For about a week, my hometown, Grand Haven, was swallowed entirely by the smoke from the Canadian wildfires. It was alarming and uncomfortable to live in. I wondered if it was the climate finally collapsing in front of my eyes.
Once the smoke had cleared, my friend Rowan and I decided to go on a seven-hour-long road trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was on assignment — I would spend a week camping, evaluating the climate and my experience with it. Then, I would return with a nature story to tell.
As I was up there, I scribbled notes in the Moleskine journal I carry everywhere, collecting moments and mile numbers to turn into a story. I have put those notes together and realized that I do not have a climate story to tell, but I do have a story: one of anxiety, unreliable automation and peace among chaos.
The Silver Bullet
I tend to get quite nervous around cars. I don’t know much about them, and when something goes wrong, my lack of knowledge transforms into a panicky ineptitude. Vehicular problems quickly become existential problems.
Rowan carries an entirely different disposition. He drives a funny-looking 2009 Chrysler Town & Country that is dented and bruised from years of aggressive driving. A few months back, he was in an accident, and the front end has been mangled ever since. The bumper hangs, and the hood doesn’t close. To keep it down, a bright yellow ratchet strap runs from the windshield to the undercarriage. The car needs fluids pretty often, but Rowan knows what he’s doing and maintains it. Despite its homely appearance, it usually runs pretty well. We have affectionately deemed it the Silver Bullet. Rowan offered to drive the Silver Bullet to the Upper Peninsula, and I accepted; it would be one less thing for me to be nervous about.
But before we even left, I realized that I would probably be anxious about the car the entire trip. We hadn’t even added a mile to the odometer, and we had popped the hood four times and been side-swiped in a parking lot. The engine was smoking because the cooling fans wouldn’t kick on. Smoke poured out of the hood. The engine needed coolant, but when we added coolant it would vaporize instantly. The odometer read 175,261. I was worried.
Rowan sent me to AutoZone for a cooling fan relay (don’t ask me what it does). I asked the man behind the counter for the part and he started quizzing me: What’s the problem with the car? Does he need a resistor or a relay? Are you sure about this?
Welcome back, car anxiety.
I played along like I knew what I was talking about. I didn’t.
“Yup, he’s overheating. Fans are no good — need the relay,” I told him. “ ’09 Town & Country — great car.”
They sold me the part (expensive!) and I returned to the Silver Bullet. My blind trust in Rowan proved right because the fan relay sorted out the overheating issue. He confidently told me the car would make it to the Upper Peninsula, so I trusted him. We drove on, and the engine regulated itself. All was well.
By mile 175,533, we arrived at our campsite near Little Brevort Lake, a few miles northwest of St. Ignace and the Mackinac Bridge. We spent the night there. I was thankful to have made it.
“A trip is not a trip without troubles,” Rowan told me, implying that the overheating was our trouble for the trip; now that we had made it, the rest of our vacation would be pleasant.
Shattered Glass
Rowan and I woke up early the next morning to fish. Fishing was all we really wanted to do. We spent hours on the lake that morning and after sufficiently exploring it, we hit the road to fish elsewhere.
If you’ve ever been to the Upper Peninsula, you will know that most roads there are long, straight and empty. The road we were driving on was exactly that. While we drove, I thought of ways to catch more fish; I thought of fileting our next catch and dressing it with lemon, spices and herbs. But my fishing daydream was interrupted when the yellow ratchet strap that holds down the hood of the Silver Bullet came undone. It flew off the hood, clanked off the side of the car and landed in the gravel next to the road. Rowan and I knew what would happen next.
The hood flew open violently. It hit the dead center of the windshield. Hard.
The windshield cracked into a symmetrical mess — a spider’s web of glass. Thankfully, it stayed intact and didn’t rain all over us.
Rowan shouted the most situationally appropriate swear word I think I’ve ever heard, and we said no more. We both got out of the car to get the strap. He tied the hood back down and we got back into the car, silently. After a pause, we went to the next lake to catch more fish. I spent the whole time worrying about the future of the trip now that the windshield was cracked. Would we get pulled over? Could we survive if it rained?
We spent the rest of the evening at the campsite. Four more friends of ours came up to camp with us, making a six-person group in total. We told the windshield story in the tent over a game of poker and, for the first time, I laughed about it. We were certain that we had gone through with our troubles, and our trip could now be a trip. I was at peace.
The next morning, we left Little Brevort Lake for Marquette — a 142-mile drive. Surely, the Silver Bullet could do it now that we had surpassed our troubles.
The Trouble
U.S. Route 2 is a pleasant stretch of road. It starts in St. Ignace and hugs the northern coast of Lake Michigan. A thick forest sits on one side of the road, and the big, blue lake sits on the other. It was beautiful, even while seen through a cracked mess of glass. I relaxed and expected a peaceful, unproblematic ride.
After 23 miles along Route 2, something sounded a little off. I asked Rowan a question I thought to be innocent.
Do you need some air in the tires?
He did. The rear passenger tire popped the second I stopped talking. After the Silver Bullet’s 175,590th mile, we had officially hit our trouble.
A situation like this would usually paralyze me. I’d call my mom, have the car towed, sell all of my belongings to pay for a ride home and cry. But I didn’t feel any of that. It was irritating because I wanted to fish, but it was funny. I stood on the side of the road and laughed. I made jokes about it and posted all about it on my Instagram story.
As we six sunburnt kids stood roadside with our hands on our hips, I realized I was standing in the middle of a memory as it was being made. Often, these are moments you can laugh at later — I was willing to laugh at it then.
My sappy outlook didn’t make the situation any easier, though. Rowan and I, along with our four other lovely friends who followed in the car behind us, spent 30 minutes trying to jack the car up. But the Silver Bullet was too heavy, the jack too weak, and the boys too dumb. We had to send our friends to the nearest AutoZone, which, in the Upper Peninsula, was guaranteed to be pretty far away. Rowan and I sat and waited in the sun. As trucks and campers whizzed past, we shared a piece of smoked salmon and laughed. If we had the right tackle, we would have waltzed over to Lake Michigan to try and catch more salmon. I was struck by the lack of worry in the air.
Once the new jack arrived (thank you, friends) Rowan lifted the car and took off the lugnuts, but the tire wouldn’t budge. It was stuck. We sent our friends back to AutoZone for WD-40 (thanks again).
Even the lubricant couldn’t save us, though. We kicked and slammed and tugged and pulled for nearly an hour until finally, with a firm kick, the tire fell off. We cheered. It was probably the happiest we had been on the trip to that point.
Rowan struggled to get the spare tire from beneath the car, but he finally emerged. We put the spare on and it was concerningly flat, but it was the best we had. We found the nearest tire shop on Google Maps and the Silver Bullet limped along for 20 more miles.
The tire shop did not have the tire we needed. Unfortunate. My peace was wearing thin as the car wobbled along the road. Without a new tire, we would not get very far, no matter how sunny I felt.
Desperate, we called all the tire shops we could find on Google. After four disappointing calls, one told us they had something close enough. We limped again for another 22 miles, and I began to get really anxious. I tried deep, diaphragmatic breathing to calm down, but the engine began to overheat again and my anxiety peaked.
The dashboard beeped, the whole car shook and the cracked windshield threw strange, misshapen shadows and glares at us. I felt like the glass was going to shatter. I was ready to shatter with it.
We arrived at the tire shop 15 minutes before it closed, and the mechanics were helpful. They laughed at our windshield while inflating the new tire. I laughed, too. I was standing within a memory again, sweating, tired and strangely grateful.
It took six hours in total to fix the flat tire, but we finally returned to the road. We drove another 100 miles to Marquette without an issue.
We were in Marquette for three nights. During all three nights, I carried a new anxiety with me — not about the car, but about my assignment. I sat at the campfire and scribbled in my notebook.
I went to the Upper Peninsula to write about the climate, which was notably pleasant; but that is probably a red herring. I know the Upper Peninsula hasn’t evaded the climate crisis. I even saw a climate-related front-page headline in the Newberry News while I panicked in the first tire shop. “Is the air clean enough?” it read.
The road trip was characterized by uncomfortable situations and daily obstacles, but the weather didn’t pose much of a problem. It was an afterthought. I was too preoccupied with other things — like sitting on the side of the road — to really observe and report on it. I couldn’t deliver what I had promised my editor. I asked her to call me so I might explain my situation. She called me.
“So, I don’t have a climate story for you. Sorry. But I do have a story to tell you. Give me five minutes.”
She did, and I told her how the Silver Bullet failed us, day after day, but I made the best of it. I found myself relaxed, enjoying my friend’s presence in difficult situations. I was learning, I said, how to manage my anxiety.
She laughed at my misfortune and told me to write the story. I hung up and went back to fishing. I felt lighter. To this point, things had gone so wrong that I felt I had failed to do my job as a journalist; I felt like I had lost the assignment three days prior and watched my story fly past me on U.S. Route 2. It hadn’t evaded me, though; the story was broken down and jacked up right in front of me.
The Trip
Before leaving Marquette, I stopped at a bookstore and bought a used copy of Jim Harrison’s “A Good Day to Die.” Harrison was born in the northern half of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Many of his stories take place in the state, in both peninsulas.
“A Good Day to Die” doesn’t take place in Northern Michigan, but the narrator — a writer and fisherman — often dreams about fishing in Northern Michigan, as Rowan and I had just done. Early in the story, two of the main characters set off on a road trip. As Rowan drove, I projected us onto what I was reading.
Our situations were similar and our dispositions were identical; it was two idiots in a car, both on paper and in real life. In Harrison’s book, the narrator became nervous about the car they were driving.
“I had tended to have personal feelings about my succession of used cars and was close to weeping when my ’62 Ford Fairlane died on the Penn Turnpike,” he writes. He remarks how Tim, the owner of the car, does not seem to care much about the condition of his vehicle, even though they were driving it across the country. “Tim’s car growled when the accelerator was depressed, understeered, was too aggressive.”
I thought it was a funny coincidence, so I underlined it in the blue pen I had been taking notes with. I felt less alone with my nerves and I read on. Soon after, the characters stop off at a gas station to buy more beer, and as I read these lines, Rowan stopped off at a gas station, too. I looked up and realized we were only a few miles away from Harrison’s birthplace, Grayling.
As the coincidences piled on, I frantically scribbled in the back of the book. I had no time to pull out my journal. I was in the right place — Jim Harrison’s domain — to tell a story. In the parking lot of the gas station, I wrote until I couldn’t anymore.
Just because the trip may not have gone how we planned it — the fishing was mediocre, the car was dangerously unreliable and I failed to find the story I set out to tell — it was not a failure. It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. I actively made memories. I noticed when I was happy. I learned how effective a mindful presence in uncomfortable situations can be.
Our story was worth remembering, and it might be worth telling. My doubts lifted. My anxiety fled. I peeked over at the odometer.
Though we had no drugs, and we weren’t buying beer in the convenience store like Harrison’s characters, the coincidences reminded me that two idiots driving a beat-up car for miles and miles is not a novel thing. At mile 176,115, I decided the road trip was an exercise of seizing youthful experiences, of maintaining peace while earning stories to tell.
Statement Correspondent Liam Rappleye can be reached at rappleye@umich.edu