An Ode to Change—and Pat and Gary's Party Store

An iconic Northern Michigan party store's legacy lives on.

Another day, another essay not in any way related to the supposed theme of this newsletter…

Last winter, my hometown’s party store burned down. It was a community hub, the location of our Buck Pole, a place whose aisles I’ve wandered as a kid looking for Charleston Chews and a slice of pizza and as a 20-something looking for flies and honey whiskey and as a 30-something looking for a bottle of merlot and a dose of nostalgia.

You could get anything at Pat and Gary’s Party Store—new muck boots, a fifth of whiskey, a frozen dinner, a whole ass hunting rifle, bass minnows, fireworks, flies, or even a 9-foot leader in a faded dime bag that had been on the shelf since the 90s (no one flyfishes in Indian River, and the inclusion of a box of haggard flyfishing implements in the back corner felt akin to the two small shelves of gluten free chips and pasta at the grocery store in town). This comment from a forum I found about Pat and Gary’s burning down sums their selection up nicely: “I'd go for a milk run and look and ammo and lures for 15 mins.”

I have never found a store even remotely as diverse in inventory as Pat and Gary’s—part general store and part Bass Pro Shop, it was unfettered by the corporate sheen of the latter and its dark carpeted floors and hodgepodged interior was unlike any actual general store I’ve ever experienced. The fake wood paneling was distinctly 80s in its pallor, with an after-market patina of what I can only assume was the exhaled nicotine of thousands of cigarettes prior to the laws about not smoking indoors. The fluorescent overhead lights would instantly make your hangover worse. The stairs to get to the live bait section (a giant basin filled with minnows and an old fridge filled with nightcrawlers, if I remember correctly) in the glorified-crawlspace were ever-so-slightly crooked. The wall when you first walked in was peppered with photos of people holding trophy bass, brown trout and walleye, all laid out between posters for taxidermies and handymen and firewood. Each photo of a fish included a Sharpie-d note of length and weight, not unlike newborn announcements.

It’s exterior, meanwhile, looked like it had been assembled from a “Northern Michigan Party Store” kit, and while “party stores” are a common yet uniquely upper-Midwest phenomenon, Pat and Gary’s was an absolute classic of the genre. There was a pile of firewood right outside the front door. For half the year, a quarter of the parking lot was dedicated to mounds of deer bait on wood pallets. For a few months in the summer, a fireworks stand replaced the deer bait. The exterior walls were covered in those plastic banners selling light beer that say “Welcome Deer Hunters!” or “Welcome Fishermen!” next to clip art of an airborne bass. This is a place where those two demographics covered just about every male in the county.

Pat and Gary’s was a tenet of growing up in rural Northern Michigan. I sometimes regale my friends out West with stories of the Indian River Buck Pole, which was an annual event on the first night of deer season where everyone and their mom would gather at Pat and Gary’s to admire the biggest bucks from opening day of deer season. As a kid who grew up seeing deer hanging from the rafters of our garage after school every November, the scene at the buck pole wasn’t all that alarming, but knowing what I know of West Coast cities now, I can only imagine what they’d think of this enterprise. The deer are quite literally hung from scaffolding made out of 2x4s, and the scene gets more graphic from there but I’ll save you the details. Let’s just say you always take your buck pole shoes off in the garage when you get home. Winners of the buck pole—determined by largest rack and heaviest dressed deer— win new hunting rifles, provided by Pat and Gary themselves.

The Buck Pole was arguably the event of the year when I was a teenager. It had the distinct charm of a rural community gathering, but you weren’t expected to spend money and it was in November, which was the worst month because there was nothing else going on as a teenager in a small town. This was the highlight of the fall season, the not-to-be-missed soiree for bored Northern Michigan teenagers who lived 30 minutes away from most other traditional forms of teenage entertainment. Even summer events didn’t hit quite as hard as going to the Buck Pole on a school night—I’d always go with friends, and our parents would drop us off at my friend Brittany’s house because it was walking distance to our “downtown,” and we’d get dressed up as best as we could while also maintaining the right layerage to stay warm and dry, and then we’d go to Pat and Gary’s and drink free hot cocoa from the local VFW hall and flirt with the boys who had skipped school to hunt that day, dressed in camo and covered in deer blood.

Pat and Gary’s burned down last winter, and with it came a wierd sense that the charm I so distinctly loved about my hometown burned down with it. That is extremely dramatic but also somewhat apt—Pat and Gary’s in its original form represented a Northern Michigan that feels like it’s slipping away, what I perceived as a sort of modern bastion of life in the North Woods. Unapologetically redneck, yeah, but also the realest expression of Northern Michigan culture that I can think of. And the rebuilding of this critical cultural hub was, as expected, underway as soon as the ground thawed in the spring. Now the framing is done, the siding is up, the windows are in. This was not a process to be taken lightly, and they’ve gone at it with a resolve that I swear only Northern Michigan construction workers who also have a hankering for rifles, whiskey and cigars could have mustered.

I love so much about Northern Michigan, but am I really a child of Northern Michigan if I’m not deeply, begrudgingly resistant to change in all its forms? Pat and Gary’s burning down felt like a definitive time stamp, a clear manifestation of my belief that town was suddenly different. As I grow older and become more of a curmudgeon (I did not see this happening so quickly) I can now point to this one event as evidence that things changed—Indian River as it was when the original Pat and Gary’s existed, and Indian River after they had to rebuild Pat and Gary’s.

This, of course, isn’t entirely accurate. The old Northern Michigan still exists, you just have to look a bit harder for it, and see beyond the first layer of offensively-large summer homes immediately adjacent to the lakes. Once you skim off that first layer of huge, uninhabited “cottages” and $100,000 recreational boats, you get to the real meat of Indian River. I tend to think this meat is found in quiet stands of red and white pines, in the sections of blue-ribbon streams that require 25 minutes of fighting brush to get to; in the people who populate the mouth of the river looking for walleye at sunrise, in the pop-up ice fishing villages made of old plywood shanties with last names painted haphazardly on the side—the patrons of Pat and Gary’s, as it were. There’s also the less tactile impulse to just go out in the woods and do something that you know is going to humble you, whether fishing or hunting or training a puppy to point or introducing your baby to cedar swamps from a sling on your chest. I see this impulse—whether geographic or genetic or maybe poetic—in so many people who live here now, whether they’ve always been here or just moved here or just moved back here, and there’s nothing I love more than seeing people keeping the Northern Michigan I know alive.

This is all to say that this trip to Indian River has been characterized by an undercurrent of change. One of the two nice dinner joints in town has new owners after 20-some years, which predictably has everyone up in arms. The roads that were fixed when I lived here full time now need to be fixed again. My little sisters who I swear were babies last week are now all teenagers or in their early 20s. And yet, things remain. The Indian River “skyline” that you can see while driving on the bridge over the expressway is still made up exclusively of a hotel and Burger King sign, which now stand like north stars against a dark, winter solstice night. Beyond the signs and the infrequent passing lights on the freeway sits the Indian River I’ve long known, still mostly unchanged—miles and miles of pines for as far as the eye can see, shading the dirt roads and rivers and mucky panfish lakes that will always define my love of this place.