The Thunderbird

A Lake Leelanau Institution

First, an admission to make: for seventeen years I have driven past The Thunderbird gift shop regularly, never once actually going in. This fact in itself is not that unusual. There are many local shops I have never actually set foot in. Why would I? Most of them are too pricey, too touristy, or just plain out of my interest zone. Apart from food, clothing, books, and hardware, there is not much reason for me to shop locally, or to shop at all, for that matter. But this is different. The Thunderbird has squatted there low on the horizon like that, a challenge to my curiosity for ages. Part of me always wanted to go in. Yesterday I finally did.

I was not totally unprepared. A friend once told me about going in years ago and having the old man follow her to the back part of the store to put the light on for her while she was back there. Another friend spoke of the aged religious tractarian literature which lined the walls, slowly crumbling like Miss Havisham's cake. Others spoke of The Thunderbird in terms of its possibilities to amuse, seeing the souvenir artifacts in kitsch terms, and justifying the experience on that level, as a sort of campy time capsule trip. These are the same people, by the way, who watch James Bond movies primarily in order to laugh out loud. My experience turned out to be more Conradian in nature, as in "Mistah Kurtz, he dead."

The first thing I noticed was that there was a smell. A combination of leaky roof, bad ventilation and somebody else's used books made me feel like I needed fresh air, even as the door was still shutting behind me. A cafeteria style drop panel ceiling asserted itself as soon as I left the vestibule and entered the store proper. In addition to the oppressive ceiling was the fact that there were no windows, anywhere, and no clear lines of flow through the store. Actually there were windows up front, but they were rendered useless by the straw hats and hanging items which blocked the light. It was like a maze. I moved gently in and saw the extensive glass casing around the cash register area, and looked further to see two older people sitting on stools, peering back to see who had entered. We spoke briefly about the rain outside and I made a left.

To the left was the used paperback book section. Also available were used jigsaw puzzles. Wow. Used jigsaw puzzles! Talk about bad karma! Dude! The paperbacks were standard Mills & Boon beach fare, Dick Francis, Clive Cussler, and much more obscure as well. Signs here (and throughout the store) emphasized that EVERYTHING was 50% off ticketed price. So, it was true. The books were marked "25¢ each". I assumed that I would need to buy two for a quarter. I felt like I would need to buy something, and poked around until I found a couple old paperbacks, one Ballantine edition from 1968 of Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone, another an old 1972 Penguin bio of Gurdjieff. I think those were the only two for me. The books are sitting next to me as I write this, their musty smell conjuring up memories of screened-in summer porches and old National Geographic magazines . I will be passing them on to someone else shortly.

I made for the right side of the store and found brass ware, crockery, and knickknacks. There were ceramic chickens and wind chimes made of shells, souvenir plates and cups, carved seagulls and African elephants. I kept moving and discovered that a door opened up into another room entirely, huge, this one apparently for wicker, wrapping paper, and cards. Still no windows. I tried to take it all in, but more or less failed to fathom what I was looking at. This stuff looked old. I wondered if they were still restocking the shelves?

It occurred to me that the music was a feature which made this place seem odd. As I entered the wicker room it struck me. I think there was different music on in there. I paid particular attention to it, but couldn't classify it, and still can't recall it accurately. God knows I have tried. It was like an imitation of polka, or something worse. It was like the kind of music that cryogenically frozen people get stuck in their heads in Philip K. Dick novels. It was not elevator music at all, not something you would recognize. The closest I can come is to conjure up some of those old 60's movies where they were too cheap to use real music for party scenes, so instead they invented an irritating generic pop music for dancers to thrash around to. Think of a Peter Sellers movie, or a Beach Blanket Bingo type thing. But this music was insistent in another kind of way - not brassy. It was insistently cheerful. It definitely wasn't a cover version of anything else, so what the hell was it?

I came out of the wicker room and continued counterclockwise, past the religious books, to the cheap and nasty cedar souvenirs at the back of the store. Here they were, the real deal, the original down market trash so beloved of my youth. Could the whoopee cushions be far away? Now I was getting somewhere. Always the same outhouse with the same crescent moon and the same humor - semi smutty, with the underlying notion that the bathroom experience is, in and of itself, both demeaning and humorous. What might be going on in there? Are you in there? What's taking so long in there? Catalogues serve dual purposes, and corncobs always come in handy. I bought this gag sign for a friend. Imagine actually using it. Is "washing feet" a metaphor for something else?

Now we come to the real guts of the store, the tractarian literature which sits, oddly enough, on a spinning rack very close to the cedar bathroom humor. This stuff is vintage. The copyrights go back at least as far as 1972 ("A Demon's Nightmare"). I remember actually handling some of these little cartoon warnings as a youngster and wondering who actually put them out. It turns out that the artist, a certain Jack Chick, of Chick Publications, has been churning them out for over 40 years. Each little cartoon booklet is a handheld warning against sinful activity. The price was three for a dollar, or in this case six for a dollar (50% off EVERYTHING). I purchased six. One was called "Are Roman Catholics Christians?" and it turns out that for all kinds of reasons, they are not. Pretty important stuff to know. Another is called "The Curse of Baphomet", which explains the satanic origins os Freemasonry. Again, who knew? I looked in vain for tracts against the UN, the DNR, the Tri-Lateral Commission, and the other "powers that be", but in vain. Probably they are still in the works.

There was, however, a plentiful supply of warnings against less organized sin, such as cursing, drinking, and sleeping around. I checked out Jack Chick's web site and found that the text of some of these stories has been updated to reflect the more fearful world we now live in. The artwork is the same, however, so there is a real disconnect at work. In the original (1980) "That Crazy Guy" Suzi goes out with a hipster and gets a dose of the clap. In the updated version (1992) Suzi learns that she is HIV positive, to which the doctor pronounces, "You're dying and there's no cure." "So now that I've got AIDS all I've got to look forward to is death, right?," Suzi asks her doctor. "Wrong Susan," he replies. " You'll soon face something far worse than AIDS." Wow. Some bedside manner. Anyway, I bought six of these, and I'm still studying them.

By this time information overload was setting in and I had to more or less bypass the Petoskey Stones and the Indian beadwork, made by "Leelanau County Indians", as the felt tip marker sign pointed out. I put my purchases on the counter and paid: all in it was under five dollars. As I stepped back out into the light of day the sun had come out. Several festive college age students were just getting out of their car and passing me on their way in to The Thunderbird. Well, I suppose there's something for everyone in there.