The Weird Staring Guy

I think he was real but he might have been one of those urban legends

Sunrise in Copper Harbor, Michigan

Copper Harbor is a town with about 75 permanent residents and a location other towns should be jealous of: the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Once you’re on the Keweenaw there are two roads to Copper Harbor: M-26, which curves along the shore of Lake Superior, and US 41, which takes you under miles of breathtaking leafy canopy.

The air in Copper Harbor is clean and fresh. Superior invigorates your soul, sometimes with calm ripples, sometimes with mighty angry crashes. You can walk the entire length and width of the town but you can also drive further north to where US 41 begins (the other terminus is in Miami), and then if you’re brave enough keep going on a gravel road to Horseshoe Harbor or High Rock Bay. Wilderness surrounds you here and the noise of humanity disappears.

It's just rocks and trees and water and the occasional kindred spirit who loves rocks and trees and water as much as you do.

Copper Harbor is kind of my favorite place in the world and I’ll give you a whole Keweenaw travelogue in a future newsletter but right now I want to tell you about the weirdest thing that ever happened to me up there. This occurred on my first visit in October 2006. On the first day of my trip I had lunch at a restaurant called The Pines, which was attached to a bar called Zik’s. There was a sign for an open mic night at Zik’s a couple days later. At the time I’d been doing standup comedy sporadically for a couple of years and I thought it’d be interesting to see how my jokes played to an audience where I was completely unknown, so after lunch I wandered over to Zik’s and asked the bartender if they ever had any comics on open mic night. She said she didn’t remember seeing any and that it was usually singer-songwriters but strongly encouraged me to come by and perform. I said I would.

I figured I could get by on 10-15 minutes of material so I put together some of my favorite bits, some of which have appeared in this newsletter and probably all of which eventually will. I drove a little ways south of town and rehearsed on a rocky beach, standing on a big slab of volcanic rock and telling jokes to Lake Superior. I refined my set in between visits to Hunters Point Trail and Horseshoe Harbor and Estivant Pines Nature Sanctuary and every t-shirt shop on the Keweenaw, and loved the idea that I was combining two of my favorite things on this trip: drinking in the earth’s natural beauty and making people laugh or at least trying to.

The open mic was scheduled to begin around 9, I think, so I started walking from my room at the Brockway Inn around 8:30. It’s a ten-minute walk but I planned to get there early in case there were only so many slots available. Walking east on Gratiot Street, I came to Copper Harbor’s one traffic light, which flashed yellow for M-26 traffic and red for US 41. The sun was already down and there was no traffic, and aside from Zik’s there wasn’t much of anything else open.

So I was a little surprised to see someone on the other side of 41 walking toward me. This guy must have been close to my age (mid-40s at the time) and didn’t look out of the ordinary. He was dressed somewhere between casual and sloppy casual—I recall a zip-up sweatshirt—but I didn’t get a good feel as to whether he was a local or a tourist. He seemed perfectly normal.  

Until he stopped in the middle of the road and stared at me. He just quit walking halfway across US 41 and looked at me without saying a word. I nodded a greeting and half-expected to be engaged in conversation, well aware that such a conversation might involve hitting me up for money or something along the lines of “Beware!” or “Repent!” or “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” But he just stared as I approached and he turned enough to keep staring as I walked past him.

I went on my way to Zik’s, listening for footsteps behind me but not hearing any and also not even considering the idea of turning around to see if he was still there. I arrived at Zik’s and there was a football game playing on the TV monitors. No sign-up sheet for open mic. No obvious emcee. Not a guitar case to be seen. I found the bartender from my previous visit and she said yeah, sometimes it gets started a little late.

But by 9:45 it sure looked like no one else was going to show up. The bartender asked if I wanted to do my set anyway and I said thanks but I didn’t want to be the only person getting in the way of these Packers or Lions fans enjoying their football. The waitress stopped by my booth and said she’d been looking forward to hearing some comedy. I said maybe next time.

Then I asked her if there was a local character who wandered around at night staring at people. She said she didn’t know of one. I explained what had happened at the crossroads and she agreed it was weird and not typical. I wondered if it were a vanishing hitchhiker-type urban legend.

And just then there was a police siren. We looked out the window and a car with flashing lights was heading west out of town.

I never found out where the police were going that night, so I don’t know if the weird staring guy was involved. But I do know that I’ve been to Copper Harbor fourteen more times and I’ve never heard another police siren.

Here are two of my favorite pics from the Keweenaw that do not involve gigantic Lake Superior waves crashing on rocks. This first one is from just east of Copper Harbor before you get to the end of 41. Also that’s me, not Gordon Lightfoot.

“No, it doesn’t have anything to do with profiling, Yogi. If you haven’t done anything wrong, you shouldn’t have any problem dropping in and registering, right? Well, yes, you might have to be fingerprinted but that has nothing to do with all these missing picnic basket cold cases we’re trying to solve.”

If you want to make it in the deer skull boiling business, you’ll need to up your marketing game like this person did.

Free Music Friday

Occasionally I post a song that has something to do with the content of the newsletter and today is one of those occasions. Here’s “Horseshoe Harbor Rag.”