Changes In Latitudes

Lake Huron is starting to freeze over the last night of me living at the Port Austin Motel. I’m heading to Kalamazoo tomorrow night for Thanksgiving and after that I will be moving into an apartment with a news reporter for the radio station in Bad Axe. It seems like it will be a great way to save money and even sounds like a start of an old sitcom on network TV.

It was pretty clear tonight and I walked out to the lake to look out over it for a last night here. I got to the last part of the dead-end road and kept walking on the beach. The sand has been frozen solid, so I didn’t get any sand in my shoes and it was so quiet, for a moment I thought I could hear the water turning to ice.

That was a silly thought, I couldn’t.

Instead a shower of snow appeared out of nowhere and started falling quickly, covering my coat in snowflakes. I hope that tomorrow when I am driving back to Kalamazoo in my trusty Toyota that the weather doesn’t change quickly like that and isn’t horrible

Work has been very busy this week because I am trying to cram what would be a full week’s worth of reporting and writing into three days. My editor Dave Shane said that I shouldn’t be concerned, I get paid for the time off because it’s holiday even if I work only three days, but that concept seems very foreign to me because of my time working manual labor and in the service industry. The concept of working hard – installed in me by my father and driven home when I realized what happens when you don’t (you get fired) is something that still feels strange when I’m doing what I enjoy doing… working at the newspaper.

Back to where I was. Living with Bryan closer to Bad Axe will overall be a big upgrade, saving me money and time spent driving. Still—I will miss staying here at the motel. It’s been a change of pace living alone for the first time in my life, but I will miss the feeling of living here. It’s kind of felt like a throwback to old Raymond Chandler books of a guy from out of town staying in a cheap motel, a hardboiled reporter writing for the paper.

My biggest regret is that I’ve been unable to finish the book I’m writing here although I’ve made some progress.

Most of all I will miss the motel owner, Michael. Having him and is wife up here when I first moved to the area was a godsend. They read the paper here and were very supportive of my articles talking whenever I see them. In additon, their dog and cats in the office and outside the motel always cheered me up and reminded me of home.

It was a little like having set of surrogate grandparents at the motel. I just went outside and had a talk with him. I said next time I’m in Port Austin I would stop by and have a cop coffee like we used to do outside before the cold weather hit.

So here end the Stephen King/Hitchcock like story of staying here throughout the Halloween season and the fall. The move will be great and offer even more in flexibility for the future, but part of me is sentimental about leaving.