Michigan’s Best Bacon Is Smoked in a Town Surrounded by Loons

Hale — Most people up here are looking to get away from busyness. The town serves fisherman and vacationers, retirees and “Lake Life” fanatics.

Usually moving away from major urban areas means abandoning access to the finest things. And in some ways it’s true: Alward’s Market doesn’t have everything you’d find in a typical Meijer. But it might boast the best butcher’s counter in the state. Aging steaks are piled near jerky and smoked meats. The variety is incredible.

There’s beer in broken coolers, bread on the shelves, and firewood in the garage. All the essentials are here, with a dose of agreeable Midwestern personality.

The added bonus is that it’s just minutes away from peaceful lakes full of loons.

My wife grew up coming to Sage Lake in the summers. It’s peaceful when the speedboats stop pulling tubes and head in for the evening. Pontoon boats glide through still water to watch the sunset.

You can see loons sitting low against the setting sun before they dart downward under the surface. Unfortunately, some of the people on the lake are loons, too. Like the neighbor of the vacation rental property where we stayed.

The big attraction on Sage Lake is the lake itself, and we had rented a pontoon that was docked just steps away from the house. We were looking forward to using it all week, whenever we wanted.

After dinner the first night, we all piled in and sat down for a sunset cruise. But instead of the boat gently backing out away from the dock, it lurched forward despite being in reverse.

It happened so fast: pushing away from the neighbor’s boat hoist, right pontoon struck the sea wall. The neighbor came out to his dock and screamed at us even though we miraculously didn’t hit any of his property given the major motor malfunction.

Unlike most Michiganders I’ve seen in these situations, he didn’t lift a finger to help.

“You people come and you don’t know how to drive a boat,” he screamed. “If there’s a scratch on my boat or on my hoist there’s going to be trouble, big trouble.”

The rage-tirade dragged on for several more minutes.

“Learn how to drive a boat,” he yelled at me half an hour later when he went out for his own sunset cruise. The guy sure knew how to torpedo our vacation before it even began.

The whole next day we mulled over what we could have done differently. My children said they were scared to go into the lake because of the “mean old man.” But who could have known the boat was broken?

We weren’t at fault, but the cortisol was still high after such a bad interaction. It’s bad enough to have a broken boat on vacation, but worse to be yelled at the way you usually only see in viral fight videos. It weighed on us all.

Thankfully, the Germans have a word called kummerspeck, which literally translates to “grief bacon.”

It usually describes the weight gained during a stressful or sad season of life, but I think it also can apply to the hunks of meat I got at Alward’s after the boat incident—slices that were as cathartic as they were artery clogging.

The bacon is smoked, so when you fry it, a warm, comforting smell fills the house. I made breakfast sandwiches for everyone with the thick-cut slabs of smoked pork.

Alward’s bacon is delicately smoky and cut thick. It’s simply delicious. I’ve never had better bacon.

You can see the smoke rising behind Alward’s Market. The walls of the smokehouse are dark, and the heavy scent hangs all around. They’re not bringing in meat from a factory far away; they’re preparing it here in Hale.

That flavor comes through in the cooked product—which may not appeal to everyone.

But for me, it was the perfect breakfast to eat looking over the lake where loons bob low. It was a reminder that we were still on vacation, that there are bright spots in life that no one can take away or tarnish.

Whether or not you need grief bacon, make your way to Alward’s and get some of its famous smoked meat. It can change your life—or at the least turn your vacation around.