Mecosta after the lakes go quiet

The best week on these lakes is the one nobody books.

By the second Sunday in October the swim beach at School Section Lake is a rope, a sign, and nothing behind them. The snack shack that moved ice cream all August sits shuttered. The campground — 166 modern sites and five camp-n-cabins, jammed shoulder to shoulder in July — thins to a handful of diehards running the electric off the hookups, and by the end of the month the county chains it shut for the year. Open May through October. Then dark. That’s the part I keep driving up for.

There are worse reasons to come to Mecosta — a village of 386 people named for a Potawatomi chief, Mecosta, which the village will tell you means bear cub — and most of them have to do with the water. The lakes don’t announce themselves. The Tri-Lakes chain, Mecosta and Round and Blue, runs better than 700 acres, and Blue drops to fifty feet in the middle, cold and dark, the kind of water that doesn’t warm back up once fall gets into it. You can smell the turn before you see it. Cold water has a smell. So does the first woodsmoke off a chimney across the bay.

The boats come off first. Labor Day empties the ski runs, and by the end of September the pontoons are shrink-wrapped in side yards and the only wakes on Lake Mecosta are wind. The water gets loud in another register — no motors, so you hear the shallows, the ducks staging, a dog barking two docks down. Nights drop into the thirties by mid-month. Mornings you’ll want gloves and won’t admit it.

Then the color. The received wisdom says drive north for it — Traverse City, the Sleeping Bear overlooks, some pull-off with a parking problem. The received wisdom is doing more driving than it needs to. The northern Lower Peninsula runs its maples and oaks the second and third weeks of October, and Mecosta County sits inside that window, and the difference between here and the postcard spots is that here you can hear it. No shuttle. No traffic. Just the sound a hardwood makes when the wind comes off open water and the leaves are ready to quit. Loud, again. Louder than you’d think.

And the fishing keeps going. Nobody tells the summer people this, the ones who pack up after Labor Day like a whistle blew. Panfish are open all year in Michigan — bluegill, crappie, perch, twenty-five a day in any combination — and School Section Lake has been stocked with walleye since 1995 to knock down a bluegill run that kept stunting itself, so there’s a walleye in the cold water worth the cold hands. Walleye and pike stay legal on inland lakes down here through the fifteenth of March. Chippewa Lake holds all of it, walleye and pike and both bass, crappie and perch and rock bass, and in October you’ll have the ramp to yourself and a heron that resents you for taking it. The bass you throw back. The rest is dinner.

We wrote up the Tri-Lakes on their own, and Chippewa Lake back when the beach piece was about the beach. Read those for the water. This one’s about the light going, the cold coming, and the fish not caring either way.

What to do, then. Fish the mornings, when the walleye slide shallow and the fog sits on Blue Lake like it’s paying rent. Walk the campground loops at School Section after they empty — 80 acres of hardwood with nobody in it is not the place the July families think they know. Drive the county roads between the lakes at four in the afternoon, when the low sun does the work no overlook can, and keep the windows down for the smell even when it’s too cold to.

Bring layers, a thermos, and lower expectations about your own competence at a boat launch in a crosswind. Bring wool socks. Bring somebody who won’t talk for the first hour.

The house we keep near the Tri-Lakes has a woodstove that does most of the arguing, and it takes bookings well past the week the beach gate gets chained. one of our Michigan cottage rentals, Three Shores Retreat, Reserve it for a stretch the calendar swears is over.

The snack shack’s been dark for weeks. Come anyway.