Enjoyer

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Alpena — Looking at a photo of a low sun hovering over blue water, it’s not possible to tell the time. Was the sun rising or setting? The photo can’t tell the story. Frozen in time with the snap of the lens, sunrise and sunset are identical. Light grows in the morning just as it fades in the evening, played backward. And though they are mirror images, the difference between them is the difference between a swelling wave and a calming sea. Ascent and descent. Birth and death. We don’t watch the sunrise.

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | Bobby Mars

Oscoda — Just when I thought I’d been everywhere in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, a far-flung story idea sent me somewhere new. A day trip up the coast along Lake Huron to Oscoda, to gaze upon a semi-notable Paul Bunyan statue. The statue underwhelmed, but the region did not. The Lake Huron Coastline. The sunrise side, they call it—gorgeous, hidden away, and wildly underrated—since the sun rises over Lake Huron from the east.

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | Katie Clarey

On any spring day in 1954, some 45,000 people could be found shopping at a brand-new mall—among the first of its kind. The ladies lingered at Suzy Hats and Baker’s Shoes before picking up ingredients for supper at Kroger. Their husbands visited Dube’s Barber Shop or perused Dunns Camera & Hobby Supply. The kids? They hung at the on-site playground. All of this hustle and bustle was happening at Northland Center, then the world’s largest mall tucked between Greenfield Road and 8-Mile in Southfield.

2 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | James David Dickson

Maykol Duarte, 18, is one of the victims of illegal immigration that we don’t talk about. Had it been any of the other three boys in the car driving that day, tailgating the police chief, Duarte might be graduating from Detroit’s Western International High School right now and not sitting in an Upper Peninsula detention center awaiting deportation. But Duarte was in America illegally, and driving without a license. Duarte was always a traffic stop away from reality.

2 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Pellston — Flying isn’t really very pleasant these days. Well, it’s not exactly the flying that’s so bad; it’s the airport. The lines, the security, the parking, the pointless frenzy and chaos, the sense that you aren’t really a living and breathing human with a name and face, but rather a random number being shuffled through the body-scan machine. Our terrible flying situation isn’t inherent or predestined. You can start your journey in peace and luxury, instead of misery and insanity.