St. James, Beaver Island — Beaver Island is honest. Every nook and cranny of life here is real, unadulterated. It shares nothing in common with the slick, polished Disney-like facade of Mackinac or Nantucket. It’s not a resort getaway for the ultra-wealthy. It’s not a luxurious escape with the finest hotels pampering the softest hands. It’s not a false front on a Hollywood set.
It’s too small and too far away for the faint of heart. This distance filters out the weak who dream of an island in name only. You can’t see St. James from the mainland. It’s somewhere else. Far. To live on Beaver Island is turn yourself over to the brutal reality of life over the edge. When the wind scapes over the cold, ice sheet of Lake Michigan in the middle February, the isolation of life on this island is unbearable for most. When the water turns rough in late autumn the island begins to feel farther away. The distance feels greater. The island isolated. Beaver Island selects for the toughest individuals. Only those who have a thicker skin choose a life here.
The sky was a flat sheet of gray on the mainland the day we headed over. The water, cobalt blue. Empty cottages with dark windows along the shore. Spit from the cold lake floating in the air. We waited in silence on the dock at Charlevoix, a little town tucked away in the northwest corner of Michigan.
There’s a wind up here that comes in November, and it stings more than any other wind in any other month. It feels like the air is going to burst into rain, snow, or some mix of both. But it doesn’t. It just hangs there, needling at your lips and cheeks, daring you to break. We waited in little packs, motionless, watching the ferry, waiting for the call to come aboard.
The little dock in Charlevoix (pop. 3,000) is far from any great hub of civilization. No one just passes through the northwest corner of Michigan. There’s no freeway that leads into town. The county has a population of about 19 people per square mile. It’s the very edge of the Lower Peninsula, as far from Detroit as you can get, but it’s not where we are going. It’s not the edge of civilization.
The ferry started its slow lurch down the channel and out into the open water of Lake Michigan around 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in early November. We passed the red lighthouse on the southern pier and the waves started coming hard. Wind whipped off the water from the north at 30 mph. I watched the wooden cottages on the shore, tucked behind pines, fade into the distance as the ship carried us out into the waves.
For 90 minutes, the little ferry battled its way through the rough water. The engine bellowed under our seats. Mechanical growls interrupted by eerie breaks of silence as the bow came up only to smack down like a hammer on an anvil a few seconds later. Waves crashing over the white railings. Water pelting the windows. At points, we were so lopsided, we saw no sky and only the terrifying steel water through the windows on the starboard side.
There were only a few of us on the ferry. Most of us sat glued to our seats the entire time. It was impossible to walk without holding on for dear life. The restroom was off limits. While sitting, I found myself grabbing on to either side of the chair with all the strength I could must just to stabilize and stay in one place. White knuckled. Passengers were hunched over in their seats throwing up into paper bags. Eyes closed. Breathing hard. An old man of about 70 wearing a Mackinaw jacket and white beard stood up the entire time, both palms grasping the seat in front of him, staring out over the bow, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
After an hour and a half, the skies cleared, the winds died down, the water grew calm and we saw Beaver Island on the horizon. Thick woods running right up to the shore. A thin line of golden sand separating the water below. A single house peeking out through a clearing on the southern side. Two hours after leaving the mainland our bout came into Paradise Bay at St. James, Beaver Island.
II
There are 600 people who live year-round on this desolate island in the middle of Lake Michigan. Ferries run often in the summer, but as autumn rolls on, the schedule thins out. By October the boat runs every other day most of the week. As the weather gets worse, cancellations happen more. If the boat’s not running, you aren’t getting off the island, unless you want to take a small plane. The planes run all year and are the only way to get to the mainland once winter hits. Yet sometimes even the planes are grounded, and you’re stuck with no way out.
Charlevoix, back on the mainland, feels like Chicago when compared to St. James. There’s not a single traffic light in town. Cars idle down the middle of the road. Old trucks, holdovers the 1990s, limp along all over the island. A mud-covered, brown 1980s Silverado with an infant carseat in the front passenger seat is parked on Main Street across from the dock.
No one who lives here has to go very far or very fast. The island is only 56 square miles after all. It’s not easy to get a car here. There aren’t competing dealerships drawing from an ever replenishing supply. Keeping up with the Joneses and expensive car leases are nonexistent. The frivolous concerns of luxury civilization don’t have much of a home on Beaver Island. Due to the island’s isolation and relatively slow pace of life, there’s a kind of pragmatic time warp that ends up limiting the luxuries mainlanders enjoy.
Shamrock Restaurant and Pub is the main place to eat in town. Inside, there are hunter green booths and dark wood walls. Deer heads and antlers mounted at eye level. A stone fireplace in the corner. We were the only ones there for lunch. The bartender told us she doesn’t like to leave the island these days. She wasn’t born here, but she moved up here from the southern part of the state years ago. She loves it. Once she went almost two years without visiting the mainland and was unimpressed once she got there.
There’s no hospital on the island, though they do have a medical center. They can do a lot, but not everything. If it’s a real emergency they take a plane to the mainland. If the weather is so bad they can’t get up in the air, the coast guard will send someone out. They don’t deliver babies here anymore. They go to the mainland to deliver. The bartender told us that according to her memory the last baby born on the island was her friend Brittany who works as a server at another place down the street.
The public school on the island has a graduating class of between two and seven kids each year. McDonough’s Market is the one grocery store. Browsing the produce section with my son, a couple local kids stared at us in quizzical disbelief. New kids don’t just pop up in November on Beaver Island. You don’t wander out here. You aren’t just passing through. Their eyes said, “What are you doing here?”
Checking out at McDonough’s the clerk noticed a tube of Dramamine on the belt. “I heard it was a rough ride the other day.” She knew what November on Lake Michigan means. She told me her son had a dentist appointment on the mainland the other day, but she cancelled because of the weather. An hour-and-a-half of seasickness is the price you pay if you need to get off the island. But if they can avoid it, even the hardy people who are used to life out here in the middle of nowhere will postpone the appointment for another day.
There’s an old cemetery across the street from St. James Episcopal Church. Surrounded by a thin chainlink fence, brown crunchy leaves gather in the corners and next to gravestones. New graves, old graves, unmarked graves. Long ago, sailors would find bodies floating in in the lake and stop here on Beaver Island to lay them to rest.
St. James Township hall is right on the water. It’s the size of an unremarkable two-bedroom house. White siding and a red roof. Paradise Bay just beyond the backdoor. Charlevoix State Bank is the only bank on the island. A homemade wooden sign reading “BANK” hangs above a small green door. An orange and black “CLOSED” sign—the kind you see in a mom-and-pop hardware store—hangs in the window. Next door, in the same building, is the Whiskey Point Brewing Company.
Construction workers hammer away all afternoon downtown. Sawhorses and plywood are laying just off the shore. Along sun-drenched backroads there are old cars and old boats sitting next to outbuildings and detached garages. Walking along King’s Highway (which is actually a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph) the bartender from the Shamrock slows down, rolls down her window, waves and says, “Hi!” to us on her way home. We hear the sound of an engine in the distance. Looking south, a small plane rises up from the trees and heads out over the water on its way to the mainland.
III
The scenes on Beaver Island are stunning not because they are fantastical displays of material perfection, but because they are real. The streets aren’t lined with hundreds of extravagant homes or BMWs. All the typical signs of a resort area are absent. The houses on the island are normal, real. Dirty trucks, old bikes, rugged land, piles of chopped wood for wood burning stoves running all winter.
In our decadent age we are spoiled. We are used to getting whatever we want whenever we want it. We can jump in our car and just drive. We can order out, and it will be there within the hour. The weather doesn’t deter us. Even in a storm, we can get where we want to go. In climate controlled luxury we are never truly isolated. We have seemingly insulated ourselves from the concerns of the weather and the world. We exist in the heart of pampered luxury civilization.
But not on Beaver Island. The boats that won’t run because of the waves. The planes that can’t fly because of the winds. Plans are made and plans are changed. Every appointment off island is subject to cancellation. Additional planning is needed every step of the way. And then a dose of flexibility is expected after that.
There’s no DoorDash. No drive-thru. No 24-hour grocery stores. No ways to hack the price and get a better deal somewhere else. No way to get anything easily. Every single thing takes longer to get here. Clothes, computers, cars, lumber, supplies, food, medicine, people. In its isolation, life on Beaver Island is a bare acknowledgment of reality, nature, geography, and circumstance. A brutal lesson that pushes us up against the wall with no way to squirm out.
It’s only beyond the edge of luxury civilization that an encounter with deeper, more honest, layers of life is possible.
There is a sense we feel somewhere in our gut when we are alone or isolated far from settled luxury. On this island, in the northern stretch of Lake Michigan, there is an inescapable loneliness or disconnectedness that falls over us. But it’s not discomforting. It’s like an opening of the self. A feeling of liberation and knowledge of place. The stars are brighter. The night quieter. The horizon darker.
This great isolation that comes from being on the frontier bears a freedom and a kind of radical independence of self and knowledge that cannot be tapped in any other way. On this little island, there still remains some glimpse of freedom left to grab and seize for those who are willing.
IV
There is some kind dance playing under the surface here. What is it that draws us—or the bold among us—toward that dance?
First the American Indians lived here. Then traders and sailors stayed on the island. Some Irish too. Then a cult leader named James Strang and his polygamist followers sought out refuge beyond the edge of civilization. And today, we are here. The world has changed, but the island has not. Or, at least, it’s juxtaposition and relation to the mainland and luxurious civilization is the same as it was before. It is a place beyond the edge, where that dance below the surface lives.
Walking along the bay at twilight, workers were finishing near a dock. Loading drills and hammers into the back of dented trucks. Cigarette smoke and blue jeans. A gaggle of turkeys waddling alongside a closed garage. A family of ducks floating across the motionless water. Glass-like and orange, a mirror for the sky. Sunlight breaking through the reeds on the shore. The cold still of autumn. An air so very different than the bitter wind on the boat the day before. Every few minutes a car idled by, waving through their window, turning around where the road ends and the water begins, and then heading back the other direction again.
The Beaver Island Harbor Light stands on the eastern tip of Paradise Bay. It’s the first thing you see when you arrive and the last thing you pass on your way out. The old lighthouse watches over a rocky shore. The sky grew dimmer as the night wore on. The light above the trees fading from yellow to orange, then red to purple. A barge slowly crept out of the bay heading east and back to the mainland. A near full moon in the northern sky.
My son took a glass bottle from his jacket with a message he dictated to me tucked inside. He inched into the water as far as his rubber duck boots would take him and threw the bottle as far as he could muster out into the rippling waves. We stood there, together, in silence for a while watching the colored sky and gentle water. Alone on the shore. The white tail of a jet sailing across the evening sky high overhead.
Those moments on the shore were the greatest moments I experienced that year. I keep returning to that dance on the edge of a knife.
It’s not easy to get to Beaver Island. It’s not easy to live on Beaver Island. Only the toughest deserve to the glory of life here. It’s no coincidence that standing beyond the edge of luxurious civilization, I experienced a few brief moments that will remain burned in my consciousness for perhaps as long as I live. I understood why they live here and what it means. But I had to get there. I had to go beyond the edge.
Honest realism. Harsh sublimity. That’s the meaning of life on Beaver Island.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @NecktieSalvage.
