My Brief Trip Up North

My mini-vacation last week went well, despite having to change our plans around the day of. My sister made the call early Wednesday morning after checking the weather – the temperature was supposed to be in the low 50s with scattered rain. The next day, however, was slated to be in the high 50s and pure sunshine. So Wednesday became the day reserved for sightseeing, and Thursday was the day we were going to Mackinac Island before driving back home.

Of course, during the four-hour drive to our hotel, we hit two tourist stops. Throughout my childhood, our family would always make a detour to them whenever we went up north, so I expected it. And without telling my sister about my recent fascination, she suggested that we visit a familiar stop in Gaylord: a small museum filled with taxidermied animals.

(What? You didn’t think I actually made up the idea of this kind of museum to fit my short story, did you?) 

So there we were, before noon, taking a walk down their halls with our little clipboards (because they provide a scavenger hunt, if you’re interested) and reading all the displays. At some point during the middle, we thought we heard another group entering the museum, but we never saw anyone else during our time there.

I learned so many new animal facts. Like the Walleye fish is named that way because it’s derived from the Icelandic word Vagl, meaning "film over eye." (Yes, the fish gives off the appearance of having cataracts.) Or that owls technically don’t have eyeballs. (They’re actually tubular and are held in place by bone plates.) Or that ermines are prone to catching a certain parasite that deforms their skulls. (As morbid as this sounds, I was disappointed I didn’t get to see a parasite-destroyed skull. I later googled it. Turns out, the bone above their nasal cavities becomes porous.)

^Fun fact: Black bears are the only native bear found in Michigan. 

It was also interesting to see how much my brain filled in the blanks and fictionalized the museum while I was writing my short story two weeks ago. I haven’t been to the actual museum since I was probably in high school, so my sister and I were trying to figure out what had changed during that time frame. The two animals you can touch in the sitting room were different – but the species were still the same. I also laughed internally when I stumbled upon the name of the early Michigan fur trapper that the museum has two exhibits of; I had given my protagonist the exact same first name. I wish I could say my subconscious was behind it, but it was just a fun coincidence.

Later, once we checked into our hotel and dropped our luggage off, we crossed over the Mackinac Bridge. We eventually found my uncle’s small business/tourist shop, and we sat in their parking lot for a few minutes, debating whether we should actually go in or not. In the end, we did enter the establishment. Made our uncle speechless, and then we hung around for forty-five minutes until my aunt showed up for her shift.

^Look at those white caps! See how windy it was? Our ears were smarting for a while after we climbed back down. 

The evening with my extended family went surprisingly well. Got to see their 8-year-old dog for the first time since we haven’t been inside their house in nine years. We even received free ferry ride tickets for the next day because my cousin works at one of the docks! (Saved me and my sister $25 each.)

As for the next day when we finally rode our bikes on Mackinac Island, the weather was exactly what was predicted: warmer, and no rain. Nothing will make you feel more out shape after bike riding for eight miles and then doing another mile or two inland where all the hills are. (We walked our bikes up those steep hills. I was always the one trailing behind.) 

^I had to climb 207 steps one way to get this picture. Thankfully, we walked this vantage point in the beginning of our day. By the end, we would have been way too tired. 

Throughout our bike riding circuit of the island, they have various educational signs to read. So we’d pause to take a look at them. And I discovered that I can’t stop proofreading them all. Who wrote these signs? Why did one board spell the word “travel” two different ways? (In American-English, it’s only one “L.”) I kept finding small errors as I was reading the displays at the museum too. The worst offense was when I noticed a semicolon after the word “however.” I thought my eye was going to start twitching upon seeing that. (The semicolon always goes before “however”!) It was usually a comma issue at the museum, though.

Don’t worry; I only pointed out the proofreading errors once to my sister. I realize no one actually wants to hear me obnoxiously correcting editing mistakes out loud. Not unless I’m purposely trying to annoy someone.

But there’s no escaping it in my head.

An Unexpected Muse

As of last week, my Writer’s Block is no longer in existence. Typing out my exasperation with it in my previous post actually worked.

The idea of a museum filled with taxidermied animals never left me. And in the early hours of a Wednesday morning – around 2:30 a.m. as I was getting ready to sleep – a character hit me. All I had was his inner turmoil, imagining him in this setting. Then everything else sort of spilled out the more I thought about how the protagonist got into this situation.

Much later in the evening of that Wednesday, I drafted a brief outline of the short story and began working on it. I wrote for almost three hours that night and then spent two hours the following day to finish it.

It was more of a literary piece – which is what I was aiming for – but the theme I thought I was going to explore ended up vying for attention with another theme: inheritance. Fun stuff. Some stories will certainly take you on some interesting turns once you actually start writing it.

Since I finished the piece, however, I keep going back to tweak it. I added a more concrete scene in the opening page. Thought about moving a few sentences around in another scene. (In the end, I didn’t do it, but I’m still not completely satisfied with the start of that scene.) Changed the final line of the entire story.

I’m also contemplating about maybe writing a second version of the story. Right now, I think I made the right decision to have it in third-person perspective. But there seems to be a strong narrator voice, which I keep going back and forth on. It fits with the detachment and despair of the protagonist, but I’m not sure if it’s too much. Also, the museum setting basically feels like a character too, so I don’t want to spend so much time in the protagonist’s head because of it.

I haven’t written a new story since last week, but now I have this “itch” to write more stories with a rural or small-town feel. I would never personally want to live in the countryside, but I understand why some people would find this type of environment alluring.

It probably doesn’t help that my sister and I are going on a mini-vacation up north next week. Northern Michigan, especially the Upper Peninsula, is quite known for their rural small towns. I have family that lives in the first tiny town once you cross the Mackinac Bridge, and my cousins’ school contained all K-12 students in one building. Granted, the elementary, middle school, and high school each had a section of the building, but still. The fact that they’d only have thirty kids in each grade is something I have a difficult time comprehending.

Despite all that, I hope I can mine some story ideas from my trip. I haven’t gone on any sort of overnight vacation in four years. My sister and I had talked about going up north since summer 2016, but we could never make it happen. (We also haven’t been in that area in almost nine years.) I’m excited for it. Even if I have had to evade all sorts of questions about it from my mom and grandma…because they’re hinting that they want to tag along on our mini-vacation too.