Staying in Oscoda: the river, the lake, and Paul Bunyan

The river runs 138 miles to get here and then it quits. The current gives out where the Au Sable meets Lake Huron, brown water sliding into gray, and if you stand on the pier at the right hour you can watch the two of them refuse to mix. That’s the town. That’s the whole geography of it, more or less — a river that ran out of Michigan and a lake that wouldn’t take it politely.

You come at it from the east side of the state, on the Lake Huron shore they call the Sunrise Coast, and the name is the flat literal truth of the place, not a slogan somebody workshopped. The sun comes up over the water here instead of going down into it. Most of Michigan’s shoreline faces west — faces the sunset, faces Chicago and the crowds and the second mortgage on a cottage. This one faces the other way. Get up cold and early or you miss the only trick the lake does for free.

The drive in is US-23. From the bottom of the state it runs up as the Sunrise Side Coastal Highway, two lanes for most of it, and MDOT hung that name on it back in 2004, part of a stretch that hugs the Huron shore close to 200 miles before it gives out at Mackinaw City. You’ll come up through Tawas, past the bait shops and the long empty runs where the forest closes back over the road, and then the trees break and there’s water on your right the size of an ocean with no salt in it. A few hours up from the bottom of the state. Less from the Thumb. You’ll stop somewhere along the way whether you planned to or not — everybody does, and the road is built for it.

The town itself is small and does not pretend otherwise. A few blocks of downtown, a grocery, the hardware store, the beach park where the sand runs cold under your feet into July because the lake takes its time warming. You can walk the built part of Oscoda in twenty minutes and see all of it. That is not a complaint. It is the point, and we’ll get to why.

Home of Paul Bunyan, more or less

First, the lumberjack. The town calls itself the Home of Paul Bunyan and it has better paperwork for the claim than you’d guess. The first Bunyan tale set down in print — a newspaperman named James MacGillivray, running “Round River” in the Oscoda Press on August 10, 1906 — came from here, and in 2005 the Michigan House put it in a resolution, birthplace of the legend as first set in ink. There’s a statue for it. Thirteen feet and change, fiberglass, standing up on US-23 at Furtaw Field north of downtown, looking exactly as sincere and as ridiculous as a giant painted lumberjack is supposed to look. Go see it. It takes four minutes. It is not the reason you came, and the town knows that, and it put the statue up anyway — which tells you something about the town.

What it’s for

Because the reason you came is the water. It’s always the water. The Au Sable is a blue-ribbon trout stream — a state designation, not a chamber-of-commerce adjective — and men have driven half a day to stand thigh-deep in the cold of it and throw feathers at brown trout since before your grandfather did. In the last full weekend of July the river carries the canoe marathon, 120 miles nonstop down from Grayling, a race run since 1947 that starts at nine at night with two-person teams sprinting through a street with boats on their shoulders and ends the next afternoon here, on the Huron shore, 14 to 19 hours later depending on how badly the river used them. They call it the world’s toughest spectator race. The paddlers look like they mean it when they land. The rest of the year the river is quiet, and that is the other thing it is for.

Quiet is the actual product. There’s a smell to it — cold water, cut pine, woodsmoke off somebody’s chimney two houses down in October — and a sound, which is mostly the lake working against the sand after dark and not a lot else. No traffic to speak of once the light goes. The cell signal comes and goes out in the Huron National Forest and nobody out there minds. You come to Oscoda to have less happen to you than usual. Some people can’t take it by the second evening and drive back down to where things happen. Most people, by the third morning, have stopped reaching for the phone in their pocket.

Where to stay

We keep a handful of houses in and around town — you can see all of them on the Oscoda page, sorted by how close they sit to the water and how many people you’re hauling up here. If it’s the river you want, this one puts you near enough to walk down to it with a coffee before anyone else is awake. Look at which way the deck faces before you book. The ones that face east are the ones worth setting an alarm for. The rest are houses with a good bed and a woodstove, which on a cold night is most of what you actually need.

Eat, do, when

A few pointers, and then I’ll leave you to it. On the food: the town is small and honest about it — a few counters, a couple of places worth the short drive — and we’ve been through them and written down what’s real in Where to eat in Oscoda, hours and all, checked, because a wrong hour on a Tuesday in the off-season is a bad afternoon you don’t get back.

On the doing: drive River Road. Twenty-two miles of scenic byway running west off the lake into the Huron National Forest — the Lumberman’s Monument, the long stair down to Iargo Springs, the log jam you can climb across. It gets its own piece, River Road: the drive, the monument, and Iargo Springs, and it earns the space. If you’d rather be in the river than looking down at it, Paddling the Au Sable tells you where to put in and what the water does under a boat.

On the when: everybody picks July. July is fine. July is also the warm, crowded, obvious answer, and Come to Oscoda in the fall (everyone else picks July) makes the case for the other one — the color coming up River Road, the empty beaches, the cold that keeps the July people home. And if all you’ve got is the two nights, A long weekend in Oscoda lays it out hour by hour so you don’t burn the daylight deciding.

The river still won’t mix with the lake. Stand on the pier and watch it not happen. Bring a coat.