Spindrift

Spindrift is a place that exists in southwest Michigan. It might resemble any number of very small Michigan towns. It has a wide main street, approximately three blocks of which is lined with Brownstones and storefronts built around the turn of the 20th century. Main Street is surrounded by a grid-like maze of white sidewalk broken by shady streets studded with saltboxes and colonials and outright gingerbread houses. The outlying neighborhoods are surrounded by dense jungle ravines and gullies, scrubby thickets and cool wooded glades snaked with deer runs and creeks. All of this is surrounded by the patchwork landscapes of American agriculture.

Spindrift has no telephone area code, no postal zip code or voting district. Its charter is not on file in the state capitol, no date of founding can be seen on any building corner stone or plaque, and it cannot be found on any Michigan map or county atlas made by Rand McNally Corporation, Universal Maps Incorporated or even the National Geographic Society. A curious few have found sporadic reference to the name and the vicinity in the journals of Titus Bronson and Pierre Marquette. The name can also be found on certain very early printed maps of the territory issued to explorers and early settlers heading westward from Fort Detroit in the first decades of the 19th century.
No one living in any of the near-by towns will say that they have ever heard of Spindrift, yet tales are told quietly in backyards and at dinner tables as well as flea markets, fruit stands and roadhouses all over the south-western counties. Some do not know it by name, only by a feeling they have when the wind blows the right way, others will tell you the name rings a bell but it’s more deja vu than direction.

The occasional weary traveler will amble into Spindrift, usually very late at night when falling asleep at the wheel or finding a main road is a concern. The stop will be brief but always oddly memorable. It is only long after the fact, however, that the power of the experience becomes apparent. Months or years later some mnemonic will tickle a memory and someone will say;
“You know, the best piece of pie I’ve ever eaten in my life was in a club car diner in this weird little town in Michigan.”
Or;
“Once I had this extraordinary conversation about Buddhist cosmology with an 80-year-old guy at an all-night coffee shop in Michigan. I was going to Chicago and I wound up on the back roads with a flat and of course, no spare. A tow-truck from this little town just happened by and what was the name of that place?”
It was always in Spindrift. What is perhaps most peculiar is that if the traveler ever gets back to that neck of the woods, they will look for a time, spurred on by the memory, only to stop in Plainwell, or Paw Paw, hoping to find the diner or the coffee house. The places are never there, or stranger still, they are but they don’t look at all like they had when you ate that great piece of pie or made that phone call. Sometimes the building is there but it’s been closed for 30 years.

There are places in Spindrift that exist or once existed elsewhere in Michigan. On Main Street is a movie palace that once held court in Kalamazoo. There is a Church of the Brethren from Saugatuck, an Art Deco Savings and Loan from Battle Creek, a haberdashery from Nichols Arcade in Ann Arbor, all gone from their erstwhile communities, all can be found in Spindrift and what’s more, they have always been there.

The residents of Spindrift are like any other people in Michigan except that they seem more complete somehow, almost as though they are archetypes of a sort. They seem familiar in that nagging way and you would swear that you have met them before or even had known them to some extent like a waitress or mailman or desk clerk you had dealt with regularly years and years ago but whom had become as lost to memory as any abandoned routine. The people of Spindrift have all been born, will live their lives and die there. All save a precious few who seldom if ever return.

An invitation to Spindrift is very rare but there is little chance of finding the place without one. Spindrift is a place in southwest Michigan that is very hard to find. It cannot be found by simply knowing where to look because in fact, Spindrift is a place in southwest Michigan that isn’t really there.