Her husband's sudden death left her to run struggling U.P. motel — and she can't walk away

Rural Michigan is ailing. For years, people have been leaving small towns and moving to urban areas, seeking opportunity in cities with more people, more jobs, more excitement. And the places they leave behind get smaller every year.

Some rural areas are still lucky enough to have an industry that provides local jobs — logging, mining, a factory or two. But many don’t, and residents often have to rely on low-wage jobs at fast-food restaurants or chain superstores, which are blamed for driving small local stores out of business, furthering the despair. 

As small towns shrink, loneliness, isolation and poverty grow. It means an aging population, a lack of jobs, a shortage of doctors and fewer educational opportunities, all of which have led to higher rates of depression, addiction, homelessness and suicide than in urban areas.

Yet for many people, rural life still embodies their dream of a welcoming place where life is slower, friendlier, more old-fashioned; where everybody knows their neighbors and where doors can still be left unlocked at night. A place to which they can always return.

Last year, a Gallup poll found that while 80% of Americans now live in urban areas, only 12% of them said they want to live in a big city. Two-thirds said they’d prefer to live in a small town or rural area. But few actually move back there. And for those who never left, life is getting harder.

This is the first story in a five-part series about life in rural northern Michigan.

MASS CITY — The widow sat in the dining room by herself, drinking instant coffee, eating boxed doughnuts and playing a game on her tablet. It was quiet inside. It was quiet outside. Another lonely morning in the Adventure Motel.

For 35 years, Nancey Withrow was never alone on mornings like this. The dining room was always loud with conversations as her husband, Donald, went from table to table, talking with all the guests at their motel while Nancey cooked bacon and eggs for everyone — hardly anything came from a box back then. Some people liked the dated rooms, some not so much. But everyone raved about the home-cooked breakfasts.

She was making breakfast as usual one day in January when her husband said he wasn’t feeling well. Donald went upstairs to their apartment and fell dead in their bedroom, at 84. And when he died, so did the breakfasts. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore.

But without breakfasts, there were no more visitors in the dining room. With few neighbors and with family far away, guests had been her social life. Now, most mornings are spent alone.

“Yeah, it’s quiet, lonesome,” said the slight, gray-haired 83-year-old. “Just, I have my little dog; that helps. I do miss all the people.” A few feet away from her, on a counter top in the center of the defunct kitchen, sat Donald’s ashes, right where she first set the container down the day she brought it home eight months before.

It was late summer. The few guests who’d stayed the night before had left, including an itinerant logger who’s a semi-regular, some road workers filling potholes on the highway and a downstate couple who’d emerged from the woods after a week of camping. Business here is random like that. There are brief peak times when the motel is suddenly full, like hunting or snowmobiling season. Then there are stretches like last April, when not a single visitor came all month.

The Upper Peninsula relies heavily on tourism, and places like these live and die by it. But as freeways were built, as chain hotels moved to the region and offered increasing amenities and comforting sameness in bigger cities, travelers came to expect more. And the era of plain, simple, roadside motels out in the country has been slowly dying. Especially for those old motels where there’s nowhere to get a meal for miles around.

“If people can’t find a place to eat, they won’t stay,” Nancey said.

It was hard enough for two elderly people to run a motel on their own. And by herself, it’s even tougher. She’s been trying to sell it and move downstate near her kids and grandkids. A few people have called about it, but none ever showed up with a check. She keeps reducing the asking price -- now down to about $220,000 -- but there’s been little interest in running a small motel in the middle of nowhere. And she can’t bring herself to just walk away.

So she waits.

“I’m just going to have to stick it out, because I don’t want to shut it down, because then you’d probably never sell it. So I have to stick it out until somebody will buy it.”

She already sold the RV she and Donald had planned to use to travel the country together, along with the nearby acre of land where they lived in a trailer when they first got married 55 years ago, and even the trailer itself. All that’s left is the motel. And until she unloads it, she spends her days going through the motions of a suddenly solitary routine.

“Well, I get up and I walk the dog and I have my coffee, and then of course there’s laundry every day, and if there’s rooms to be done I do the rooms, and I've been trying to pack up a few things to move,” she said. “But other than that, I haven’t been doing a heck of a lot.”

She was here only because of her husband, anyway. Donald, it seemed, was constantly chasing the next thing, and Nancey would always follow him. “He was always looking for something different,” she said. Both grew up not far from this motel. After graduating high school, Donald moved to Detroit. Nancey had moved there too. And since Yoopers usually managed to find each other in the unfamiliar big city, the two got together and soon married. Donald was drafted into the Army not long after, but was sent home when they found out he was deaf in one ear.

“He was always sorry he didn’t get to go in,” she said. “Probably would’ve done him some good, just slow him down a bit. Young and crazy.” That frustration expressed itself throughout his life in all the patriotic decorations he plastered on the lobby walls.

They moved back to the Upper Peninsula, to a mobile home on that acre of land which his grandfather had given them. Then he moved again to the Detroit area looking for work; a couple years later she followed. Then he moved back to the U.P. again after seeing this already-old roadside motel for sale and buying it on a whim. A few years later, she followed once again.

For 35 years, they essentially ran the motel by themselves. She’d cook breakfast and clean the rooms, he’d do the repairs and plow the snow from the lot. He built them an apartment on top of the lobby almost by himself. If they ever went anywhere, she’d just leave keys in each room’s doors with a little handwritten hello note. “Everybody’s honest,” she said. “They all come in and pay.”

The motel’s dining room, which is also its office, is decorated in U.P. roadside motel kitsch — mounted fish, mounted deer, deer figurines, a plaque depicting the history of the American flag, and in the corner a china cabinet containing origami birds, ceramic angels and statuettes made of bread dough, given to her by a guest. The room is still a mix of patriotic and cloying, rugged and fragile, a blend of Donald’s personality and hers.

As they grew older, the work became more difficult, especially for Nancey, who wasn’t as enamored with life in the rural U.P. as he was. “This is where he wanted to be,” she said. “He liked it up here, said he didn’t care if he crossed the bridge any more or not.”

Donald finally relented a couple years ago and put a “For Sale” sign out front. “I think he more or less did that to appease me,” she said. “He didn’t care if he moved or not. He didn’t want to leave here. But, at the end, he was getting to the point where he was getting ready.”

And then he died, never to enjoy retirement. His widow wants to avoid the same fate.

“It seems like somebody would want it,” she said of the motel. “They could make an excellent business here if they work it.  If you hire a bunch of people, you’re not going to make money. But if you stay here and work it, you could do a very good business. Just need that one person that enjoys people, meeting people. There’s so many good people that come in.”

But it’s a hard sell.

Noon on a weekday in downtown Mass City: There’s an old hardware store, now closed. The local bank, now closed. A food co-op whose faded, painted sign marks it as long closed. The little Post Office is now down to four hours a day — two hours on Saturdays. Not a soul on the streets. And only a car now and then to interrupt the cricket-chirping, birdsong country silence.

“There’s not much, and it seems to be getting less and less,” Nancey said. “There’s just not the employment around to keep the people in the area.”

The town still has some signs of life, though. A little grocery store still operates near the intersection that once marked downtown Mass City. Small, older homes fill the countryside around it. And there’s the town’s only bar — owned by the same family for a century — put up for sale by its longtime, elderly owner. And then he died, never to enjoy retirement.

Like a lot of small U.P. towns, its best days were a century ago. Founded in 1848 by a runaway slave from Missouri who discovered copper while hiding in the woods here, by 1905 it became a boomtown with nearly 1,000 residents, mostly Finns who immigrated to work in the mines. During a miners strike in 1913, when the town’s stores sided with the mining companies and refused to sell food to the workers, the miners set up competing food co-ops — a socialist one called Mass Co-Op, the other non-political called Settler's Co-op. They were known as the Red and the White. And customers took sides.

When the Mass Mining Company closed in 1919, most of the miners gradually migrated elsewhere, causing a slow-motion exodus of residents. Those who stayed relied on farming and logging. The population stands at several hundred now.

Life got even tougher in the region after the White Pine copper mine a half-hour away shut down in 1995, letting about 1,000 workers go. Then, about 200 more jobs were lost after the paper mill in Ontonagon — the nearest big town — closed 10 years ago; about the same time Ontonagon’s nursing home closed, leaving 62 people unemployed.

Outside the bigger cities, much of the Upper Peninsula has had similar struggles. Since 2010, the U.P.’s population has declined by almost 10%, and 14 of the U.P.’s 15 counties have lost residents as people move elsewhere to find work, young people leave to find excitement, and elderly residents pass away.

The Upper Peninsula grew rich from iron and copper mining in the 1800s. But as the mining industry went bust, thanks to depletion or economic downturns, the jobs and the money vanished. Outside of cities like Marquette and Houghton, where hospitals and universities provide employment, the only option most people have is to learn a trade or take a retail job for close to minimum wage.

“There isn’t the work around here,” Nancey said. “When somebody graduates, the younger kids, they have to leave to go to work. There isn’t too much opportunity here unless you can get on the county or a government job or something. People have to leave.”

The morning routine still calls for cleaning the rooms after guests check out, and with afternoon approaching, she left behind her figurine-decorated, deer-antlered diner and headed to the vacated rooms.

The work isn’t too hard, because most guests are respectful, and they know she’s doing it all alone, so they usually clean up after themselves. The road workers who stayed last night in the room with the kitchenette, for example, washed their dishes and stacked them neatly before leaving. Not long ago, a group of snowmobilers somehow broke a headboard and left $40 on the nightstand in the room to cover damage.

She sprayed disinfectant on the mirrors, in the shower and onto the dresser, and wiped each with a rag slowly, gingerly. She changed the sheets on the beds. She vacuumed the floors. In less than an hour, she was done.

Now what? The whole day lay before her, and it was hers alone.

She could pack more things, she said, in readiness for the day when she could finally leave. Another brutal Upper Peninsula winter approached, and she hoped to be gone before it buried her in snowy isolation.

Or she could go deposit the check for the RV she just sold, but that meant a long drive to the bank in Ontonagon, since the sole local bank closed its doors in January.

Then again, she said, she might just wait here. Wait for some guests to hopefully arrive. Wait in case someone sees the motel as they drive by and asks about buying it. She might just wait, she said.

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep

Ryan Garza is an Emmy award-winning photojournalist. Contact him: rgarza@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @ryangarzafreep, or on Instagram at @ryangarza.

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