Ellsworth, Michigan Going Home: Roots, but No Tracks

By John Skow

I have his shaving mug and his last name. And I have a rough wooden chest in my office, knocked together in Denmark more than a century ago and addressed with brush and black paint: "F.H. Skow, Ellsworth, Antrim County, Mich., U.S.A." There is only one way to carry such a chest by yourself: pick it up and put it on your shoulder. When I do that, the hair rises on the back of my neck. I feel my Danish grandfather, old Falle Hansen Skow, picking up the chest one morning in 1872, when he was 16, easing it onto the back of a farm wagon, then riding with his father to the train station. The night before, he had carved his initials on a windowsill of his parents' farmhouse in Jutland, "so you won't forget me." A few years earlier, Germany had inhaled his part of Denmark, and thus as a teenager he was in danger of being drafted into the Kaiser's army. No thanks. His folks scraped together enough money to buy him passage to the U.S. So say the family stories, a bit hazy in parts, like everyone's family stories, though the windowsill and the initials were still there a century later.

Fast-forward to the summer of 1990: F.H.'s grandson is becalmed in his office, postponing chores by reading the New York Times food page. Abruptly, one of memory's custard pies sails out of a time warp and hits me in the snoot. The Times describes a fine restaurant, called the Tapawingo, serving cassoulet of morels, and veal with forest fettucine, dinners $22 to $32 with first course and salad, in -- SPLAT! -- Ellsworth, Mich. My reaction is dismay. Ellsworth doesn't belong in the Times. It belongs in my earliest memories, where it has been for the 40 years since I last saw it. Ellsworth is my grandfather's farm, with a huge scary bull, and the dark, musty air of the feedstore across the road, and railroad tracks, where I flattened pennies when the Chicago Flyer came by. Now some guy named Bruce is advancing on my boyhood with a gigantic pepper mill, saying he'll be my waiter for tonight. Yes, thanks, Bruce, I'll need a little time. Actually, I will need a trip to Ellsworth.

Fast-Midwestward to Michigan: F.H. died in 1937, and I was just old enough to remember him as a fierce-looking geezer with a sandy mustache. Today that would describe me, and at the coffee bar in Ellsworth's Viking Food Store, Pete Drenth, 77, said a couple of weeks ago that from the side he could see the resemblance. I was pleased to hear that. One of the other high-mileage gents passing the time over coffee heard my name and said, "You're the doctor who settled in Toledo." No, I told him, that was my father. "Oh, yes," he said, "I know who you are." He had me placed, and that felt good too.

Maybe the chest in my office did make that first voyage with my grandfather, but perhaps it came later. F.H. made three round trips to Denmark and back after he settled in Michigan, once to find a likely bride, Christine Sandberg, then to bring her to the U.S., and finally, after their five children were born, to give his wife one last look at home. One of the hazy bits in his story is how, before he emigrated, he knew of a tiny, unincorporated farm hamlet called Ellsworth (after Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, the first Union officer killed in the Civil War). There were a few Dutch families in this rolling, forested country at the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula, but no Danes who might have written to say there were lumberjack jobs in the woods for a sturdy young man who didn't speak much English.

At any rate, the teenage and penniless F.H. found his way to Ellsworth and prospered there, somehow buying and selling farms and houses, building and operating a three-story hotel called the Orient, a shingle mill, a hardware store and a waterworks, and donating land for a station when the railroad came through in '92. That was the year he and two other men paid a surveyor to plot out the town. That year -- and any other, according to a town history -- he was good for a suit of clothes, or a railroad ticket, or the rent money, when someone was down on his luck. After the Depression, my father told me, F.H. made no effort to collect debts. He had never been much good at retrieving his money, which was odd for a man who in one lifetime used up all his family's financial-brilliance genes for several generations to come. While he was still a boy learning English in Michigan, he lent money he had saved for college to a friend -- a Yankee, the town history reports -- who skipped town. No matter; he went on lending and giving away money, and there wasn't much left when he died.

Big frog, small pond; an even smaller pond today, with fewer than 400 residents. I look around for the train station, but it's not there. No tracks, either; they were ripped up "Oh, quite a few years ago now." A big prosperous food-canning factory that my grandfather and some other townsmen started in the '20s petered out, I learn, in the early '70s. A steel- fabricating plant operated there for a few years, then went belly up, and now a toxic-waste cleanup putters along in a clutter of rusted metal. Ellsworth Lake is still where it was when my father and I would shove off at first light in a borrowed rowboat, seats slicked by dew, to fish for perch and crappies with bamboo poles and worms. Now a friendly fellow who is launching a $15,000 bass boat, complete with electronic fish-finder, says the water is a funny color near the dead steel factory. But Ellsworth's houses and churches are painted, and yards are mowed. The surrounding dairy farms seem prosperous, though fewer farmers run bigger spreads and here and there old farmhouses sag blind and empty. A girls' softball team looks sharp in maroon uniforms as the players warm up for a game.

At the Tapawingo, an elegant and easeful lakeside villa, I toast F.H. with an '87 Calera Mills Pinot Noir. Hard to say whether he would have approved. The family was churchly, but the women did most of the praying. Would the jalapeno smoked shrimp, seared and placed on a bed of black-bean-and-garlic sauce, have seemed the work of the devil? The cucumber-dill soup, with little blue borage blossoms floating on it? The lamb with braised lentils, garnished with nasturtium? Owner-chef Harlan Peterson, an escaped car designer who once styled Thunderbirds for Ford, says he is trying to phase out the flower garnishes. His customers won't let him. They are rich resorters, from such glossy Lake Michigan yacht moorings as Charlevoix, and occasional nervous Ellsworth elders being taken to dinner by their children from Chicago or Detroit. They pack the place, wearing the glazed looks appropriate to munchers of black-cherry-with-mint granita salads and paillards of Norwegian salmon.

Trust me, F.H., it is the best meal I have eaten since the time I looked sad during an interview with Craig Claiborne, and he and Pierre Franey fed me lunch. Yes, says my grandfather, but have you tried the Rowe? It turns out that there are two astonishingly good restaurants in Ellsworth. Wes Westhoven's Rowe, in fact, is where the Tapawingo's Peterson learned the restaurant business, and Peterson amiably admits that Wes' wine cellar is the best in northern Michigan. I am in no position to argue. The next evening Westhoven produces an impudent 1987 Cabreo Chardonnay from, of all places, Italy's Piedmont region. The food is exceptional -- strongly accented country French, read off a chalkboard: bean-and-red-pepper chowder, down-home pate, a superior house salad with bacon, and trout stuffed with shrimp. I have heard that people from Ohio fly here in private planes, eat and fly back. A scheduled airline would not be excessive.

On my last morning in town I make the visit I have been putting off, to F.H.'s house, where a cousin still lives. The place seems smaller, and it is; the big barn is gone, and the small barn and the manure pile and the woodshed and the galvanized tank that caught rainwater and, for crying out loud, the privy. In their place are neatly kept new houses. A paved street crosses what was the hillside pasture, and the little creek I tried industriously to dam up every summer -- tried, I think, simply because it seemed impossible -- is gone altogether.