The Mitten and the U.P., What It Means to Be a Michigan State

Michigan is a state that resists easy summary, partly because it is not really one place. It is two peninsulas separated by the Straits of Mackinac, a roughly five-mile-wide passage of cold water that, for over a century, made the Upper Peninsula effectively a different world from the Lower. The Lower Peninsula, which Michiganders call the Mitten because its outline, gloved by the Great Lakes, looks exactly like a hand, is home to about ninety-seven percent of the state's residents.

It contains Detroit, Flint, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, the industrial and university cities that made Michigan a powerhouse of the twentieth century. Its terrain is glacial, flat to gently rolling, carved by ice sheets into a landscape of small lakes, river valleys, and rich agricultural land. Michigan ranks among the top states in the nation in the diversity of its agricultural output: cherries from the Leelanau Peninsula, blueberries from the southwest, apples from the Lake Michigan shore, sugar beets from the Saginaw Valley.

The Upper Peninsula, the U.P., is something else entirely.

It covers roughly thirty percent of the state's land area and holds less than three percent of its population. Its residents, called Yoopers, have a cultural identity distinct enough that a movement for statehood, proposing a fifty-first state called Superior, periodically resurfaces. The U.

P. is a landscape of boreal forest, granite outcrops, waterfalls, and Lake Superior shoreline that feels, in its northern reaches, more like northern Ontario than anything in the American Midwest. The Mackinac Bridge, completed in nineteen fifty-seven and known simply as the Big Mac, connected the two peninsulas for the first time.

At five miles long, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at its opening and remains among the longest today. On Labor Day each year, the bridge is closed to vehicles and opened to walkers. Tens of thousands of people cross on foot, from the Mitten to the U.

P. and back, in a ritual that has no obvious parallel anywhere else in the country. Michigan is surrounded by more fresh water than any other state in the lower forty-eight.

It is a state that built cars, logged forests, mined copper, grew music, and bent the arc of American labor, all before most of the rest of the country was paying close attention.