The Pere Marquette State Trail near Hersey

Halfway between Hersey and Evart the pavement bends toward the Muskegon River and the smell arrives before anything else — cut hay, then the wet-iron cool coming off the water, then pine. You don’t see the river first. You smell it. There’s an overlook there, and it’s the one place on this stretch people stop on purpose.

Get the name right, because two trails share it and the internet will lie to you. The paved ribbon everybody photographs runs east, around Midland — that is the Pere Marquette Rail-Trail. What passes Hersey is the Pere Marquette State Trail, the western half of the same dead railroad, fifty-five miles from Clare out to Baldwin. Same Flint and Pere Marquette railbed. Different surface, different crowd, no gift shop.

The good part near Hersey is thirteen miles of asphalt — twelve, depending who is counting — from the rebuilt depot at Reed City through Hersey to Evart. West of Reed City the pavement quits. Seventeen miles of crushed limestone out to Baldwin, which is a different day and a fatter tire. The paved stretch follows two rivers, the Hersey and the Muskegon, past farms and pine groves and, come July, wildflowers nobody planted.

The grade is old railroad, which means it is flat — a train will not climb what a road will — and straight enough that you can hear a car on the county road a half mile before it crosses. Mostly you hear your own tires and the water. Blackbirds in the cattails. A tractor somewhere. In summer it smells like warm tar and cut field. In October it smells like the river and woodsmoke from somebody’s first fire of the year.

Start at Reed City if you want a bathroom. The depot there is a nineteenth-century train station built back from nothing, standing where the State Trail crosses the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail — the two old railroads make an X and the depot is the hinge, part rest stop, part Chamber of Commerce. Water, restrooms, parking. Hersey gives you a staging area and a gravel lot, and that is the entire hospitality budget. Which is honest, at least.

Finding the Hersey lot is its own small comedy. The town is four blocks off the main road, and the staging area sits back by the trail rather than the street — miss it and you are looping past the same corner twice before you give up and follow whoever looks like they have done this before. Then it is you, the gravel, and whatever you carried in.

Hersey was here first — before the county, before the county was organized enough to argue about. Delos Blodgett walked in, 1851, and planted potatoes on the west bank of the Muskegon, squatting on state land, which is how a good deal of Michigan got started. He named the place for Nathan Hersey, a trapper who had worked the river in the early 1840s and then, as far as the record cares, walked back out of it. Blodgett stayed. Sawmill, gristmill, township supervisor. In 1869 the village was platted and made the seat of Osceola County, first town in it, the whole machinery of government run out of a lumber camp on a river. The lumber left on the Flint and Pere Marquette line, some of it, the story goes, to help rebuild Chicago after the 1871 fire — though every lumber town in Michigan tells that one about itself.

It did not hold. By 1920 fewer than three hundred people lived in Hersey and the jail had been condemned. Reed City, up the line, had eighteen hundred people and ambitions, and in 1927 the county seat moved there on a vote and a lawsuit and a ballot box the Michigan Supreme Court had questions about. Reed City won. Hersey has been the smaller name on the map ever since, the town the trail passes through on the way to the town that beat it.

Come the first week of October. The maples along the Muskegon turn before the oaks, the whole thirteen miles goes gold and rust, and the air drops cold enough that you quit sweating and start smelling the river again. Bring a bike with real tires. Bring water — Hersey will not sell you any. Our house near the river one of our Michigan cabin rentals, Golden Valley Retreat, sits a few minutes from the Hersey lot, close enough to ride before the coffee wears off, and the Hersey guide https://roamstays.com/location/hersey/ covers the rest of what the town has and does not have.

The overlook faces west. Go late in the day. Then wait.