Staying in Lake

There is no lake called Lake. The town took the word and left the water to sort out its own names — Windover, Doc and Tom, Big Norway, a scatter of small ponds strung along M-115 that never bothered to agree on one. You come up looking for the thing on the sign. You find a post office instead. ZIP 48632, a stop sign, woodsmoke coming off somebody’s chimney in October. That’s most of it.

Get the county right, because plenty of people don’t. This is Clare County — not Osceola, that’s the next county west, where the Muskegon runs. Clare County, southern edge of the northern half of the mitten, elevation 1,063 feet. High enough that the nights turn cold in September and stop apologizing by October. The community proper sits about five miles west of Farwell, out on US-10. The good water sits north of there, up in Freeman Township, off M-115. The post office and the fishing are not the same address. Nobody out here seems to mind.

Understand the scale before you set your expectations, because “town” oversells it. Lake is a name that covers more ground than the place does. The dot on the map is a crossroads. The 48632 it anchors reaches north for miles into the lakes, so a mailing address of Lake, Michigan might put you on a working farm, on a lakefront lot, or on a two-track with a hunting camp at the end of it — all of them Lake, none of them a downtown. The post office is the closest thing to a civic center, and it is about the size of a two-car garage. This is a feature. You came for the lakes, not the town, and the town has the decency to know it.

The drive is the introduction

You come up US-127 to Clare, then swing northwest onto M-115 and watch the gas stations quit on you inside a mile. M-115 runs northwest the whole way — through the lakes country toward Cadillac, and past that to Frankfort and the big cold water of the actual Lake Michigan. You will not go that far. Twelve miles or so out of Clare, you turn off. Onto a road named for a family, or a lake, or both. The pavement gives up and goes to gravel, the gravel goes to sand under jack pine, and then you are there — wherever there is. The last mile smells like hot sand and two-stroke oil and, when the wind is right, the lake itself, a green weedy warm-shallows smell that people either love or roll the windows up against.

What it is for

Fishing. First and mostly. Windover is fifty acres and drops to sixty-eight feet, which is deep for something you can row across in ten minutes — deep enough to hold walleye through a hot August when the shallow lakes have gone to soup. Northern pike in the weed lines. Smallmouth and largemouth both. Bluegill, rock bass, black crappie, perch — the panfish that keep a kid on a dock busy from breakfast to sunburn. You can work the whole lake from a fourteen-foot aluminum boat and never hear a jet ski, because there is not enough room for one to get up to speed. Doc and Tom, Big Norway, the little unnamed cuts off the two-tracks — same arrangement, smaller. This is not trophy water. It is Tuesday-evening water. A cooler, two rods, the mosquitoes arriving at dusk on schedule.

The second reason is the same as the first, said quieter. There is no downtown. Freeman Township, which holds most of these lakes, counted 1,125 people at the last census and was drawn up in 1908, and it has not hurried since. No stoplight. The commerce runs to a party store and whatever bait somebody is selling out of a chest freezer — buy your gas and your groceries back in Clare, before you commit to the gravel. What you get in trade is dark. Real dark, the kind that puts the whole Milky Way back over the water where it belongs, and a quiet at night that an outboard being stubborn a half-mile off will carry clean across.

Winter does not empty the place so much as freeze it in position. The lakes lock up, the shanties go out onto Windover, and the M-115 corridor turns into a snowmobile route lit by headlights and cold as a walk-in. It is not for everyone. It is barely for most people. But there are worse things than a cold morning, a hole in the ice, and a thermos that outlasts the fish.

Somebody keeps this running, and it is not the county. It is the man who grades the sand road after the frost heaves it, the woman at the party store who knows which lakes are producing and will tell you if she likes your face, the neighbor who has watched the same house for the same owner for fifteen winters and rakes the porch roof before the snow caves it. You will not meet most of them. The place works anyway, on the labor of people who are not performing hospitality at you. Tip that, when you find it.

Where to stay

You do not stay in Lake at a motel, because there is not one worth the name. You stay in a house on the water, or a cabin a short walk from it, and you buy your own eggs. That is the deal, and it is the right one. If we have a place open out here on the 48632 — this one — it will be the kind with a screen porch facing the water and a canoe already gone gray in the weeds, because that is the only sort of house that makes sense on a lake this size. Look at the Lake page for what is actually open and when. The good weeks book early, and the people who come here tend to come back to the same week every year until somebody makes them stop.

Eat, do, and when

Eat: keep your expectations low and read the companion note, Where to Eat near Lake, before you count on a kitchen being open past eight. Most of the real food is back in Clare or over in Harrison, the county seat, and that guide is honest about the drive. Do: the water is the doing. If it rains, the Things to Do near Lake note has the rail-trail and the county parks that hold up under a gray sky. When: come the last week of September if you can take a cold morning. The water is still swimmable if you are stubborn about it, the bugs have finally quit, and the maples along M-115 turn the color people drive a long way to sit and look at. There is a whole note on that too — Lake’s Best Season.

There is no lake called Lake. That throws people for the first day or so, the way any place named for a thing it doesn’t have will. Then they stop noticing.