Ted McClelland makes the 10,000-mile Great Lakes Circle Tour to answer a burning question: "Is there a Great Lakes culture, and if so what is it?"
The Great Lakes have always been lumped in with the Midwest, but the region has a culture that transcends the border between the U.S. and Canada. United by a love of encased meats, hockey, beer, snowmobiling, deer hunting and classic rock power ballads, the folks in Detroit have more in common with Windsor, Ontario, than Wichita, Kansas, and folks in Toronto have more in common with Chicago than Montreal. This is not your typical armchair travel book, but a humorous social essay filled with quirky people and unusual places that prove the ordinary is more fascinating than the famous.
The journey begins where the Great Lakes begin, at the Calumet River in Chicago, where McClelland meets Yuri, a Latvian sailor who wants to go shopping for "Nikes." He goes bowling in Milwaukee and decides it's the drunkest town in America. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he hears a folkie sing kazoo-inflected ballads about the Wild North mining days. He hangs out with a Lake Superior herring fishermen, and a Mackinac Island Jesuit carrying on the work of Marquette. He falls in with a regiment of War of 1812 re-enactors, meets a long-haired Ojibway painter, has tea with the God-Save-the-Queen old ladies of the Kingston Monarchist League, and polkas at the Cleveland Slavic Festival, where the girls still love an accordion hero.