My Top Ten Reasons for Moving Up North

 

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on August 7, 2009 in the Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

 

      The other day my friend Chip from Columbus, Ohio called me. He wanted to know how we were doing since we moved to Cheboygan in March. Like every one of the old cadre from down south, whenever they check in with us there’s the inevitable “I don’t know how you’re going to make it through the winter in northern Michigan” sympathy talk, and I heard it from him, too, as though everyone in the world thinks there’s no way a city boy like me has a chance to make it through the winter up here. The blizzards, the ice, the long dark nights… my survival skills. I always respond that I grew up in Duluth, but I can sense a disbelieving shaking of heads anyway. They know me too well.

     It got me thinking about David Letterman’s Top Ten Reasons shtick that’s helped make his show so popular over the years. He starts from the number ten and reads his list from ten back to number one, with a drum roll, for ridiculous comic effect. The call made me want to do the same. Apologies to the master. My Top Ten Reasons for Moving Up North:

     10. I took out a huge mortgage on the lake cottage based on house values in 2005 to buy out my relatives. Everybody on the planet knows the math in 2009 on that one! Dumped the down state mortgage in the process. Now it’s one place, one payment. Better odds.

     9. I haven’t had to wait in traffic since we moved except for a very short older lady in a 1989 Pontiac on the two lane blacktop of the North Straits Highway. She had her left blinker on for a good mile as she puttered along towards Wal-Mart at about twenty miles an hour. The blinker was comforting, not aggravating.

     8. A good breakfast here is religion, not some recommendation from the National Institute of Health. And it’s not granola and vitamins. Eggs, potatoes and a little meat. Stack of toast.

     7. The customer service difference between “I don’t know, maybe” and “you betcha.”

     6. Snow banks come in Brilliant White, not Exhaust Pipe Dirt or  Road Salt Grey.

     5. A heat wave means a day in the eighties Fahrenheit, not weeks in the nineties or the hundreds (though since the summer solstice this year we’ve had exactly zero heat waves).

     4. The nasty biting, whining-in-your-ear mosquito season lasts about a month. With a little rain in Ohio, five months.

     3. New cars up north look just like my two old ones (almost 500,000 odometer miles between them) when a little gravel road dust is thrown on them.

     2. If the refrigerator looks empty you can grab a fishing rod, shotgun or rifle depending on the season. Of course you have to know how to use them.

     1. My wife is deliriously happy.