Staying in Montague

Two towns split one lake, and they have been doing it since before the Civil War. Montague on the north shore, Whitehall on the south, White Lake in the middle — a drowned river mouth a couple of miles across that both places treat as their own front yard. A causeway carries the old highway over the narrow end. Stand on the Montague side on a still night and you can read the lights in Whitehall across the water. The rivalry is real. Mostly it is about high school football, and it has been for a hundred years.

The city is small — about 2,400 people, a figure that has barely moved in a century and swells to three or four times that when the summer people come in June. This is the far northwest corner of Muskegon County. You get here off US-31, the highway that runs the whole west coast of the Lower Peninsula, and you leave it at Fruitvale Road and follow Water Street down toward the lake. Downtown is a few blocks. A hardware store, a couple of bars, an ice cream window with a line out front on a warm night. The smell off the lake shifts with the wind — cold and clean when it comes off the big water, low and weedy when a shallow lake sits in the August heat.

White Lake is not Lake Michigan, and that trips people up. They book a place on the water thinking they will walk out the door onto the big lake, and instead they get this — quieter, warmer, ringed with docks. The White River comes down out of the orchard country to the north and east and pools here behind the dunes. That is how the lake got made. Wind and sand dammed the river mouth thousands of years ago and left a harbor. To reach Lake Michigan you run the channel out the west end, past the White River Light Station that has stood on the south bank since 1875, out to where the horizon goes flat and empty. It is a few miles by boat. By car it is a short drive to the sand, and a longer walk across it once the afternoon has cooked the beach to something you cannot stand on barefoot.

The thing everyone stops for stands at the corner of Water and Dowling. A weathervane, forty-eight feet tall, billed as the largest working one on the planet — and the record-keepers back the claim. Whitehall Metal Studios built it and gave it to the town in 1984. Four thousand three hundred pounds of steel and aluminum, and on top of all of it, turning with the wind, a scale model of a lumber schooner named the Ella Ellenwood. The real ship ran aground north of Milwaukee in the fall of 1901 and broke apart in a storm. The next spring a piece of her nameplate washed up in White Lake, the word ELLENWOOD still legible on the wood, and that board hangs in the city hall now. A town lost a boat, got the wreck’s nameplate back, and built the biggest weathervane in the world about it. Call it grief. Call it civic pride. Around here the two are hard to tell apart.

What Montague is for is the water, the trail, and the beach, roughly in that order. The Hart-Montague Trail starts here — twenty-two miles of paved rail bed running north through asparagus fields and old fruit orchards to the town of Hart. It was the first rail-trail the state ever took on, the work of a fruit grower named William Field who picked up the dead rail corridor in the early eighties and handed it to the state. Flat enough that a kid can ride the whole thing and complain the entire way. In summer the lake is warm and slow and forgiving of a small boat you do not know how to run. In winter the same trail takes snowmobiles once there are more than four inches down. The lumber that helped build Chicago went out through this channel a century and a half ago, and the town has been quiet ever since. That is the point of the place, not a knock against it.

Stay on the water if the budget allows it. We keep a few houses on the Montague side one of our Michigan cottage rentals, Driftwood Sands Retreat, — the kind with a dock, a view across to the Whitehall lights, close enough to walk into town for the ice cream and far enough out that what you hear at night is loons and not US-31. If the White Lake houses are gone, the Montague page has the rest of what we run around here. Book the water. The inland places cost less, and they cost less for a reason.

For where to eat, the rundown is in Where to Eat in Montague, and it is not a long piece — this is a small field, and better to name the four places that are good than pad it. What to do past the trail and the beach lives in Things to Do near Montague, the light station and the channel piers included. And if you are trying to time the trip, read Montague’s Best Season before you book. The short version is that everyone comes in July, and July is not the answer.

The weathervane turns whether anyone is watching. It has pointed at nothing in particular for forty-odd years. So does the town.