How a Stupid Rock Taught Me to Love My Home State Again

Lessons from Pure Michigan

Like many people who grew up on the Leelanau Peninsula—sometimes called the “little finger” of the Michigan mitten—I didn’t realize until well into my mid-20s that Petoskey stones aren’t a precious metal.

My earliest childhood memory involves walking along the beach near my house when I was just five or six, holding my mother’s hand and scouring the shoreline for Petoskey’s, a fossilized coral that can only be found on the coast of northwestern Michigan. Its distinctive honeycomb pattern, as I was often reminded by grownups, came from coral that existed 350 million years ago, before dinosaurs or even Jesus. It’s the most aesthetically perfect design ever created by nature.

At least that’s what my friends and I believed. What other explanation could there be for the excitement these stones gave our parents? When I found my first Petoskey and presented it to my mother, she reacted as if I’d just plucked a water-logged Ivy League college acceptance letter out of the lake.

Every kid in my neighborhood grew up coveting these stones. We spent summers roaming the beaches, our heads cast downward like monks on their way to mass. If we were lucky enough to find a few, we’d polish them till they glowed and turned them into necklaces, bracelets, and earrings for our mothers, aunts, and girlfriends. They wore it all, even though most of the stones were essentially heavy rocks, way too bulky to be worn gracefully. All of the women in my hometown had hunched-over postures from their Petoskey jewelry, like medieval slaves covered in iron shackles.

It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago as an adult and started dating non-Michiganders that I realized not everybody is beguiled by Great Lake fossils. My first gift to my future wife, a month after we’d started dating, was a Petoskey necklace. She looked at it like I’d handed her a macaroni bracelet.

“Are you being serious?” she asked.

I was embarrassed by the rejection, but mostly confused. How could she not be enamored by my Petoskey gift? She was from Pennsylvania, where they didn’t have mysterious minerals covered in magical hexagons. She’d seen exactly as many Bigfoots as she’d seen Petoskey stones. But she wasn’t impressed.

I’d spent my life believing that Michigan contains everything that a person could reasonably want or need. It has rock jewelry, perfect views of the aurora borealis, no toll roads, coveted fudge, winning college football teams, 10-cent-per-bottle recycling returns, islands where even vice presidents aren’t allowed to drive, and endless beachfront property stretched across the longest freshwater coastline of any state in the nation.

We have 140 lighthouses. That’s more lighthouses than anywhere else in the country. Jealous much?

We’re also the only state with hand-based cartography. You can hold up an open palm, point to exactly where you live in Michigan — as long as you live on the Lower Peninsula — and be immediately understood. Beat that, other 49 states.

It’s still disconcerting to me how outsiders, even fellow Midwesterners, feel about my home state: that it’s blighted, abandoned, despair-inducing. I know Michigan has its faults. There’s the lake-effect snow, roads that resemble post-World War II Dresden, a hollowed-out auto industry, and Detroit, the only U.S. city with an unofficial holiday devoted to recreational arson. Michigan is home to both Ted Nugent and Michael Moore, arguably the most loathed celebrities who won’t shut up about their bad political opinions on both the Right and Left.

You could look at all the evidence and decide that Michigan is a joke. That could be true. Or maybe you’re a coyote and we’re the Texas Horned Lizard.

The horned lizard, a spiky-boned reptile indigenous to much of the southern U.S., has a brilliant defense against predators. When it feels like a coyote might be intending to eat it, the horned lizard squirts blood out of its eyes, at a distance of up to five feet and right into the offending coyote’s mouth. The coyote (like most living things) gets skeeved out by eye blood, loses its appetite, and runs away.

I’d argue that Michigan uses the same defense. What’s that? Popular Science claimed that everybody will be moving to Michigan in 2100 because it’ll be the U.S. state least affected by climate change? Um… wait, did you hear we’re poisoning children in Flint with drinking water? And we’re not stopping! We’re like, “Whatever, poor kids. We’re out of money! Keep drinking the cancer Kool-Aid!”

Flint’s water crisis is the Michigan equivalent of blood squirting out of a lizard’s eyes. Obviously, Michigan’s water isn’t all poison. Just like the Texas Horned Lizard isn’t always squirting blood from its eyes. But that’s what we want you (i.e. the coyotes) to think.

Every Michigander lives with the fear that our borders are constantly in danger of being colonized by over-enthusiastic outsiders. I can still remember how I learned that (now-disgraced) celebrity chef Mario Batali, who owns property in Leelanau, had invited U2 guitarist The Edge up to Michigan for a mini-vacation, and the pair were spotted together at a farmer’s market in my hometown of Northport.

I got a panicked call from my mother. “You don’t think he’ll buy a house here, do you?” she asked, referring to the Edge. “He lives in Hollywood or Ireland or whatever. He wouldn’t want to come here, do you think?”

“I have no idea,” I told her.

“What if he comes back with the rest of his band and they all buy summer homes?” she wondered aloud. “That’s the last thing we need.”

“I don’t think Bono wants to move to Michigan,” I assured her.

“Don’t be so sure. Nobody thought Tim Allen would move to Michigan, either, and now he’s doing tourism commercials.”

“I’m pretty sure he came here when he was eight.”

“They’re going to keep coming!” She said, ignoring me.

I don’t live in Michigan anymore, but I visit the state every summer, and now that I’m a father, I’ve begun introducing my son to Michigan culture. I’ve taught him that soda should always be called pop, the most important decision he’ll ever make is between Flint-style and Detroit-style Coney Dogs, and that snow (to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin) is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

I’ve taken him to our beaches and taught him how to search for Petoskey’s. He found his first one last summer, and we celebrated. I told him why the stone was special, not because it’s especially beautiful but because it’s unique . Those snooty ocean coasters can’t claim to have better versions. (Nobody can say, “Well, the Petoskey stones in Michigan are fine, but Maryland Petoskey's are fresher.”) I told him how this was the beginning of an endless Easter egg hunt that would consume him for decades, and then repulse him for just as long, but not before he gave a Petosky to the woman (or man) he wants to love forever, and they might not get it, but that’s okay because outsiders not getting it is part of what makes a Petoskey stone so precious and rare. It doesn’t belong to everybody, and there are few things in this world that don’t belong to everybody.

It’s just a dumb fucking rock, I told him, and someday he’ll feel like a fool for getting excited about a dumb fucking rock. But in the blink of an eye, he’ll be a middle-aged man, standing in a lake that feels like home again, staring at the water and trying to find another dumb fucking rock, and he’ll forget how much he wanted to leave this place as a teenager because now it feels like the only place on earth that matters. He’ll make grand declarations (at least in his head) to move back before Bono and all his rock star buddies buy the really nice homes.

My son was barely paying attention. It’s fine. He needs to learn these things on his own.