Copper City — There’s no reason to be here unless you call it home or you’re running away from something.
Copper City is a clump of houses on the edge of the world. It is an impossibility, a place marred by the scars of time that simultaneously seems to exist outside of it. It stands in contrast with the wilderness on every side, which has consumed portions of it.
Residents I spoke with moved to Copper City decades ago and have no interest in being anywhere but the state’s second-smallest town. While they admit their houses need work, they love their century-old homes and rock hunting on Superior’s shores.
You can count the number of streets in town with two hands, the number of businesses with one. The Drift Inn is the most notable, serving drinks and bar food to those who come by road or trail. When I visited, a couple from Lake Linden said they often drive their side-by-side here.
There is still an active mine just outside town, a living reminder of its heritage. I’m not sure what they’re digging up, but it’s probably not copper.
There is also a post office and the Copper City Community Center, which houses a bright yellow GMC fire truck.
The stamp-sized post office is staffed only a few hours a day. The 190-or-so residents pick up their mail here. The community center next door displays notices on its front windows.
Across the street is the playground, divided by a road. A row of teeter-totters sticks out of the overgrown grass, waiting for children.
The streets are quiet. Occasionally, a dump truck will break up the silence. A rusty pickup will stop and turn down one of the short streets. A hand-painted black stop sign stands as a reminder that some places have not bowed the knee to standardization.
Ahmeek Street takes you to Michigan’s smallest town. These tiny villages are connected by industry, history, and this two-lane road.
A snowmobile sits half on a sidewalk in the center of town, and rusted shovels lay up against dry-rotted porches as if waiting for winter. The roofs are steep to better deflect the inevitable blankets of snow. It’s as if the town is perpetually suspended between the seasons.
In late summer, the air carries the crisp freshness of Lake Superior over the peninsula. At night, the Milky Way shimmers in a flossy web above.
Most roads end in a clump of trees, but the septic field on the south side of town offers a wider patch of sky. A skunk hides under the fence blocking wanderers with danger signs. Behind the septic field is the dump.
The nothingness surrounding Copper City makes the tiny enclave more substantial, even if it is made of old storefronts-turned-houses or rusting trucks. There are blighted homes on almost every block, the prey of time and the elements.
Apple trees hold fruit around town, on otherwise abandoned street corners and on the roads skirting the outside of town.
One resident who has lived here for 20 years told me Copper City was once like a co-op, where residents would raise animals and share eggs and milk.
I would imagine the animals, like the apple trees, must have been stewarded by the miners and their families, people who worked the ground and under it to make a living for themselves.
The quietness is somewhere between idyllic and eerie. The possibility of living here is as aspirational as it is completely unimaginable. To those addicted to the sprawling suburban “amenities” of corporate America, it would be impossible.
It’s hard to imagine life in stark contrast, in a vacuum. But perhaps stripping away everything extra is the best way to experience it fully.
Maybe the antidote to the malaise of the new millenia is a joyful asceticism where you can watch the stars at night and experience wilderness on the weekends, where you can breathe fresh air and enjoy the quiet.
Copper City lives on in the margins of modernity. The short roads lined with simple homes signify a way of life that’s forgotten but not yet gone.
Brendan Clarey is deputy editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
