My day was progressing on the boring side. A quick trip for a few grocks and a run by Swan Corners. A few chores. xWord. A boooook. The GG arrived home and promptly fell into a deep sleep on one of the couches in the back room. It was not nap-in-a-bottle but an empty cereal bowl indicated his recent potato chip snack.

2:30 or so? Text message from the Mackinac Bridge Authority. Bridge is CLOSED. Emergency situation. What could have happened? The weather was perfect. Did somebody drive over the guardrails? It has happened twice. Did someone jump? The google yielded NO information. I could find the incident back in June(?) when a couple of nutsos drew guns over a traffic altercation. Today? Nothing.

I turned to Facebook. Childhood friend BC posted that he was traveling down from a Bay Mills campsite to Onaway. I thought, “Oh no you are not.” I didn’t comment but other people did and one of them said something about a bomb threat. And yes, that is exactly what closed the bridge.

The bridge is back open now and BC has posted a video of them crossing the bridge, so traffic is clearing. A comment to THAT post was that something was found under one of the towers. This is unofficial third hand input from somebody I don’t know so PLEASE TAKE IT WITH A GRAIN OF SALT! I will say that the bridge sometimes closes for high winds or falling ice but I have NEVER known it to close because of a bomb threat so apparently it was deemed serious.

Those of us who frequently travel to the yooperland take the bridge for granted these days and it got me thinking that if somebody had blown up the bridge or even seriously damaged it, it would not be fixed quickly and would HOSE the Great Lake State. There are no car ferries across the Straits of Mackinac any more (I vaguely remember the ferries) so getting from the lower to the upper would require either a drive down around Chicago and up Wisconsin, or over to Canananada and up through Ontario. And Canananda is (wisely) not letting us nutso vax-haters in yet. (I and everyone I know is vaxxed, just so many in our crayzee country are not.)

The yooperland has always (in my lifetime) been a tourist destination. I think one of the first words I remember learning is “vacancy”, being driven by all of the cute little mom-and-pop motels in our little city of Sault Ste. Siberia as a small child. I do not know the statistics on this but I am gonna guess there are gazillions more people visiting the yooperland than there were before the Big Mac was built and people didn’t have to queue up for ferries. Big hotels have encroached on the small mom-and-pop motels and their there are Air-bnbs and a lot of people have fancy camping rigs.

This scanned slide, which I’ve posted before, was taken from a light plane (Cessna maybe?) when the Mac Bridge was being built. I’m not sure who was flying but I think it was my dad’s friend Sandy Sanderson who ran the little local airport. Dad was a WWII flight instructor. My granddaddy was in the plane with them and I’m gonna guess my dad took the pic. We’ll talk about the ferries some other day.

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