FTV: Papin Road

 

     One of my favorite Steve Earl songs is Copperhead Road.  If I had an ounce of song writing ability in me, I would put the Earl touch on a tune called Papin Road, but I don’t.  Everytime I drive down that stretch of gravel road, Earl’s song pops into my head.  That name no longer exists on any newer maps, but in my mind, it will always be ‘Papin Road’.

     When I was four years old, we would occasionally rent a small cabin at Collin’s Cabins at the end of Papin Road east of L’Anse.  The cabins stood at the mouth of the Silver River which empties into the foot of Huron Bay.  Our side of the bay is at the base of the Abbaye Peninsula which separates Huron Bay from Keweenaw Bay.  The Abbaye name is derived from French for ‘point between two bays’.  This body of land looks like a smaller version of the Keweenaw Peninsula.  My dad used to hunt and fish in this area when he was stationed at the State Police post in L’Anse, Micxhigan.  I was born and lived my first year on the planet along the shore of Keweenaw Bay.  We left for Manistique, lived there for a year and then moved on to Marquette which was my dad’s last MSP post.  My first clear memories starting at age 3-4 are from our first house on Kaye Street in Marquette and the previously mentioned fishing trips to Huron Bay. 

     By the time I was five, the folks had purchased a lot to the north of Collin’s Cabins and constructed a one room tarpaper shack we called The Swamp.  I can take credit for the name.  We stayed at Collin’s Cabins when we worked on the original camp.  Everyone reminds me that my rallying cry as we set off to work on clearing the lot and building the camp was, “To the swamp!” which stuck.  There wasn’t much lot clearing to do because the property we bought was the site of a sawmill in the late 1890s and early 1900s.  

     The ‘swamp’ part was actually man-made.  When the sawmill was in operation, they piled waste slab wood for a dock that extended into the river channel.  This was overlain with planks and steam powered ships would tie up there to load finished lumber.  Sediments from the river were deposited on the upstream side of this structure.  Eventually bulrushes, cattails, and small shrubs began to grow on the ‘point’ (as we have called it since we bought the land) which in turn trapped even more sediments.  

    The sawmill site (and soon The Swamp) stood atop a flat sandy area that was created at the end of the last ice age.  The Silver River drains the highlands between Mount Curwood and the Herman Highlands located east of L’Anse.  When the early Lake Superior water level was higher, the mouth of the river (and thus the foot of the bay) were farther upstream than they are today.  Sandbars tend to be deposited on the inside of river bends.  By mapping the step-like sandbars that were left high and dry as the lake level dropped, one can see where each lower river stage flowed.  When the last of these ancient sandbars was laid down, the river mouth at the head of the bay was formed.  By then, Lake Superior had  stabilized at the average elevation of about 602 feet above sea level.

     Our marooned sandbar stands a good six or seven feet above today’s average Superior water level.  I say ‘average’ because the shape of Huron Bay results in local tides.  Huron Bay has a wide mouth that opens into Lake Superior seven miles to the NE and it narrows to the river mouth at our location.  When the extreme wind or weather systems push water farther up the river, the level at The Swamp can change 8 to 10 feet from low to high tide.  After the sawmill dock was no longer in use, it continued to capture more sediments until it was buried under swamp grass and trees.  There used to be forty feet or more of the artificially created swamp between the camp and the river’s edge but erosion has removed a good deal of it.  As the river cut back the bank upstream from our present dock, the erosion uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts.  Everything from bottles of ‘Dr. Chamberlain’s Balm’ (glass with raised lettering), broken plates to circular saw blades emerged.  The area where they had been dumped near the river’s edge showed a human pattern of dumping refuse in the closest low spot of ground.

     I have not been able to locate any written records about this sawmill but we managed to piece together the story from various sources of information.  The story of the paddle wheel steamers pulling up to the sawmill dock came from Lizzie (Papin) Roberts whose family lived four lots upstream from us.  My dad used to talk to Lizzie and her brother Jack quite a bit and she was a font of information about the old days.  The Papins were members of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) and had occupied that site for a long time.  It was Lizzie who told us about watching the ships loading at the dock ‘when she was a little girl’.  She had been born in 1881 and passed away at the age of 101 in 1982 which gave us a pretty good idea when the mill was in operation.  They were also the reason the road to The Swamp was named Papin Road.

     Lizzie’s brother Jack was a quiet man who never said much.  When we would see him walking down the road between Lizzie’s house to his own little shack, Dad would offer him a ride.  He would hop up on the running board of our old camp truck and hang on to the mirror.  When we dropped him off, he would simply nod and go his own way.  We could always tell when the fish were biting because we could hear the squeak of his oars when he would row out into the bay early in the morning.  If we went out to fish, Dad would ask Jack, “How are they biting today?” He would pull up his stringer and show us his catch.  If they weren’t biting, he would just shake his head.  I asked if he was a mute but Dad just said, “Nah, Jack has always been a quiet guy.”

     When Dad was still working as a detective, he would swing by the camp to check on things if he was in the area.  On one trip in the mid 1960s, he said he found Jack’s cabin reduced to smoking embers with nothing left but the old bed frame.  He was relieved to find Jack staying with Lizzie but I don’t remember much about him after he lost his own place.  The site of Jack’s cabin was sold and a large, modern home was built on the same spot.  We began wondering if it was cursed land because this place also burned to the ground.

     Every summer, we seemed to tackle another building project at The Swamp.  First came the expansion of the one room shack by adding a larger bunk room with a smaller bedroom / bathroom attached to that.  The smaller room featured an indoor ‘water closet’ for the toilet with water supplied from a gutter filled water barrel outside (in the warm months).  The end bunk room was too far away from the cast iron wood stove in the main room so it had a small fuel oil stove to keep that end of the camp warm.  The exit door from that end of the camp went through the shed where we stored the wood used to heat the front half of The Swamp.  The bigger bunk room had a double bed and a double bunk bed.  Two army cots occupied the smaller room next to the privy one of which I claimed for my bed.

     The dock and boathouse came next.  I remember Dad making a big maul out of a tree branch and a block of wood a foot in diameter.  He hand pounded cedar posts from the sand bank to the water’s edge.  Then he hand dug a channel out of the muck big enough to park our sixteen foot fishing boat.  Eventually we would add a boathouse and a sauna.  The wood for the boathouse was salvaged from the Piqua Furniture factory that was razed in 1963 to make way for the new Marquette Senior High School on Fair Avenue.  I didn’t mind the salvaging lumber and nails, but coating the dock planks with creosote wasn’t my idea of fun.  I much preferred digging ditches for the drainfield or shingling roofs to painting planks with creosote.

     For water, we hand pounded a well point into the sandy soil.  We only had to go down about thirty feet to find water that didn’t have any ‘swampy’ smell to it.  As the youngest of the bunch, I got delegated to fill the water buckets and kettles from the pitcher pump by the sink.  Our hot water was heated on the woodstove in winter and on the gas range in summer.  We spent a lot of weekends at The Swamp and all of my Dad’s two week summer vacations.

     The shallow water covering the sandbar at the mouth of the river warmed up quickly and we were usually swimming before the end of June.  If the tide ran heavy due to unsettled weather, it would drag cold lake water in, but it never took very long to warm up again.  When the tide was low, we had a vast expanse of sand to run around on.  One of our favorite pastimes was to run down to the dock when we heard a boat coming from the bay.  The boat launch was a half mile upstream and many of the people who launched their boats there were not aware of the sandbar at the mouth of the river.  The deeper channel ran on the outside of the bends so we watched an endless parade of boaters run aground on the bar while trying to travel up the center of the river.  

     The cabin between The Swamp and the remaining Collin’s Cabins was owned by a couple who had moved here from Detroit.  Jerry was retired from the Detroit Yacht Club and had a collection of used sail canvas in his garage.  He gave a big enough chunk to my brother Ron so he could rig a sail on one of our flat bottom skiffs.  He cut the mast and boom poles from the back of the property and did all the rigging himself.  The one problem we had was the lack of a keel, but he got quite adept at navigating the boat even when it had a habit of sliding to the side as it moved forward.  Jerry also owned a ragtop Jeep that he would let us borrow when we went road hunting on the old logging roads in the hills on either side of the bay.  By the time I was 11, I was allowed to drive our beater camp truck around the back trails, but I never got to drive Jerry’s Jeep.

     The place Jerry and Dorothy lived in was not very big nor was it properly winterized for year round living.  In between our own building projects, my Dad and his brother Ike took a couple of weeks one summer to help expand and improve the condition of Jerry’s place.  It already had a beautiful stone fireplace.  They needed a bigger bedroom and were able to convert the sun porch into more living space.  If memory serves me right, they also redid the roof.  We used to climb an apple tree next to Jerry’s big garage and hop over to its roof.  This high ground was a great vantage point during apple fights.

     Jerry’s wife Dorothy was good company for my Mom when we were out doing guy stuff.  She also took me off Mom’s hands from time to time so she could have some peace and quiet.  When I was still pretty young, Dorothy found out I didn’t like eggs.  She said, “What do you mean you don’t like eggs?  You just haven’t had eggs the way I make them.”  After that, she always found a day to have me over for a hard fried egg and Sarah Lee coffee cake for lunch.  They had an old Cocker Spaniel named Chip and a little Toy Poodle named Lil’ Bit so when the adults were busy playing cards or talking, I would entertain the dogs.  When Jerry passed away, Dorothy remarried (she became Dorothy Pickle) and moved to Arizona.  When I first started hunting birds, Jerry had loaned me his 410 shotgun before I got my own for my birthday.  Before she left the area, Dorothy sold us Jerry’s 16 gauge shotgun with a polychoke that I used duck hunting for many years.  

     The Collins family eventually got out of the cabin business and built a ranch style home near the river bank.  They sold the cabins, some of which were moved to other locations.  As you drive through Bovine on U.S. 41 by the L’Anse Golf Course, there are still a couple of the old cabins on the left side of the road near the turn off to Herman.  Another permanent home was built next to the Collins house and both of those properties have changed hands many times, as has Jerry and Dorothy’s old place.  

     The lot downstream from us was sold to a man from the Milwaukee area who used to come up infrequently to fish.  We never saw him in the winter and I do not ever remember seeing his wife or kids there.  The yellow house trailer they moved in to use as a camp was rather beat up.  When our occasional neighbor stopped showing up to fish, Dad asked around and found out he had died.  I remember Dad calling his wife and offering condolences for her loss.  He just wanted to let her know that if she was not planning on keeping the property, he would be interested in buying it.  She must have interpreted his call as an attempt to get the place on the cheap.  I was sitting at the kitchen table a full room away from the phone and I could hear her cussing Dad out for calling.  Dad never gave it another thought, but apparently she did.  The next summer, a real estate agent contacted Dad to make the deal.  We sold the trailer to help pay for the lot.  One more trailer camp was added between our property and the swampy bayou beyond but we were glad to have a little more elbow room.

     The Swamp now had 200 feet of frontage along the river but the lot only extended 100 feet back from the river bank.  The man who owned the forty behind our land had it logged and then sold it.  The new owner then purchased a fifty foot wide strip of land from the new owner of Jerry’s place and announced he was going to sell lots in the back forty and use this strip for ‘access to Huron Bay’.  A quick call to the local Zoning Board ended this scam and he eventually sold us the fifty foot strip and nine more acres bordering our lot.  The rest of the forty acres was sold to someone else who built a small cabin with no frontage on the river.

     Sometime after the Papin family sold their land, the road was rechristened ‘Collins Road’.  The old WPA era road sign was falling apart and was replaced with a steel pole topped with a metal street sign with the new name.  The old sign was left in the woods so we rescued it, rebuilt the rotted parts, and hung it in the camp to remember the old days.  The old post was still there so we made a new wooden sign we mounted under the new metal one that said, ”Collins Road – (Formerly) PAPIN ROAD.”  The dueling signs were there for many years before someone decided they needed a “(Formerly) PAPIN ROAD” sign more than the old Papin Road did.

     When Dad retired in 1986, he wanted more room so we could have family gatherings on the bay.  Once the new modified A-frame was put up, he did the interior finishing including a stone fireplace.  When the new Swamp was livable, the old Swamp was disassembled and the lumber was reused for various sheds, woodshed roofs, and so on.  When the interior finishing was done, the only project left was a new sauna.  The last major construction was a garage to which a third half bay was added for the boat, trailer, and canoe.

     Dad had used his pocket knife to carve THE SWAMP 1958 into a pine board we hung above the kitchen table (which he had also built).  The plank he used for the fireplace mantle in the new Swamp was big enough that I was able to use part of it for an updated sign.  Using a router, we made a new one that now hangs over the front door.  The camp itself may be newer, but the sign still says THE SWAMP –  EST 1958.

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