L'Arbre Croche — the Crooked Tree — a stop on the Tunnel of Trees.
This shore has an older name, and it is worth carrying with you for the rest of the drive: L'Arbre Croche. French for the Crooked Tree.
The name comes from a single enormous, distinctively bent pine that stood on the bluff and was used as a landmark by everyone travelling this coast by canoe — visible from far out on the water, unmistakable, and therefore the way you knew where you were. The tree is long gone. The name outlasted it by centuries.
And L'Arbre Croche was not a wilderness. It was a string of Odawa villages running along this bluff for miles — settled, farmed, with cornfields and orchards on the high ground and fishing below. A historical marker here records that in the eighteen forties this stretch held the largest concentration of Native people anywhere in the United States.
Think about that as you drive a road with almost nothing on it. This was, by the standards of the time and place, densely populated country — and the road you are on follows the trail that connected those villages.
This is Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians country, and I want to be plain about the tense: IS, not was. The Bands are a federally recognised sovereign nation with their government just south of here. Not a chapter that ended. A nation you are driving through.