“The house is a hundred years old. You walk in, and the smell is delicious—it’s mothballs and history and frog, toad and turtle races. It brings back so many memories,” says Desloge. “It’s the one thing in my life that hasn’t changed.”
Her parents, hampered by the stiffness that settles in during the nine-hour drive from St. Louis, move more slowly up the path. Her father, John M. Drescher Jr.—now 81—first came to this house as a child with his parents. He brought his bride along some 50 years ago, and they in turn brought Ann and her two brothers. Desloge hasn’t missed a summer in her 46 years, not even the year her daughter was born prematurely, after a difficult pregnancy, on July 20. A week later, tiny Katherine made her début in Michigan.
The trip north in the family SUV is a ritual in itself. “We have a tradition of leaving at 5 in the morning,” says Desloge. “It’s dark. We talk about who’s going to see the lake first—even before we get to the house, it’s ‘I see the lake! I see the lake!’ When we get there, there’s a rush—a race—to be the first to touch the water
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“It’s not a slow transition,” she adds. “It’s immediate. You’re back in the fold and you haven’t skipped a beat. I’m 46 years old, and once again I’m 12. Sancliff always remains the same. It’s where my soul lives.”
Ask St. Louisans about their summers, and a surprising number will launch into rhapsodies about Michigan. Like Desloge’s family, many have been going to the same cottages summer after summer, generation after generation.
Victoria Rosenkoetter has a photograph of herself in pigtails in Fennville, where her grandparents had a cottage on Lake Michigan. She’s under the watchful eye of Ethel, a very stout nanny in a very modest bathing suit.
When Rosenkoetter began bringing her own children to the house (built on a foundation of nail kegs in the sand), Ethel was still around to help out, make life easy.
“The highlight of the day was sitting on the porch, having a drink and betting on what time the sun would go down,” says Rosenkoetter.
Michigan cottage life is steeped in tradition, “even down to the plates you eat off at night—‘I don’t want the pink plate, I want the blue plate,’” laughs Desloge. “My daughter took over my bedroom in the cottage, and my sons took the boys’ room, even though they could have each had their own room. My brothers shared a room, so my sons do, too.”
The continuity is part of Michigan’s charm. Bruce Douglass, a clinical psychologist in Traverse City, has summered in his own family’s cottage all his life. “There tends to be a mythology about these places that builds all winter and comes to a fever pitch in the spring,” he says. “To walk into a cottage that has been closed for six months or nine months—the air is cold, it’s still, there’s a bit of dust or mold in the air—it’s a very distinctive smell that triggers deep memories. It becomes a sacred place. There are all kinds of feelings about belonging, about sameness. It’s very ritualistic.”
The familiar smell, one woman says, is “a little bit mildew, a little bit wood smoke and a little bit old bathing suits.”
A man who goes with his family every summer describes their Michigan lakeside community as “womblike”: “There are a number of people who never go anywhere for vacation but there, and everybody knew you as a baby and some knew your parents as babies.”
“It’s my mecca,” says real-estate developer David Schlafly, whose family has a cottage in Harbor Point, the section Town & Country magazine once described as the Riviera of the Midwest.
Interior designer Tim Rohan came late to Michigan summers: “I’m the boyfriend who later married the girl whose grandparents had the cottage.” His wife’s family has been summering in Charlevoix since her grandfather had the cottage built in 1912—as a gift to her grandmother, who was eager to escape the St. Louis heat.
“We joke about the sleeping sickness,” Rohan says. “The air’s so fresh, you can sleep 10 hours every night. It’s so quiet, and the birds are chirping in the morning. The windows are open because you never need air conditioning. Everybody sleeps late, even the babies!
“Charlevoix goes to sleep all winter long,” he continues, “and then spring comes and after the winter thaw—which is, like, May—all the groundskeepers of all the private clubs pull the shutters off the windows and take the canvas throws off the furniture. All the wicker chairs are put on the porches, and it’s a rebirth of Brigadoon for one more season. It’s a feeling of coming home to your grandparents’ house—the old sheets from years ago and Uncle Frank’s bad lamps that were shipped up in 1968 and the fun of getting out Dad’s old boat.”
The summer-cottage tradition dates back a century, though the area was settled earlier by lumber barons. Much of the wood used to rebuild Chicago after the fire of 1871 came from this region. By the time the lumber industry had faded, the rail and steamship companies were promoting the area—halfway between the equator and the North Pole—as an idyllic summer escape.
“It started out with people occupying old farmhouses; then they began building hotels and houses,” says Kathryn B. Eckert, a retired Michigan historic-preservation officer. People from Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee, as well as St. Louis, were eager to get away from the sooty, hot and humid air of newly industrialized cities, not to mention the polio epidemic.
Most of these “cottages” have four, five or six bedrooms—though often only one bathroom, unless the house has been remodeled. The cottages usually aren’t winterized, and many families go to great lengths to preserve original details. “We finally bought a new refrigerator, and my son cried,” says Desloge. “When the wallpaper needs to be replaced, my father searches frantically for something that looks exactly like it.”
The lush world of Michigan isn’t only for the monied, but there is a definite hierarchy among resort communities. The most exclusive are farther north, clustered along the rim of Little Traverse Bay. Charlevoix, with its drawbridge, lighthouse, petunia-lined streets and private cottage communities—as well as a crystal-clear spring-fed lake that flows into Lake Mich-igan—is on the lower lip of the bay, but its stature is enhanced by the fact that it is one of the oldest resorts. Lake Walloon is inland but has the cachet of having been Ernest Hemingway’s childhood summer home.
Harbor Springs, on the north side of the bay, has always been the most exclusive and expensive, according to locals. Mercedes and BMWs crowd the streets in summer (in the offseason, it’s pickup trucks).
Next to Harbor Springs is Harbor Point, a perfectly groomed community, very private, where the transportation is limited to golf carts and bicycles.
Across the bay is Bay Harbor, a new resort on a five-mile stretch of shoreline formerly home to a cement plant, has sprouted multimillion-dollar mega homes that give it the edge in property values, if not taste.
Grand Traverse Bay, Torch Lake and Lake Leelanau to the south are home to Northport, North Point (where several St. Louis families summer) and, on the Lake Michigan side, Leland, home to even more St. Louisans. The air is not as rarefied in Leland; the summer people are just as wealthy, but the style is relaxed. “Nobody puts on the dog,” says one of the St. Louisans with a home there. “You have some of the richest folks in the country, but there are no airs. Anybody with land in the township can be a member of the country club.”
Crystal Lake, to the south, also attracts St. Louisans, as do Ludington and, even farther south, the tiny towns of Douglas and Saugatuck. (Saugatuck got its traffic light in the 1950s; until recently, the town’s only police officer would cover the light with his raincoat after Labor Day and then retire himself until the following summer.)
The Schlaflys’ Victorian cottage, built in 1880, sits on a bluff 50 steps above Lake Michigan. The centerpiece of the rambling house in Harbor Springs is—as in so many Michigan cottages—a well-used fireplace to chase the evening chill. Schlafly recalls a typical day from his boyhood:
“The town whistle blasts for lunch. It means that sailing school starts in 45 minutes. You grab a sandwich and pedal with your life preserver to the pier. There are 20 or 30 minutes of instruction, and then they assign you a buddy and you set out. For the next three hours, you’re out on the water, pretty much on your own. Occasionally you go into the drink. It’s very, very cold water.
“Afterward, you pedal back in time for dinner on the porch. You have that rare sense of satisfaction from doing something that’s difficult to master. The days just blow by.”
The days still blow by. Life revolves around tennis, golf, sailing and the water. The pace is a bizarre hybrid of relaxed and hectic.
“It’s a very social life—it’s not a life for a hermit,” Schlafly says, adding that he likes to get home to his routine after two weeks. “The first morning, it’s kind of quiet, and then tennis is arranged, or a sail is arranged. Before long, it’s busy, very busy. It can be unreal. To be a healthy human being, you would not want to spend your life up there all summer.”
Rohan describes “this comfortable lifestyle from the 1920s that has never changed. The staff would go up a few days early so you had fresh towels, beds flipped, boats gassed up, sails rigged.” It’s a surreal experience for someone new to it—but it’s not hard to adapt. “You sleep late, you stay up late. It’s a lot of cocktail parties—a lot of booze, actually. Booze, food and fun.”
There’s nothing to do except have fun. By late afternoon, everyone’s a little sun-weary. After a cool shower and a nap, it’s time to dress for dinner, and it’s cocktails from then on.
Many of Michigan’s summer stomping grounds are built around residential resort communities. Charlevoix has two of the oldest. The Belvedere Club dates to 1878 and the early days of the Charlevoix Summer Resort Association. The Chicago Club got its start in 1880, when a group of wealthy Chicagoans put down summer roots. Some of the associations had religious affiliations—and some still honor the remnants of those roots.
“You can’t drink outside the cottage walls,” Desloge says of Ludington, which was founded by Methodists. “My parents used to sit on the porch with their teacups and their teapot—with martinis in the teapot.”
The associations organize activities for children and adults. Some, harking back to the area’s days on the Chautauqua circuit, bring in speakers. Others, like the Sequanota Club on Lake Charlevoix, hire a chef who prepares lunch and dinner each day for members in the communal dining room.
“Except Sundays, when there’s a beach party,” says Rohan. “We get together in the dining room. There is a piano, we sing some hymns and someone talks about something that is important to them. Then you go change clothes again—because that’s all you do in Michigan, change clothes—and you drive onto a beach. The kids play in the dunes and roast marshmallows and skip stones; the beach faces west, so you get a wonderful sunset.”
Summers used to last eight to 12 weeks. Women would pack up the children, the pets and the staff—a nanny, a cook, often a laundress or maid—and settle in from mid-June to Labor Day. Men would visit on weekends. Few can do that anymore: Women work, and children’s school activities begin in late August.
“The season used to stretch solidly through the Labor Day weekend,” says Schlafly. “We open the cottage for the Fourth of July weekend. The place is cleaned from top to bottom, utilized through mid-August and shut down after the first weekend in September. It goes into a very dormant, sleepy state.”
He marks the return to “reality” at the first gasoline stop on Interstate 55. “You’re looking around at the other cars, and you see the faces of Middle America,” he says.
August days are bittersweet, says Desloge. Her husband arrives for the final tennis tournament. There are barbecues and award ceremonies, and then it’s time to pack the family into the SUV for the drive home.
“In St. Louis, we speed through life. In Michigan, the days are languid and long. You can really spend time with your friends,” she says. “I grew up with Thomas, in the cottage next door. His wife is now one of my closest friends. We had our babies at the same time.
“You watch everyone grow up and their parents get frail and their kids get married,” Desloge adds. “It gives you a chance to step back from your life and see where you’re going.”
Blood Feuds
Forget Grandma’s diamond ring—who gets the cottage?
Sooner or later, every family with a summer house in Michigan has to answer that question.
“It’s not a pretty subject,” says Ann Desloge. Her father—an only child—inherited the family’s summer home in Ludington. “Everybody that you talk to has something like that going on. There are literally people who don’t speak to each other. It’s brutal.”
The question is so pervasive that Michigan attorney Stuart Hollander specializes in “cottage law,” resolving conflicts over who inherits—or gets to use—a family’s summer home. Hollander works closely with a psychologist. Together, they’ve seen some pretty nasty fights.
“Frequently there are major struggles that lead to horribly hard feelings,” says Bruce Douglass, Hollander’s psychologist partner. The fights often lead to lawsuits that are “as ugly as divorce,” in Hollander’s opinion. He started specializing after noticing that cottage-related issues “kept coming up and coming up and coming up” in his practice.
Trouble brews especially quickly when some heirs are financially more secure than others, he says. One person who wants his or her share of the house’s cash value can force the sale of a property. “Ninety percent of the inheritances divide an estate equally among children—regardless of need, regardless of who uses a house, regardless, even, of how much the parent may dislike one or another of the siblings,” Hollander notes. He suggests putting a cottage into a limited partnership, preferably with an endowment to cover maintenance of the property. Each heir then owns shares of the partnership.
This arrangement is best accomplished while the original owners are alive. Otherwise, consensus among squabbling siblings and cousins can take months. Douglass likens the negotiations to “tribal dynamics.”
“It gets into birth order, gender, family expectations, who the founders were, who they favored in the family, territorial issues, travel patterns,” he says. “The sibling-rivalry thing is huge.”
