…and never thought upon…" – Robert Burns
Back when, great diners fairly littered the western U.P. A handful of those still exist to this day, often in other forms.
The others are just gone.
The diner we prized most was called Scotty's, located on US2, between Bessemer and Ironwood. A long, dark drive from Bobcat in the woods, but so worth the effort.
And it's likely, long about the time of The Bear Story, that's where I first met a sixteen-year-old waitress named Chris.
Much later, Chris and her family saved the Black River Pub from dissolution and for a while, she short-ordered the only fresh Superior fish fry you could get without driving maybe 30 miles.
Though not 'all you can eat,' it was one of the best Northwoods fish fry's I've ever had.
Chris has since moved on from the Black River Valley. At last report the restaurant remains, but not the same. Never again, the same.
*
For perhaps thirty years, when Heather & I needed a clean, dry place to stay on the Gogebic Range, our home away from home was the Travelers Motel. This is from our front door:
The other sign read "Squeaky Clean." So it always was.
Stays at Traveler's ran the gamut from our settling in for comfy weeks at a time, to us getting unceremoniously swept out of the woods and very much needing safe haven.
Coincidentally, up this bluff behind the motel and tucked into those trees was once my Uncle John's farmhouse.
It's not there anymore either.
But for decades, at the end of full days spent pursuing wilderness adventure, when sitting in the chair outside my door at the motel so to relish the nightshift chorus, its ancestors had once sang likewise to mine.
This long term sense of connection to a specific landscape is no small thing, as it turned out.
Pandemic Year 3 and The Traveler's Motel is gone.
It's replaced now by a national chain store peddling cheap goods to everyday folk, though no longer as cheaply as their name implies.
'Times long past' indeed.
