Stay with me along this stretch, because the country you are driving through was named for a single tree, and I think that is worth stopping on.
Picture this shore before any of it — no road, no houses, no cottages on the bluff. If you were travelling this coast you were doing it by canoe, close in, because a big canoe on Lake Michigan does not go out into open water if it can help it. That lake kills people who take liberties with it.
And when you travel by water along a shore that is a couple of hundred miles of trees, you have a problem: it all looks the same. Green bluff, green bluff, green bluff, for days. You need landmarks. Not maps — landmarks. A thing you can see from out on the water that tells you exactly where you are.
And on this bluff there stood a pine. A big one, and crooked — grown bent, leaning out over the water in a way no other tree along that whole shore did. From out on the lake you could pick it out from a long way off, and when you saw it, you knew.
The French called it L'Arbre Croche. The Crooked Tree. And the name did not stay attached to the tree — it spread to the whole stretch of coast, and to the string of Odawa villages along it, which by the eighteen forties held the largest concentration of Native people anywhere in the United States. An entire country, named after one bent pine.
Now here is the part I find hard to shake.
Nobody knows exactly where it stood. The tree came down — storm, age, lightning, or an axe, depending on who you ask — a very long time ago, and the accounts do not agree on the spot. So somewhere along the miles you are driving right now, there was a pine that a whole people used to navigate by, that gave its name to this entire coast, and we have lost the place it stood.
It is still doing its job in one respect. Every historical marker and old map on this shore still says Crooked Tree. The name has outlived the wood by centuries.
So as we run north through this tunnel — look at the trees leaning out over the bluff on your left. One of them is standing where it stood. You will never know which one, and neither will I. But it is out there in this green somewhere, and I think about that every time I drive this road.