Diary – 27 August 2004

Pentwater, Michigan

This is America’s heartland, the ‘flyover country’ usually seen by British visitors only from an aeroplane window as they head west for the coast. It’s a land of other people’s clichés — home of the moral majority, the background for Norman Rockwell paintings, a series of cowpoke towns which lie flat as a map from the Adirondacks to the Rockies. Which makes it such a surprise when visitors to the Midwest — especially this northern part — discover how beautiful it is. In this one county of mid-Michigan there is rolling orchard land, the start of the pine and hardwood forests that stretch north through most of Canada and, on the shores of Lake Michigan, a 150-mile stretch of white, soft sand. And everywhere there is water, which makes it resemble Scandinavia more than the Continent, and explains why surnames like Gustafson and Lonergan vie with Smith for space in the phone book.