You're standing on Bridge Street, at the drawbridge over the channel — the narrow strip of water connecting the big lake, Lake Michigan, to the round harbor full of sailboats behind you. If the roadway is tilting up into the sky right now and traffic has stopped, congratulations, you've met Charlevoix. This bridge opens on the hour and the half hour all summer, and the whole town just plans around it.
The schedule was set when this bridge went up at the end of the nineteen forties, and it has never once bent for anybody. Storm, holiday, emergency — the bridge goes up on the hour, and you wait. A sitting governor once brought his yacht through here and had to sit in the channel for twenty minutes with everyone else, watching the second hand, because in Charlevoix the bridge does not care who you are.
Here's the thing worth knowing before we go meet the houses. This channel is the whole reason the town exists in the shape it does. Back in the eighteen seventies, before there was any of
this, men dug this channel out by hand — shovels and sweat — to link Lake Michigan to the inner harbor. And once you could sail straight in off the big lake, Charlevoix turned into a summer resort almost overnight. Wealthy families from Chicago and Detroit started coming up every summer to escape the heat and the smell of their own cities. The railroad ran a train called the Resort Special straig
