Mile 14036: Is that Mustang ready to go? Muskegon County Airport.

My first real girlfriend had a sixties style Mustang, so I am really glad Ford has regarded those classic lines in the current sheet metal. We once drove all the way from Owosso to a week long campout with her family near Boyne City, MI. We attended a wedding for a lawyer who met his bride during one of our cross country sky outings at a golf course just south of Owosso. At the wedding, we were seventeen, and nobody was watching the trough, filled with beer and ice. Did I mention the wedding took place in a barn? I saw the groom one more time after that, leaving his office in a downtown brownstone across from the Shiawassee County courthouse. He had his cribbage board in his right hand, and he was walking to a second law office, another brownstone. The two law firms met during lunch for cribbage. Sadly, I learned of his death from heart attack all to soon after his wedding, a city leader and a fine man taken all too young.
I'll always love Mustangs, even the boxy looking ones from 1981, the ones without the muscular bends and lines that make a Mustang a Mustang. I remember one sundown in late July, when this first girlfriend drove me home to Bancroft along the Grand River road. In this case, the Shiawassee River running alongside the road is the Grand River. We spotted a little dirt road canopied with maples, sugaring maples from the regular spaced columns of the scared trunks, and we parked along it, across from an abandoned two story brick manse. It had the shape of a house from 1870 or 1880, in an area of land once settled by farmers from Ohio. The house would not have looked out of place in Savannah Georgia. The land had served as Michigan's smallest Chippewa reservation, ended in part by Whigs in power in Shiawassee County. Schoolcraft himself attended to the treaty that forced these Chippewas to move along on their own trail of tears. Legend has it that Okemos and Owosso started life on this land by the Shiawassee, and I am remembering even Pontiac visited, recruiting braves for the attack upon Detroit. I still remember our brief interlude, her demanding, "Let me see", and promising to always love me. I heard about her wedding to another man not too long after I departed my boyhood world to go study at Michigan State.