When Yoopers travel, they naturally contrast and compare where they are to life back in the U.P. Yoopers naturally see the world from a different perspective, a Yooper perspective.
When home, you know you are of the land of the Menominee, Dakota, and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa). You relate to the Finnish word “Sisu”-stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness. Your ancestors probably supplied the rest of the country and world with minerals, metals, and wood.
But when you’re downstate, far south, out west or east, even across the Big Water, you miss the meat turnover brought to the region by Cornish miners called pasties (pronounced “pass-tees”). And cudighi, the sweetly spiced Italian American sausage link (often part of a sandwich on a long hard roll with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce), brought by Italian immigrants in 1936.
You listen to the “trolls” (people who live “below the bridge”) complain about a few inches of snow.
When you describe your normal winter of snow measured in feet, they say “I could never live up there! I’d move to Florida!” Then Yoopers quietly think to themselves “Good. Go to Florida, or Phoenix, or Denver, or wherever—anywhere but the U.P!”
In the cities you endure four, six, eight lanes of traffic, creeping along like a funeral procession. You miss the forest, the quiet, the fresh smells.
Since you grew up among clear cold trout streams and waterfalls, you shake your head in disappointment when you see their so-called “rivers” colored either green from algae, brown from sediment, or girdled into a concrete walled channel.
Where are the frogs, the turtles, the trout? Is there really any need for fish to have eyes? What could fish see in that murky water? What memories will the young have of hours spent playing at “the river”?
So instead, you head for the beach at their local lake.
It’s not the miles of open beach along the clear cold shoreline of the U.P.’s great lakes, Superior, Michigan, or the northwest corner of Huron. It’s smaller, more crowded. There are no agates. It doesn’t smell quite the same.
In October, their few trees might turn a pretty yellow color, but they don’t get our explosion of reds and oranges. They don’t have the leaf-lined, golden-carpeted roads like ours, or the near-solid walls of roadside color that reach deep into the forest and change with every turn.
In the U.P., it’s like a color-crazed artist painted a gigantic mural of color along miles of roads. Tourists must drive up to the U.P. for that experience. They must leave all that color here. They can’t take it home with them.
I recall the lyric from the old Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi about how you don’t appreciate what you have until you don’t have it anymore. You wonder, do they even know how good it once was, how good it can be?
When you grow up with waterways that are basically drainage ditches and greenery that consists mostly of lawns, how do you gain a love of the outdoors? From a zoo?
Modernity has weaseled its way between the land and its people, causing people to pay for the pleasures of good land, but we resist. Yes, we log trees and mine metals, but we also protect our land because when we travel, we see what they’ve lost.
When we anxiously head home over the Mighty Mac, our storied Mackinac Bridge, we breathe a sigh of relief as we turn back onto Hwy 2 or Hwy 41, knowing that soon we’ll soon be home. Ahhh… YOOPtopia!
Excerpted from the Winter’23-’24 issue of Health & Happiness U.P. Magazine, copyright 2023, Empowering Lightworks, LLC. All rights reserved.
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