What’s More Michigan?
An art installation made possible by John Lindley
For MARVAC & MMHA
by Jason Keusch
What’s More Michigan? Collage on Board. 14’x4’. Okemos, MI. 2026. Jason Keusch
What’s more Michigan than...
grinding out your forty or fifty in four days to “get” an extra day at the lake, pulling your fifth-wheel overnight, north, just to turn around and brave I-75 on Sunday afternoon with all the other folks trying to get home.
You won’t get Michiganders by separating family, work and recreation.
You must combine them to understand: home, factory, up north and the roads in between.
You can drive eight hours across Texas, but why would you? The scenery gets worse as you go.
Michigan changes and meanders by the mile marker. The landscape rises and falls. The bridge sways over the Straits with an arrogant:
I dare you.
And we do,
dare.
We don’t get bored until the Ohio border.
Why go to Chicago? They are already here, probably complaining that there’s no stairway back up the Sleeping Bear Dunes.
Indiana just seems to make the drive to Fort Myers longer.
What’s more Michigan than...
pulling, pushing, dragging and slowly navigating a Ford truck with a camper in the bed pulling a trailer with a canoe, a pontoon and 14 bicycles north-
windows down, Bob Seger up.
duct-taping old tennis shoes on your feet to fish in the Looking Glass River.
a heated debate over the proper doneness of a flaming marshmallow thrusted skyward by a seven-year-old running around a campfire.
listening to Ernie Harwell call the game on AM radio while Aretha Franklin demands respect on the record player in the other room. Mom is listening to the game with a Stroh’s, you with a Rockin’ Rye and the sound of Dad mowing the lawn comes through the open kitchen window. The soundtrack of summer in Michigan.
What’s more Michigan than…
saying Anishinaabe place names every day without a second thought, then stumbling over the word “Anishinaabe.”
a ten-year-old boy collecting alkaline batteries because he liked baseball, only finding, after his battery collection grew to two shopping bags, that Al Kaline did not endorse Duracell™ or Eveready™.
There’s nothing more Michigan
than the groan elicited by a person declaring:
“I’ll go alone.”
young boys debating the merits of Ford versus Chevy in the lunchroom, arguments based on what their fathers choose to own.
using the words ‘eh’ and ‘ope’ and still remaining the toughest SOB in the room.
In 1914, Henry Ford raised factory wages so his employees could afford to drive the cars that they built.
What’s more Michigan than owning the product of your trade?
There’s nothing more Michigan than building homes in a factory to reduce the cost for working people.
We live in houses our neighbors built, we drive cars our fathers made, we take home as seriously as the cottage.
And
What is more American than these things?
Other states can surely boast, and they are truly American.
But they are not Michigan.
ope…
