Prologue

In the summer of 1964, when I was fourteen, I rode a bicycle from my home in Wacousta, Michigan, to my family’s cottage at Gun Lake, Barry County, in the company of my best friend, Mike B—. We covered the one-way distance of about sixty miles in about eight hours, pedaling through rural Eaton and Barry County farmlands, small towns, and forested recreation and game areas. To a fourteen-year-old living in that time, it seemed a very substantial feat. I knew no one of any age who had tackled such a long day’s bicycle ride. Mike and I camped out for two nights on the eastern end of Murphy’s Island, an island accessible only by boat. It was then, as it still is today, part of Gun Lake State Park. It was, and remains, an undeveloped island, thick with natural vegetation. We used my father’s home-built sailboat to get there and had the little island entirely to ourselves.

Camping is forbidden on Murphy’s Island now, but no such rule existed in the early 1960s. No one objected to our being there and pitching our tent there. No one came by to object to the campfires we built to cook our meals.

Today, the state posts a sign on the island’s gravelly beach, warning away would-be campers.

After two or three days spent relaxing in camp and sailing around the lake in my father’s boat, we broke camp and left Murphy’s Island. We returned to our bikes, reversed course, and bicycled back to our Lansing-area homes. Our total mileage, by bicycle alone, amounted to about 120 to 130 miles. Sixty years later, it’s still a nice memory.

I don’t recall which of us, Mike or I, was the first to think of making this little trip. I think it was a mutual concept. I had known Mike for as long as we had been in school together at Holy Cross School in Lansing—which is to say, since the first grade, and even before that. I remembered him, in fact, even from our kindergarten days. We didn’t become friends until we joined the scouting program at Holy Cross and became members of Troop 36, Chief Okemos Council, Boy Scouts of America, under the sponsorship of the parish of Holy Cross. I was ten years old at that time; Mike was eleven. Troop 36 fostered our comradeship, and over the next few years we became fast friends—so much so that when our high school years began and Mike entered a Franciscan seminary in southern Indiana, while I continued attending the Catholic schools in Lansing, we stayed in close touch. We exchanged long handwritten letters. I subscribed to his school’s monthly magazine to keep up with his life and doings, and we never failed to get together during his vacation visits home.

During the 1964–65 school year, with the long summer holiday impending, Mike put forward an idea that inspired me with its audacious scale: his idea was that we should undertake a much longer, far more challenging bicycle adventure. It was no idle fantasy; he already had a plan and had begun to prepare.

He proposed this in a letter to me from Mount St. Francis: a journey of roughly 800 miles, round trip, from Lansing northward, across the Mackinaw straits, into the heart of Michigan’s storied Upper Peninsula (known to all Michigan citizens simply as the “U.P.”), and then home again. We would travel by bicycle, as we had the previous year, carrying our gear with us, relying on ourselves a