STAVROS'S BIRTHDAY -OR- WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FARM?

Last week marked the second annual hitting-of-the-thumb by Stavros and Eunice. We decided to beat the weekend crowd and set out at the peak of rush hour on Thursday afternoon, without so much as a bottle of water between us. That afternoon we’d had front-row seats at the Tigers game so we were good and fried as we set out on 696 headed east with every other sweaty, crabby slob in town.

By 6:30 we rumbled down the driveway of the White Feather Motel. This is a favorite spot of mine. It sits in the middle of a really sort of cute trailer park on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron. 

The beach there is private and there are a ton of rocks of all sizes to examine, throw, step on awkwardly, stand atop, break in half, or put in your pocket to bring home. Stavros showed off his rock-skipping skills after dinner and they were quite mad. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We checked in after being told by the proprietress that she’d only charge us for a one-bed room if we promised not to mess up the second one.

“Which one you want to sleep in?” asked my dearest, after setting down our bags on the bed farthest from the door.

“This one,” I answered, pointing to the other one, and Stavros immediately whisked the bodily-fluid encrusted cover from atop it and flung it into the corner.

I spread the cover we’d brought from home over the sheets and went into the small bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. The proprietress and her friend were just outside the window grilling and smoking and talking in the grassy yard between the motel and the trailer park.

“Ready?” I asked the now fully supine Stavros, who lay atop the pink bedspread, checking email.

We crossed the yard, nodding hello to the proprietress and her associate as a car pulled up next to ours. As we got in ours, a man got out of the other, leaving a woman inside, smoking and waiting. They looked like the up north biker version of Jack Sprat and his wife. He nodded to the proprietress and continued around the corner to his room. I tried not to think about them but failed.

“Probably forgot his piece,” I said as we backed out, looking away.

Dinner took place at Cadillac House, famous for its…for its being one of three places to eat in Lexington. I ordered the broasted chicken and Stavros had the “Rodeo Burger,” which was a burger with some sort of barbecue sauce and an onion ring or something not at all related to rodeos. I’ve been to a lot of rodeos in Idaho and they don’t have anything like that so I don’t really know what they were talking about.

My broasted chicken was served with what the waitress described as a “real light pilaf” and broccoli. We watched Jeopardy and along with the six or seven other patrons, shouted out the answers. Well, when I say “we,” I mean Stavros. I knew exactly one answer, the title of a Kingsley Amis book. I pretended to think it was a boring show after that but it didn’t stop Stavros from participating.

“KRUSCHEV!” he yelled.

“OREL HERSHISER!” etc.

After dinner we went back to the beach by our motel and threw the aforementioned rocks around, stood on them, stepped on them, put them in our pockets, broke them in half and so on until I became afraid that the sun would go down and we’d be unable to grope our way up the right sandy staircase and get lost in the trailer park. Back in our room, we had a final toast to Stavros’s birthday and settled into the very uncomfortable double bed and turned on the 10” tv. As luck would have it, a marvelously terrible movie was on, Stephen King’s The Langoliers.

I almost felt like it was my birthday!

The next morning was perfect. Stavros even said as much as he stepped outside with our bags. We only had the room for one night so we had to amscray by 10:30.  

“It’s perfect!” Stavros declared, as he stepped into the sunshine and I folded the pink blanket and packed up toiletries. “Where is there to have breakfast?” he asked.

“Wimpy’s,” I said.

“Wimpy’s? I don’t want Wimpy’s for breakfast!” he whined.

“Well, I don’t know where else there is. I mean…that’s really all there is.”

“Are you telling me there is only one breakfast place here? What about down that one road?”

“There isn’t anything down there. There might be breakfast at the golf course.”

To humor him I drove to the golf course. There was a big sign advertising lunch starting at 11 AM.

“Lunch,” he grumbled, “I’d rather have lunch anyplace but a golf course.”

“Golf courses have good diners,” I said, although I have been to this particular one and it is gross.

“What is ‘auce’?” I asked, as we drove back toward Wimpy’s and passed an Elk’s Club-type place advertising an “auce breakfast.” It was the second sign I’d seen in Lexington for this mysterious “auce.”

“I don’t know,” said Stavros. “Is there someplace down the other way?”

“Not unless you go way, way down there and then it’s just some shitty little place. Auce must be a kind of fish,” I decided, turning onto the road back toward town.

                                                           AUCE

Stavros pulled out his iPhone and after a few seconds announced: “Auce: All U Can Eat.”

“Oh, my God, ‘a kind of fish!’” I said.

“Forget it,” Stavros said in defeat as we passed the corny-looking “A Night To Remember” B & B, “There’s nothing down here.”

One U-turn and two Wimpy’s breakfasts later, we were out on the sidewalk again, the day gaping open before us like an Auce swimming toward a nightcrawler on a hook.

“Let’s go see if we can find the farm,” suggested Stavros.

“Okay!” said I, always up for an adventure, especially it involves farms and country drives.

As a child, Stavros and his family had spent summer vacations at his maternal grandmother’s house north of Lexington. Upon her husband’s death, she’d sold it to a lottery winner and that was the end of the Papanasticiou summers in the thumb. Stavros hadn’t been there for 22 years and was dying to see it. So was I. My childhood in Idaho was spent surrounded by farms and so this felt personal to me, too.

After heading straight up for about 30 minutes, we came to the not-so-prettily-named Snay Road.

“Everything’s German up here,” Stavros told me, consulting his phone for a map. “All these roads have names like that. Look at that house,” he pointed to the right at a strange-looking brick house in a style I’d never seen. “That’s from the mid-1800s, “ he said.

 “Weird,” I commented, noticing that we were the only car in any direction.

We bounced along for a few minutes and made a right turn, then peeled our eyes for Abend road. Bear in mind there were no actual road signs. There were small pieces of wood or metal nailed to poles and no particular effort was made to trim trees around them or place them where a passer-by might notice them without much effort. Finally, after turning around and doubling back few times, we found it. I turned and we drove slowly toward what looked like a farm house with a few outbuildings on the other side of the road. I could almost feel Stavros holding his breath.

“This isn’t it. I don’t get it,” he said as we passed a couple dozen cows who all turned to look as we did. I was surprised that they took notice of us. When I was little, my dad (in Idaho, where there are a lot of cows) told me that cows were so dumb that if they were in pain, they knew it hurt, they just didn’t know where. I’m sure he was just being funny, because there was something about the cows all looking up at us, one by one, that made me doubt him. They didn't seem dumb.

We pulled over at the end of the road. Since there was no other vehicle within miles I figured we could hang out there as long as it took for Stavros to get his bearings. He looked around then looked at the map. Then he did it again.

“Let’s turn around.”

We headed past the cows, who all looked up at us again, and bounced in the dust back the way we came. We decided that Abend Road must not go all the way through, and we had to hit it from another street.

Finally, about a mile due east of the Abend Road cows, we spied a lonely looking farmhouse surrounded by barns and tall grasses. There was no actual farm here, that is, no crops, no animals; the land wasn’t even tended to. This had to be it.

The house itself was not the house Stavros remembered. It looked like they had added onto it then covered the whole thing with aluminum siding. In addition, it looked totally abandoned. We got out of the car.

I walked down what used to be the driveway but what was now just part of the overgrowth. Stavros stayed near the car. It was very windy and I could hear a metal clanging somewhere nearby. It was like being in Children of the Corn. I went into the backyard where I saw a well pump. The metal clanging was coming from some corrugated siding on the most derelict looking barn I have ever seen. I was absolutely dying to go inside but was pretty sure Stavros wouldn’t let me and also that there would be corpses inside. So instead I tried to capture the horror of it on film. It’s too windy to hear the clanging.

 

These are the other barns.

Stavros was pretty shell-shocked when we left. I think he had accepted the fact that his family no longer had the farm, but he wasn’t prepared to find it forgotten and left behind, the old brick house transformed into a modern-day mess of aluminum siding with blankets for curtains and grass up to your hoo-ha all around it.

The ride home seemed much shorter. We stopped at a junky gas station past Port Sanilac for water and listened to the worst country music ever recorded all the way back to Lexington.

On the way up to the farm, I made a reservation at a very nice B & B I’d stayed at before with my family.  After humping our stuff up the stairs to our room, we laid down for a while and looked at the pictures of the farm then took a nap.

When we woke up, we were starved. We decided to have dinner at the “fancy” place down by the water called the Smackwater Grille. This place is part of a block of establishments owned by some guy who is clearly the Donald Trump of Lexington. He owns the fancy pizza place at the end, the gourmet food shops in between, and the theater attached, which features such acts as the singer from Santana, tribute bands, and the singer for Santana. They waiter handed us a schedule as he showed us to our wrinkled black tablecloth-covered table. I noticed that there was a Michael Jackson tribute show that evening entitled “What is Bad?” or something.

“We should go to this,” I said excitedly to Stavros, tapping the flyer.

When the waiter arrived with our drinks and we asked how much the show was.

“$35-$50,” he said without batting an eyelash.

“Well,” I laughed, “Okay. Maybe.”

People in Lexington but really be desperate for entertainment. There was one show we really would have liked to have seen, but it had been the previous weekend.

The good news is that the food turned out to be very good. I was surprised, on account of the tablecloth and all. Stavros got a steak:

...and I ordered pasta puttanesca.

Because this is turning out to be the longest post in Modern Coastline history, I will abbreviate the remaining highlights of the trip:

• After-dinner drinks at Cadillac House. There was a strong odor of urine in the air.

• Breakfast at B & B included large sausages and Swedish Pancake, a custardy pie thing.

• When we returned home, we that we missed the most awesomest storm in history and that power had been out at my house for at least 12 hours.

It was a good trip.