billion dollars, accounting for inflation. 15:34 [SPEAKER_01]: It was also the site of discovery for a new former frog, known today as Mohawkite, made up 15:46 [SPEAKER_01]: It's still the only place in the world, this rock is found. 15:50 [SPEAKER_01]: But by 1932, operations were no longer sustainable and the mine was closed. 15:56 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1933, the Mohawk mining company decided to liquidate everything, the land itself, all 5,000 acres. 16:05 [SPEAKER_01]: was sold in 1934 to the copper range company for $25,000. 16:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Permanent, at this time, dwellings were sold to their occupants for $1 per room, plus $1 for the lot on which they stood. 16:19 [SPEAKER_01]: This means that when the company left town, they sold off each house for $3 to $7. 16:25 [SPEAKER_01]: They basically left an account of dust. 16:27 [SPEAKER_01]: And the former capitalist hub of gay is now just one more isolated suburb of nowhere. 16:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The people were welcome to stay. 16:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The price was right, but the work, they're only reason to live there, was gone. 16:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Gate doesn't have all the buildings of central. 16:45 [SPEAKER_01]: It isn't pretty like Fayette, but it has its own appeal. 16:48 [SPEAKER_01]: And it has a legitimately ghostly vibe. 16:51 [SPEAKER_01]: You can feel what you came for. 16:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The huge imposing presence of the past. 16:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Because of that, I'm classifying it as a ghost town anyway, and I can do that because this is my list, and because I'm the one paying for gas.
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