The Driftwood

The motel room smelled like home and sadness and hope, all at once.

The husband and I were back in Rogers City so he could conduct a funeral for Betty, a force of nature who knew how to get her way even after she had gone to Heaven. The trip to northern Michigan from our downstate home was just far enough for an overnight stay at the Driftwood Motel, one of three or four mom-and-pops in town.

Michigan’s west coast boasts a barrage of swanky resorts hulking along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The east side of the state, though, is a whole different world. In Alpena, the biggest town along the Sunrise Side stretch from Tawas City to the big bridge, you’ll find a proper multi-level hotel or two, but most lodging up that way consists of low-slung motels that don’t concern themselves with swank.

Folks don’t visit Sunrise Side towns for fashionable streets packed with boutiques and eateries. They come for the lake, that behemoth slathered all across the horizon, rolling and rocking and gliding under the seagulls and whooshing up to your feet, leaving behind water-weathered gifts and whispering backward in a roll of bubbles and quicksilver.

They come for the nearby woods, too, quiet and bright and full of birdsong, and for lattes at MI Northern Espresso and Plath’s bacon and tiny treasures at the Painted Lady and charming live theater and Gary’s poems someone illustrated and enlarged and hung on a downtown fence.

What they don’t come for is the motel room.

If they did, they’d probably be disappointed. The Driftwood, like many other small-town motels, keeps it simple. The furniture shows subtle signs of wear and tear, and the bedspread is all-purpose shiny polyester in stripes of colors no longer in vogue. Bedside lamps are just lamps, with no built-in USB ports. Towels range from fine to a little scratchy, and ain’t nothing plush about the toilet paper.

But step out the sliding glass door at the far end of every room, and you’re treated to a million-dollar view people dream their whole lives of seeing.

Lake Huron, laid out in all its splendor, gazed back at us from under a fading sunset as we stepped onto the room’s back deck the evening before the funeral. At 2 a.m. I gaped at a grayscale lake glowing up at the Big Dipper, and a few hours later we held our breath as the sun crawled from a watery horizon.

No, the Driftwood isn’t about glamour.

It’s about being OK with where you are because you know something glorious awaits just outside your door.

***

We were a collective bundle of nerves the first time we stayed at the motel, back when our kids were young. My husband had just received a call to one of the churches in Rogers City. After a long drive progressively farther from civilization, we arrived in town tired and nervous about the impending upheaval in our lives.

We checked in at the front desk, as instructed, and discovered some thoughtful church members had left a surprise for us ― snacks for the adults and activity books for the kids. That gesture of kindness helped us believe everything was going to be OK in this new, unknown world.

Years later, I reconnected with the motel during another time of uncertainty. I had walked away from a meaningful job without a plan, heeding a tug I felt but didn’t understand. God was telling me He had something else for me to do, and I had to let go of the security of my full-time position to find it.

To keep a paycheck coming, I took part-time work cleaning rooms at the Driftwood. I vacuumed and wiped and folded and sprayed, mind engrossed in trying to figure out what God had in mind for me next.

The day we arrived for the funeral, I stepped into room 201, breathed in, and instantly had to blink back the pinpricks in my eyes.

This place meant uncertainty. It meant worry and hope and not knowing what comes next.

How perfect, I realized, to find myself once again at the Driftwood, here in a new time of transition and wondering and flinging myself on a God I trust to catch me.

I didn’t know, back when we munched snacks and worried about uprooting our kids and wrenching ourselves out of our former home, that what lay ahead in Rogers City was beauty and joy and life-changing friendship.

Later, as I cleaned and questioned, I didn’t know I was about to launch into a new career that opened my eyes and rewrote my heart.

A few days ago, sniffling and reaching for a tissue in the low-key motel room, I wondered once more what’s coming next as I start over again, redefining myself and pursuing a Big Idea I’m compelled to turn into a book, not sure where it will all lead.

There is a next, the room seemed to say to me.

You’ve been here before. And there’s always a next.

***

We had a little spare time before the funeral, so we went to Seagull Point, our go-to hangout when we lived in town. We meandered the beach, where I stooped to pick up pocket rocks and the occasional water-smoothed stick.

I sometimes like to picture the journey a broken branch or stray piece of wood takes before it winds up, rounded and silky, sunbathing on a beach. I run my fingertips along a piece of driftwood and imagine it bobbing on the watertop, rocked up and down and jostled side to side and sometimes flung when the wind gets fierce.

The driftwood doesn’t know what’s ahead any more than I do. We’re both riding the current, shaped by sunshine and rain into something new. Something we couldn’t have imagined we would be.

In the uncertainties, in the waves and winds, there is a next.

There is a Something Ahead, something you can’t see as you wait and work and wonder.

In the meantime, grab a snack. Maybe clean something. Dream a little. Where you are might not be glamorous, and it might even be a little scary. But just wait until you see what’s right outside your door.

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If you haven't visited the Rogers City, I highly recommend it. Not all of you at once, though ― we don't want the beaches to get crowded. If you go in summer, make sure you pick up a treat at Ice Cream Lane and climb on the rocks on the marina breakwall.

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