Slightly Off the Mark

The Mackinac Bridge in Pictures

One day--let's say it was the 50s, because these things happened back then--some people from the lower peninsula of Michigan rowed over to meet with some people from the upper peninsula. "Isn't it wild," one said, "that we're part of the same state, but can't just drive back and forth?"

"I've got it!" a Yooper said. "Let's make the U.P. its own state! We'll call it, let's see .... Upper Michigan!"

"Or," said some engineer looking for contracts, "we could build a bridge".

"Ha!" said another, who operated a ferry. "Over that long piece of water? It'll never happen."

Opened in 1957, it was at the time the world's longest suspension bridge between two anchorages, and still is the longest in the Western hemisphere. For you flat Earthers, that means this side of the ocean. The main span is 3,800 feet long, and it sure felt that way as we were driving over it. The rest of it is ... well, longer.

In the old days, 9 ferryboats carried 9,000 vehicles a day--plus other ferries that hauled train cars--across the Straits of Mackinac. Or is it Mackinaw? Or is it, as the natives said, Michilimackinac, which means "Straights of the Great Turtle With a Long Name"?

But, with 16 mile backups of drivers waiting to use the ferries, it seemed like there should be a better way. A well-heeled fellow by the name of Cornelius Vanderbuilt II proposed a bridge all the way back in 1888. Someone else suggested a floating tunnel, which sounds like a nightmare from every direction.

Yes, that giant ship hauling iron ore, or rubber duckies, or tanks of Mountain Dew, or whatever, is going under the bridge--and it's a BIG ship. I know, because we later got much closer to it.

President FDR tried to get funds for the bridge project during the Great Depression, but Congress thumbed its nose at him. Figuratively. When it finally happened, it took three and a half years, five lives, and a quarter of a billion in today's dollars before the first person to drive across: Michigan's Governor Mennen Williams, who paid $37.26 in today's dollars. People must have carried around a lot of pocket change back then.

There's a statue in a park on the north end of the bridge, a memorial to the ironworkers who built it and the five who died. Why is it looking away from the bridge? Um ... well, maybe for pictures like this.

40 years later, the 100 millionth vehicle crossed.

By the way, it cost us $4 to get across, during our tour of Michigan that I'll speak more about later. Yes, I took lots of pictures.

What's the point of being at the junction of two Great Lakes, if you can't play in the water?

For those of you who are curious--or fearful--exactly two vehicles have gone over the side, one due to excessive speed and one a suicide. Why someone would choose to drive fast 200 feet over the water is beyond me.

One plane has hit it, crashing into the suspension cables during a heavy fog.

The Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse, along with a steam powered fog horn, helped guide ships through the busy Straights until the year after the bridge was finished. It's now, naturally, a maritime museum.

Oh, one more thing: On April 24, 1959, Captain John S. Lappo flew a Boeing B-47 Stratojet UNDER the bridge. Yeah, I looked it up: It's a six engine strategic nuclear bomber.

Under the friggin' bridge.

No word on whether it, or he, was loaded at the time, but he didn't work for the Strategic Air Command after that.

(By the way, my novel Radio Red is set near Lake Bellaire, which is a real place about 80 miles from the bridge.)

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Remember: If you’re not traveling, you should be reading.

Draft 4 of Hoosier Hysterical II: The Indianian

I finally finished the fourth draft of Hoosier Hysterical II: Flyover Madness. (I really should do a poll on that subtitle: I've come up with about a dozen, and they're all bad.)

Those of you who aren't writers may be curious about what constitutes a draft. It depends. This being a (more or less) nonfiction book, I spent over a year researching, which included driving all over Indiana, reading a lot, and taking a lot of pictures. We'll come back to the picture thing later.

I even hung out with James Whitcomb Riley for awhile, and he died 110 years ago.

That's often called Draft Zero, or the exploration stage. For most writers the first draft is actually getting the story down on the page. Most first drafts suck. That's okay--they're not designed to be seen by anyone but the writer. It's called "rough" for a reason.

The second draft is structural revision. It's fixing major issues: plot holes, timeline mistakes, and in this case dividing the book up in a way that makes some kind of sense. I suck at structural revision. Usually I sweat blood doing those, only to have Emily point out later how not done I am.

What worries me are that my first drafts usually come out fairly clean, so what if my second make things worse?

At least my writing space is more comfortable than others, although this author lived the life of Riley.

The third draft is polishing: Making things perfect, which is laughable, because it's never perfect. Writers seeking perfection will never finish. They'll be buried clutching a red pen and the eighteenth printout of their manuscript.

For some writers, the fourth draft is when they send it out to readers, for someone else's take on the story. Not me, not yet. My fourth draft is the "word draft". I search for words that could weaken the story. In fact, I have a document titled "manuscript polishing check words". For instance, if you want to make your story more active, search out passive words like "was" and "had". "That"--I overuse that one. Words that end with "ing", which can get repetitive. Saying "stood up" instead of just "stood". "Suddenly."

I've got a million of 'em. Well, I have a list of 32 words, and I search the whole manuscript for each one. Excessive? Yes. But it works for me, and while searching them out I often stumble across other problems.

So I'm done, right? Heck, no.

Like most authors, Civil War General Lew Wallace was great at procrastinating. At the foot of the steps on the right of this photo he built a moat, and stocked it, so he could fish instead of write.

In the case of Hoosier Hysterical 2: Meeting in the Middle, the manuscript will have photos, like its predecessor. Now I have to sort through the photos we took over the last several years, find all that might be worth including, then show them to Emily so she can tell me which of the good ones are, in fact, bad ones.

By now you're starting to realize why my books didn't start getting published until I met her.

Since we live in the northeast corner of the state, that might be the point where we drive down south again to get photos of places and things of interest. We've traveled around, but going south of Indianapolis isn't a day trip.

So then I'm done, right? Heck, no!

No, I wasn't kidding about Lew Wallace's moat! According to the Wallace Museum, the photo on the left is the only known one taken when it was there. On the right is a later flood that gives you an idea.

That's when I give it a final polish until it shines like the top of the Chrysler Building, or fire engine chrome, or my head. Perfect, unimpeachable. At that point Emily finally reads the whole manuscript again, so she can show me the problems yet to be solved.

Then, after working through her comments, I polish it. Again.

This would be a good time to mention a radio interview I did, not long after Hoosier Hysterical I: The Beginning was published. As I sat outside the studio, waiting to go on, I leafed through the book to remember what to talk about.

And found a typo.