My best friend’s little brother saw a sign on a bulletin board advertising an apartment in our hometown of Dollar Bay, Michigan that simply said, “Dollar Bay — not a dump.” We like to joke about the elegant wording of the ad, repeating it over and over again in our thickest Yooper accents. Think long vowels — Dooollaaar Baaay . . . nooot a duuump. It makes me a bit homesick. We’ll never know if the apartment lived up to the description, but I will say that the town, well, the town itself is indeed a bit of a dump.
As a kid growing up in Dollar Bay — population just over 1,000 — I always felt a sense of pride for the town. The Fourth of July is by far the most exciting day of the year in Dollar Bay. The town puts on a two day celebration, starting on the 3rd, with a street dance and treats for the kids. The Fourth features a big parade, chicken barbeque and kids games in the park. The streets fill up with hundreds of people from all over the area, as the neighboring larger towns leave the Fourth of July celebrations to the smaller towns like Dollar Bay. As a youngster I would decorate my bicycle with red, white and blue crepe paper, dress up in a costume and participate in the parade. My mom helped with the costumes. I was a firecracker one year and Yankee Doodle Dandy another. Once I was in junior high, I marched in the high school band wearing the most uncomfortable, ugly polyester uniforms and while playing the trumpet. Seeing the streets lined with so many people made me feel like Dollar Bay was someplace special. It’s Norman Rockwellesque, but with a lot less open container enforcement.
My parents moved out of the Bay shortly after I graduated high school some twenty years ago, but they still live in the area. Every time I return home for a visit, I try to make a trip to the little town where I grew up, and just about every time I’m there it seems a little more ramshackled and run down. I was distraught when my parents decided to move. How could they leave this cute little town where they raised their three brilliant children? What were they thinking? Now when I go back I wonder why they didn’t get out sooner. It’s not to say that I’ve become some elitist snob in the past twenty years . . . while, okay, maybe just a little. However, when they did leave Dollar Bay, they built a house on Lake Superior at the site where we had a cabin for many years. When I return home for a visit I now get to sit on the shores of the largest freshwater lake in the world and take in more beauty than any one person deserves. To think, they chose to trade a view of Vern’s front porch, a neighbor’s makeshift used car lot and the Hebner’s old wood pile for gorgeous Lake Superior sunsets every night. They gave up the sounds of drunken snomobilers for the waves gently hitting the shoreline. What could they have been thinking?
Recently, I attended the Fourth of July celebration in Dollar Bay. For the first time I really felt like a stranger while walking down main street. I saw some people that I recognized, but couldn’t necessarily place. I shared a little small talk with a couple of old friends who graduated a year behind me. It is interesting to feel so alien in the town of my upbringing,a town that was once so much a part of who I was. As I spent time looking at Dollar Bay through a more critical and less rose colored lens, I feel a sense of relief that I got out of there. Yes, the place really is a bit of a dump, but there’s more to it than that.
This year I will be 40-years-old and with this milestone birthday lurking in my thoughts, I find myself curious to explore the town of my upbringing some twenty years later. My formative years . . . how much of a role did growing up in this place have in making me the person I am today? Like just about every native Yooper that I know, I love the area’s history and natural beauty and certainly identify as a born and raised Yooper to the point of having the U.P. tattooed on my arm. Fanatical? Yes, just a bit.
With my most recent visit to the area, I’m beginning to see things from a slightly different point of view. There is a lot of poverty in the area, a lot of substance abuse and domestic violence. Of course, this is nothing new of small town life, or life anywhere, for that matter. But it’s also something that is easy to overlook when you only visit a couple times of year and tend to focus more on the area’s natural beauty and history. As the time since I actually lived here grows, I fear becoming more of a tourist and less of a native Yooper. I’d like to attempt to get in touch with my native Yooper and resist the tourist. I want to explore the area as someone who still considers it home, not someone visiting to take a pretty drive up to Copper Harbor.
So my plan is to walk around the old neighborhood, a.k.a. the whole town really, and view it through the lens of my camera. Lame? Maybe. Mid-life crisis? Maybe. As a kid growing up, everything seemed so much larger — both literally and figuratively. I know nothing is preserved in time forever and I do not expect it to be. But for some reason, experiencing how different things look and feel from when I was a kid, well, it just makes me a little sad. Maybe it’s the impermanence of life in general. We are here for such a short time and really make such a small impact on the world. What does it all mean? What’s it all for? Yeah . . . mid-life crisis.
In part, photographing Dollar Bay is my way of remembering it. Although I’m only 39, I have a pretty lousy memory. I’d like to capture this place as it is now in 2014, before it changes much more. The old high school, the remains of the Copper Country Dairy, Big Hole, Three Pipes, Sandy Bottom, Avenue G, St. Francis, my walk to school, the list goes on.
Stay tuned for the next episode . . .
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