Now pull up a seat, because at the end of this road there is a building that has no business existing, and the man who made it spent forty years on it.
His name was Stanley Smolak. He came out of Poland to America in nineteen twelve — one more immigrant off one more boat — and he did what they did: he went to Detroit and he worked in the factories. Years of it.
And in nineteen twenty-one he came up to Cross Village, at the top of this road, at the end of everything, and he stayed.
Now here is the thing that makes this story different from a hundred other immigrant stories. Smolak did not arrive and keep to his own. He went to the Odawa people who had been on this bluff for centuries, and he learned from them, and they took to him — genuinely took to him. They gave him a name in their own language. When he came to build, it was Odawa hands that helped him build it.
And what he built, through the nineteen thirties, was an inn — out of what was lying around. Fieldstone off this ground. Timber from these woods. Driftwood off that beach down there. He did not have money for materials, so the materials were the country itself.
Then it gets strange, in the best way. Smolak was a self-taught artist and he had an eye for what he called nature's oddities — a tree root that looked like a face, a twisted limb that looked like a creature. So he gathered them, thousands of them, and carved and set them into the building. Into the furniture, the doors, the beams, the bar. Go inside and the place is CRAWLING with them. Faces in the woodwork. Things with limbs. Creatures that were a root in a swamp before he found them and helped them along.
And the name. Look up at the roofline as you pull in and you will see a row of iron legs sticking up along the top of the wall like a fence of bones. Those are stove legs — inverted cast-iron legs off old wood stoves, which in that country in the thirties were free and plentiful and shaped interestingly. So he used them. That is the whole reason it is called the Legs Inn.
He worked on it until the day he died, in nineteen sixty-eight, at eighty-one years old. Not finished. Just stopped.
And his family kept it. It is still theirs, still open, still serving Polish food at the end of this road, and the state made it a historic site in nineteen ninety.
So here is what I want you to think about while you are eating your pierogi. A man crossed an ocean, put in his years on a factory floor, came to the last village on the last road, and then spent the rest of his life making something beautiful out of roots and stones and cast-off iron that nobody asked him for and nobody paid him to make.
Go inside. Put your hand on the bar. That is forty years of one man's evenings.