Ludington was founded in 1845 as a center for trappers and fishermen. It boomed in the 1880s on the lake trade and remains a home of one of the only regular cross-lake ferry. Like so many waterfront towns, it was devastated by the rise of the railroads and devastated again by the waning of the lumber industry. What remains is the architecture of what had been a bigger town, elegant storefronts filled with dead-end concerns — dollar store, consignment shop, tattoo parlor — and rundown mansions where, once upon a time, the debutantes drank gin on back porches watching the ships.

We rolled into town in the early evening. In June and July, the Michigan days are nearly arctic in length. At 10 p.m., it was still light enough to read a newspaper outside. We ate at the Old Hamlin House. It was like a meal in a mother’s dream of the past, turkey dinners with a thousand sides, every food group represented, the regulars talking high school football. My son was wearing a Bears jersey, Brian Urlacher’s number 54, and two octogenarians approached, giggling: “Don’t ya think the fellah’s a little small to play linebacker?” In these sunstruck ports, it’s still the old America, the place of my childhood, peopled by old folks, as friendly as can be as their generation fades away.

We checked into Snyder’s Shoreline Inn, a two-story motel across the road from the lake. Everything I left in the 1970s was there waiting for me: the tiny bars of soap, the clunky room keys, the sand in the bed and the smell of candles and mildew.

Before bed, we went to the beach. It’s broad here, with dramatic dunes. There is a harbor and a jetty with a beautiful lighthouse at the end, as there are lighthouses up and down the coast. You can walk the jetty and look back at the yellow lights of Ludington as night comes on. A ship sails away from the harbor, the water red in the evening sun. For me, it was unaccountably strange — watching the sun go down on Lake Michigan. This was my personal Atlantic, and it had always been a place of sunrises and dawns — never sunsets. It was as if I had finally reached Saint-Exupéry’s France, land of the setting sun, birthplace of the world.

We stopped at Traverse City the next afternoon, cherry capital of the world. The road was lined with orchards, the branches so heavy with ripe fruit they bent to the ground. The pavement skirted Grand Traverse Bay, coves and islands appearing and disappearing between houses and trees.

This has to be among the most beautiful drives in the country, each turn affording a new view of the lake, which stands for all those lakes prized by Midwesterners but unknown to so many others who rush off to foreign oceans that pale in comparison to our strange inland seas.

An hour or so up the road, we rolled into the outskirts of Petoskey, Hemingway Country. The writer loved resorts. If he wrote about a place, you know it was one of the “in” places of the moment. In the 1920s, it was Paris. In the 1930s, it was Key West. In his early years, it was this lakefront vacation town. His family had a house nearby, on Walloon Lake. Hemlock forests and streams, lumber mills, swamps — boyhood adventure condensed to a perfume.