By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Way Back
Machine dreams — nightmares about cameraman malfunctions — proved more than daydreams as I handed Carter my race video card. I could blame squalls, forecast to clear as we drove home from Lawless Park, for my victimhood.
This was my first shot with gear he’d presented me last night at the Three Rivers Super 8. Now it and I were baptized, hell was sure to ensue.
Next, Carter would drive three hours home to Ann Arbor, en route dropping off his and my captures at Art and Jennie McCafferty’s Great Lakes Sports Publications home and HQ in Ypsilanti.
I faced 20 minutes east on M-60 from the park to Three Rivers, 50 miles north on U.S. 131, then west on the South Beltline to what passes as my place.
We could dry off and warm up in heated vehicles listening to the Indiana-at-Michigan football game. The stakes?
Carter went to seven years of classes at the University of Michigan, first studying chemistry while immersing himself in campus culture. Beakers and flasks vanished after he set himself on fire playing magician at a frat party — a show worthy of his Ann Arbor contemporary, Iggy Pop, then with a band called the Psychedelic Stooges.
Hair and eyebrows sizzled, Carter switched to photography and year-round residence near U-M’s “Big House” football stadium. His apartment is crammed with camera gear gathered since.
I started college at Indiana, graduated from Purdue, took a month of U-M grad classes, then decided enough academics. Three schools, but at least I came back with one degree.
It was the football boys’ turn now to play outside in the rain. Carter had our combined shoots of Ron Gunn’s Sandhill Crane All Trail Run on digital cards for Art to discard and/or make into YouTube videos.
So I assumed westbound on M-60.
Slight Return
Past Jones — no time to stop at the Shell station or Satori Salon & Spa, even though now open — sunlight patches appeared through clouds. My car’s weather screen showed green rain masses breaking up near noon kickoff, passing west to east.
Jones was briefly famous for a five-day police siege at Rainbow Farms Campground, whose owners’ Hemp Aid and Roach Roast festivals had become too flagrant for FBI eyes by Aug. 31, 2001.
During the standoff, life partners Grover “Tom” Crosslin, 47, the campground owner, and Rolland “Rollie” Rohm, 28, set fire to 10 structures on their 34-acre homestead and pot haven. Paranoid about surveillance, the pair had procured assault weapons, which set police who indeed were surveying them more anxious.
Crosslin opened fire on a WNDU-TV helicopter flying up over the Indiana border from Notre Dame University’s South Bend campus, prompting more federal charges.
The owner was shot dead the fourth day after aiming his gun at an FBI agent trespassing on his property. Rohm was killed next day after setting fire to the house they’d holed up in and raising his gun to fire at an approaching armored vehicle. All this, of course, per police reports.
Rainbow Farm’s flirt with fame was eclipsed a week later by 911 terrorist attacks.
Fast forward two decades and pot shops have cropped up throughout the state. Northbound through Three Rivers, I noticed Goat Cannabis Co. across the freeway from where I’d woken up at the Super 8 seven hours earlier. Confluence Cannabis called to consumers too.
Might there be more in Schoolcraft? Integra Auto Capital, 131 Auto Care, Speedway gas/convenience mart on the outskirts … no. In town were a funeral home, Bud’s Bar, Mar-Jo’s Diner, churches, a dentist’s office, Subway, McDonald’s, Little Caesars’s and Wendy’s restaurants, a cemetery, car lot; now Schoolcraft was behind, no pot still.
The game had kicked off: IU was giving the #2-ranked host Wolverines a surprising go in their 109,000-seat Big House. Heisman Trophy-hyped U-M quarterback J.J. McCarthy was struggling more than his Hoosier counterparts handling slippery balls.
I’d mulled moving to Kalamazoo 30 years earlier when a Western Michigan University alum told me living there was like being in a collapsed mummy. PUFF, Curaleaf, High Profile, Cloud, Nirvana, Green Eden, High Profile, Herbana … no lack of options for schooling in pot crafts there.
Nearing Wayland, where I’d been a photojournalist for a weekly newspaper 13 years, the Gun Lake casino loomed. Local efforts to thwart Native Americans from building it in Bradley had been a big story then; I’d covered a meeting at which the new-federally-recognized Gun Lake Tribe appised white settlers now ensconced there of its plans.
“Not in our backyards,” shouted one who opposed it, saying gambling would be gateway to more crime and depredation. “Go back to where you came from,” another said.
In the 1990s I’d covered corn soup suppers at the Bradley Indian Mission south of now-casino. Among crooked crosses in the nearby graveyard was a marker for the actor who had played Tonto in “The Lone Ranger” radio shows from 1933 to 1954, then the spot’s claim to fame.
I filled up with gas across the street from the tribe’s gaming complex. Digital readout signs promised bounties in grids of light that winked off and on as vehicles streamed by.