Isle awhile: Life’s a beach on Beaver Island’s wild kingdom

BEAVER ISLAND, MI — Relax, grab a drink. Go for a drive.

That might seem a bit preposterous in most places, but not on Beaver Island; home to a custom known as “boodling,” which involves slowly roaming the island in a vehicle with beer.

“You just get a bunch of your friends and some libations and drive around the island,” said Bill McDonough, CEO of the Beaver Island Boat Company and a prominent fifth-generation islander who co-owns the island grocery store, McDonough’s Market. “You look at the wildlife or go to the beach and just enjoy each other’s company.”

Yes, life’s a beach on Beaver Island; a wooded kingdom of wetlands, wildlife and apples galore in the middle of Lake Michigan; where the light of the Milky Way shines like a beacon at night and the very pace of Earth’s rotation seems to slow, as if the universe were spinning on island time.

Long ago, the Irish and the Mormons fought over this beautiful place. The Irish won, but with the victory came a Sisyphean task of accommodating perpetual outsider fascination with the deposed Mormon “king,” James Jesse Strang — a con man by most accounts who was brought down by an assassin’s bullet 167 years ago, but whose odd legacy kindles endless curiosity.

Since then, the descendants of hardy Irish fishermen who fled the rugged Atlantic shoreline of County Donegal have turned Beaver into America’s Emerald Isle, a land of 100,000 welcomes populated by island characters year-round and many visitors in the summer, all with one goal in mind.

To get away from it all.

“It’s undeveloped. It’s natural,” said Ed Wojan, a longtime realtor known for creating an exquisitely detailed map of the island. “It doesn’t have the usual trappings of the mainland. There are no big golf courses. No high rise resorts. It’s just a single-family home Mecca.”

“It has a lot of nothing.”

Well, not exactly nothing. Beaver and the wider archipelago of surrounding islands are a treasure trove of ecological riches. A rare wildflower known to only grow in Michigan thrives in island creeks. Endangered piping plovers nest on the beaches. Endangered thistles pop up on sandy volleyball courts. Sandhill cranes and loons fill the sky. Ash trees stand tall; insulated, to a large degree, from an invasive insect which can’t fly far enough overwater to attack them.

Apple, birch and cedar trees abound, often in close proximity on the edge of gravel roads. There are dunes, fens, boreal forests and bogs. Abundant deer and turkey stop what little traffic there is. Bumblebees and monarch butterflies crawl across milkweed blooms at every roadside and beach.

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What Beaver Island doesn’t have are fudge shops. Or forts. There are no cruise ships docking in the harbor. No horse-drawn carriage rides or magnificent hotel verandas.

“If you love Mackinac Island, you’ll hate it here,” said Eric Fogg, a third-generation visitor whose family presence on the village perimeter has earned the nickname “Foggville.”

Mackinac — a historic rival of sorts to Beaver, including in modern day high school sports — is set up to absorb a regular influx of day-trippers and fudgies, Fogg said. Beaver is not.

“The island won’t entertain you,” he said. “You have to know how to bring your own fun.”

If you can do that, there’s plenty of fun to be had. The island lends itself to outdoor pursuits such as camping, hiking, biking, swimming, paddling, birdwatching, hunting and fishing. About a third of the island is wooded, state-owned land managed by the Department of Natural Resources. Deer are abundant and there are lakes stocked with bass and walleye.

The island is ringed by sugar sand beaches from which nearby islands and even the mainland, on a clear day, are visible. A 42-mile water trail encircles the island and sunken cars and shipwrecks can be found under the crystal-clear waters.

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The 55-square-mile island — roughly 12.5 miles long by 6.5 miles wide — is shaped like a beaver tail, but that’s just a coincidence. The island is brimming with wetlands and was a major source of beaver pelts — hence the name. The French called the archipelago Iles de Castor (Islands of Beaver).

Speaking of beaver, if you want to see one on the island, the simplest way is to visit the Mormon Print Shop Museum, a historic structure where a stuffed beaver with a slightly daft expression sits behind a glass case. Yes, there are still wild beavers on the island today and people still trap them.

“Most people that first get beaver on their property, you know, they’re all excited and don’t want you to touch them,” said Mark Valente, an islander of 40 years who gets the call when North America’s largest rodent starts to become a nuisance.

“And then they start chewing down all their trees.”

Valente, who makes and sells items made of beaver pelts, including beer koozies which are pink on the inside, is one of 600-some islanders who live there year-round.

Any island will be home to some characters and Beaver is no exception. The 84-year-old toy museum owner Mary Rose is a prolific painter who delights in selling trinkets to children for a nickel. Tony Miller, the astronomer and campground host, sometimes goes by “Duke Skygawker.” The water trail guide, Mark Engelsman, is chair of the island transportation authority board, but also moonlights as Bigfoot when the call goes out for silly postcard photos.

“We’ve got a laundry list of characters on this island,” said Amy Maschner, a lifelong visitor and former advertising executive who retired on the island and now edits the Northern Islander newspaper. “It’s not the island of misfit toys; more the island of people who ran away from home to live a simpler life.”

To live on Beaver, “you have to be satisfied in your own skin,” said McDonough. “When you look in the mirror, you have to be able to say, ‘I like that person.’”

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The islanders are a tight-knit community and routinely identify themselves in terms of longevity — a fifth-generation island resident; a third-generation summer visitor. A recent transplant. The lifestyle is very laid-back. People wave a lot — at friends or anyone else who is approaching on foot or in a vehicle. Cars are frequently lent to strangers with little fuss.

The island ethos is “help your neighbor,” McDonough said. However, the ancestry is Irish and sometimes those neighbors “fight like cats and dogs.”

“But then when something’s wrong, everybody pulls together.”

In terms of pace, things tend to happen when they happen. That’s known as “island time” and it’s a byproduct of the remoteness. It’s a two-hour, 32 mile-ferry ride from Charlevoix. Projects take a while. Need something the grocery or hardware store doesn’t stock? You’re out of luck until the boats or an airplane can deliver it in a few days. If it’s winter and the ferry isn’t running, that wait could be much longer.

Many staples of the mainland are nonexistent. There are no drive-throughs or chain stores. There are no stoplights. Cellular service is spotty. Outside the village of St. James, paved roads quickly become gravel or dirt. There are back roads, and then there are Beaver Island back roads. On some of these roads, you might have trouble squeezing around another vehicle. You may see people driving slowly in a pickup truck with a picnic table in the bed, upon which people — “boodlers” — are sitting and drinking beer. You may find them stopped in the middle of the road, chatting with another vehicle.

“Most people aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere because you really don’t have anywhere to go,” said Mike Green, a retired ferry captain.

The easygoing spirit has its limits, though. Life’s a beach until it isn’t. In June, a brawl between islanders and mainlanders at the Beachcomber Bar resulted in felony charges and the U.S. Coast Guard flying an injured man to Traverse City. The bar was damaged and closed for several weeks.

Tension does develop between islanders and tourists. In recent years, off-road vehicle use on dunes has angered islanders, who are protective of their natural resources and expect tourists to respect them. In 2022, Beaver Island Community School students created a pledge reminding visitors to recreate respectfully in a place that people call home. The pledge is printed in the island Visitors Guide, which asks tourists to drive slowly, clean up their litter, and avoid feeding or moving wildlife and transplanting native flowers.

Islanders also worry that mainlanders see its resources as free-for-the-plucking. A sudden disappearance of apples from the abundant trees along Sloptown Road last year has some questioning whether legal changes are needed to prevent a Tragedy of the Commons.

“I think there’s a lot of trail cams going up this fall, which is a shame because that’s not the place we grew up in,” said Shirley Cole, events coordinator at the Beaver Island Community Center. “It’s a very trusting place.”

Law enforcement has also been a sore spot, lately. In March, concerns boiled over about Charlevoix County deputies sent in after the regular island deputy grew ill. Islanders say St. Patrick’s Day policing was excessive and set the island on edge.

“I think there is a perception that Beaver Island is this lawless community full of people that turn a blind eye to extremely drunk people operating motor vehicles on the road,” said island attorney Mary Beth Kur, whose public forum remarks were quoted in the Petoskey News-Review. “I really don’t think that there is anything further from the truth.”

Wojan described it all as a “tempest in a teapot.”

“It’s settled down,” he said.

Nonetheless, there’s long been a leave-us-be attitude among islanders, Wojan said. Some would refer to a trip to Charlevoix as having to “go over to the United States.”

“That’s sort of the attitude that was here for a long, long time,” Wojan said. “Outside forces are starting to try to assert their control of the island. And the old island people just don’t accept that. We’ve done quite well, controlling things ourselves.”

But changes are inevitable and Beaver Island’s isolation isn’t the protection against outside influence it once was. Wojan said the island rode out the pandemic with very few cases of COVID, but property sales skyrocketed. When the pandemic struck, an island in Lake Michigan looked like the perfect escape for some from the germy mainland. Buyers snapped up properties which had sat on the market for years, sight unseen.

“I sold more property in 2021 than I had ever sold in any previous year in the last 48 years,” Wojan said. That wasn’t merely a blip, either. It has continued apace. “We’re running out of inventory now. It’s reduced dramatically. Anything that comes on the market is selling quickly and at higher prices. Because this is a natural place that’s not developed.”

The increase in residents has upsides and drawbacks. An influx of newcomers brings money and tax revenues but can dilute that sense of tight-knit community.

“We need people to be part of the community, so that they join boards and give their ideas and become part of the community to help support it,” said Pam Grassmick, a fourth-generation islander and environmental advocate. “You can’t just have absent property owners.”

Nonetheless, Beaver Island has come a long way from the days of party line telephones and power brownouts in the evening when everyone turned on appliances at dinnertime; when the Dominican Sisters came from the mainland to teach school children and an orange was considered an exotic treat.

A new $61 million grant from the recent federal infrastructure law is expected to boost access to high-speed internet on the island through a project to lay under-lake fiber cable from Charlevoix to the Upper Peninsula by way of Beaver Island in the middle. The island radio station, WVBI-LP 100.1-FM, is increasing its signal from 43 to 3,000 watts, allowing it to reach the entire the island and expand its programming.

“The island is in a great place right now,” Fogg said. “The downside from the islanders’ point of view is that all these people are here. But the upside from the islanders’ point of view is that all these people are here. They live within this tension of wanting to be by themselves because they liked that isolation. And yet, the isolation wasn’t very nice in many ways.”

“There’s people that are visiting, there’s people that are escaping, there’s people that are working,” he said, “It’s kind of… like the American Dream.”