Fudgie: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real Mackinac Island
The island you love is the six months that are for you. The other six are the island.
On Monday 26 October the Grand Hotel rings a bell at half past nine, the rockers come off the porch, and by Halloween night the fudge shops are dark, the hotels are locked, and most of six hundred horses are on a freight boat to farms around Pickford. The Mackinaw City ferries stop on the 31st. What is left is about five hundred people, a grocery store that has been open since 1884, the Mustang, a school, a few dozen draft horses hauling mail and trash, and a little twin-engine plane when the straits freeze.
I came up from Portage in May 2019 to cut fudge for a summer and I never got back on the boat. Eight summers on the freight dock, seven winters shovelling the roofs of hotels that are shut. I am not island born and nobody here lets me forget it. Most of what I know I got from Denny Wilkes, sixty six, born here, thirty years driving taxi and longer in the barns, who told me in my second winter that you are not an islander until the boat quits and you are still standing in Doud's. This is the book I wish someone had handed me at the dock in 2019.
What's in it
What closes when. The real 2026 dates, hotel by hotel and fudge shop by fudge shop, from Haan's 1830 Inn on 18 October through the Grand on the 26th and the last Mackinaw City boat on the 31st, and what that means if you are booking a late trip or trying to stay.
Where the horses go. Six hundred in July, the freight boat to Pickford from August on, the couple of dozen that stay, what they haul all winter, how they cross when there is ice, and what the barn people actually think of your bicycle bell.
Two docks, one owner. Shepler's or Arnold (the old Star Line), Mackinaw City or St. Ignace, why they are now the same company, what a ticket costs this year, the booking fee nobody mentions, and why the city council asked to see the books in March.
The bed that goes with the job. How seasonal housing works, why it ends the day the shop does, how people actually find a winter room, and the honest version of the housing squeeze on a four square mile island where most of the land is state park.
The fudge question. Murdick's, Ryba's, Joann's, Murray, the two chains, and what happened to May's. What is actually different, what the counter workers eat, and why the fudge festival moved to October.
Halloween weekend, properly. Trick or treat on Main Street, the Great Turtle half marathon on the inside trails with the carriages still running, which bars do the costume nights, and why this is the weekend the year-rounders come out.
The winter chapter. Doud's, the Mustang, Kingston Kitchen, snowmobiles instead of bikes, the ice bridge and the Christmas trees, the plane to St. Ignace, the emergency text alerts the city approved this September, and what people do on a Tuesday in February.
The island without the crowd. Arch Rock at seven in the morning, the inside trails in October, M-185 with no bikes on it, Fort Mackinac in its last week, and the places Denny goes that are not on any map at the visitor center.
Being a fudgie who stayed. The word, what it actually means (a tourist, not me), why I use it anyway, and what seven winters taught me about whether you can ever stop being one.
How it works
Ebook, roughly sixty pages, download link straight after payment, reads on a phone on the boat. Closing dates shift every fall and the ferry prices shift every spring, so when they do I update the book and send the new version to everyone who already bought it, no charge, for as long as I'm still here to type it.
Who this is for
People who worked a summer here once and still dream about the 7:30 boat. Families who come every year and want the island after the crowds. Anyone thinking about taking a seasonal job and wondering what happens in October. And anyone who has stood on the dock at the end of a trip and wondered what it is like to not leave.
Denny says the island doesn't close. It just stops pretending.
Download it now, free updates for life
Instant download. Any device. Written under the pen name Joel Wander.