Trapping tourists

By Mike VanBuren

From the early July 2013 edition of The North Woods Call
    
   Summer has officially arrived in northern Michigan, along with the annual influx of tourists looking for recreation and quality outdoor experiences.

  The vacationers have been greeted, once again—as they have  for many decades—by legions of gargantuan figures that stand solemn guard over many state highways.  These figures are easy to spot, posing rigidly along the roadways while waiting to accept star billing in somebody’s photo album, home video, or slide show.

     Inevitably, a road-tripping family from Flint, Detroit, or Grand Rapids will come along, careen off the blacktop in their mini-van and slide to a dusty halt amidst flying gravel.  The kids will jump from the car and race to strike a giddy pose for  Dad, who will peer through the viewfinder of his camera and capture the special moment for posterity.

    Then they’ll all head for the gift shop—there’s usually one close by—in search of fake Indian-bead belts, tiny birch bark canoes, or some other cheap and inauthentic trinket from Asia to help them remember the occasion.

  As for me, I generally turn away in callous indifference and keep driving.  I’m too old to get excited about incredible hulks of hardened plaster spread over wood and chicken wire frames.   Besides, if I want, I can always visit them on the way back.  The elephantine forms will certainly be there for a while, waiting patiently for the next carload of money-toting tourists to come whizzing by.

     These herculean dust collectors range from bearded folk heroes to domestic and wild animals.  They are often brightly colored and magnified many times by dimensionally challenged craftsmen.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think an army of jumbo knickknacks had invaded the north country.

    Without a doubt, one of the most popular northern creations is Paul Bunyan—an overgrown, ax-wielding lumberjack who can sometimes be seen standing next to his beloved companion, Babe the Blue Ox.  A cute couple, to be sure, and one that I confess posing alongside a time or two when I was a child traveling between state parks with my parents and sister.

  Large inanimate bears and moose are also popular among the prodigious artisans who build these towering monuments to the north woods. Throw in some antique automobiles, and perhaps some stuffed deer hunter mannequins, and you have a recipe for upper Michigan intrigue.

     Back when I worked in Kalkaska during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the village seemed to be rich in candidates for the yet-to-be-established Monster Statue Hall of Fame.  Anyone who drove through the village in those days was greeted by a rich variety of cyclopean replicas.  There was a chicken, a jumping trout, a pink hippopotamus and a foraging bear—not to mention the obese toddler balancing a double-deck hamburger at the southern end of town.

     Further north, about halfway to Mancelona, an entire colony of mastodonic critters has resided for years in the forest along U.S. 131.  Last time I checked, there was an elephant, an eight-foot-tall rabbit, and a host of other stiff and hollow mammals.  Tucked away in the trees, as I recall, was even a small replica of Noah’s Ark, which I suspect the animals use whenever it rains.

     Mt. Mancelona may not be as majestic as Mt. Ararat, but nobody seems quite sure where Noah’s floating zoo actually came to rest.  I think I know.

   At one time, I thought that Kalkaska County—once known for lumber and more recently for crude oil—might attempt to become the nation’s leading producer of Goliath souvenirs, designed for and, of course, sold to money-oozing tourists from Brobdingnag and beyond.

     It would have been the natural next chapter to the local development story.  With badly twisted logic caused by attending too many Economic Development Corporation meetings, I figured the county could well emerge as the only community anywhere in the world to manufacture northern Michigan souvenirs for visiting giants—beings long associated with abnormal growth.

     And there I was in the middle of it all, never having taken a ceramics class.