You're standing at the Open Space, the big grassy stretch on the bay, and this is the ground zero of Traverse City's entire personality. Because this town calls itself the Cherry Capital of the World, and unlike most things a town calls itself, this one is basically true.
The region around you grows something like a hundred million pounds of tart cherries a year. That's close to half of all the tart cherries in the United States. Look inland and you'll see why — the peninsulas out there are covered in orchards, because the lake you're standing next to acts like a giant temperature blanket, keeping the trees from blooming too early in spring and freezing too hard in winter. The cherries are here because the water is here. Everything up here comes back to the water.
It started, sweetly enough, as a prayer. Back around the nineteen-tens, the growers would gather in spring for something called the Blessing of the Blossoms — a straightforward request to whoever was listening for the trees
to not die. That turned into a festival in the mid-twenties, and the state liked it so much the legislature officially made it the National Cherry Festival, moved it to July, and it's been running almost every year since. They crowned a Cherry Queen. There is a hundred years of Cherry Queens.
But I need to tell you about the pie.
In the summer of nineteen eighty-seven, right here at the Open Sp
