A day in the life of a Mackinac Island dockporter

My 2020 was supposed to be full of crazy travel stories and wild adventures, but when COVID-19 swept across the country in spring I found myself sitting at home with absolutely nothing to do. It slowly became clearer and clearer that foreign travel wouldn’t be practical for the foreseeable future, so I needed to pivot and find employment much sooner than I originally envisioned.

I didn’t want to go straight back to the 9-to-5 lifestyle I just left, so rather than settle for a “normal” job, I searched for something fun and unique that would get me away from home. That’s exactly what I found on Mackinac Island, Michigan.

Since transportation on Mackinac Island is limited to only walking, biking, and horse carriage, many of the hotels employ dockporters to transport guest luggage from the two ferry docks (Shepler’s and Starline) to the hotel, and vice versa. July 4th was my first day working as a dockporter for Mission Point Resort, and it was the start of an incredibly interesting 3.5 months on the island. This is what a typical work day looked like for me:

6:45 am – My alarm awakens me from a deep slumber after another mediocre night of sleep. My living quarters, dubbed the “quorum”, are located in the basement of our conference center.

The quorum very closely resembles a jail – all concrete, no color, and bright fluorescent lights – so I rarely get a refreshing eight hours of sleep. Here is a quick glance at my room:

Our concrete cubicles are even lettered like a jail cell! I’m prisoner 102E, sentenced to 40 years without parole for being too handsome.

My room holds up to five prisoners in total. A majority of the time it’s just myself and two Jamaicans that work in our hotel’s kitchen, although room 102 was home to a number of other convicts before they quit or got fired.

It’s rare for one of my roommates to be respectful and quiet at night (more on this later), but even when he is, I still don’t sleep peacefully due to various other inconveniences, i.e., fire alarms going off.

7:00 am – I finally hop out of bed and walk shirtless (because my recent conviction for being too handsome has given me all the confidence in the world) to the showers on the opposite side of the quorum, passing a couple dudes with pee pails on the way. Yep, pee pails.

Some of the guys don’t want to walk all the way to the bathrooms in the middle of the night, so they pee in a bucket and dump it out in the morning. I went to college at UWGB, where the dorm rooms all had their own individual bathrooms, so I’m not sure if this is a common dorm tradition? Either way, I find it horribly disgusting but I try not to judge – the aforementioned combination of concrete walls and fluorescent lights eviscerates even the strongest of corneas at 3 am.

I eventually make it to the showers and I see another tiny frog sitting in one of the stalls. It’s the third time I’ve found tiny frogs hanging out in our showers, which is quite bizarre, but ehhh, whatever man. It just adds to the quorum’s charm. Some people might hate a living situation like this, but I see the humor in it all, so I find it genuinely entertaining.

7:25 am – I walk to our employee cafeteria to eat a breakfast consisting of french toast, potatoes, and bacon. It’s the same exact breakfast every single day, but it’s pretty good, so I’m not going to complain. Once in a while they mix in biscuits and gravy, and let me tell you, that puts me over the moon.

7:35 am – I jump on one of the hotel’s porter bikes for the first of many times during the day. It takes me about three or four minutes to ride the single speed bike a half mile to the Starline dock, and the ladies swoon, because for some reason my bike has a panda beanie baby attached to the basket.

My hotel is the second largest on the island, so we have a horse shuttle that goes back and forth between the hotel and the docks. All I do is meet the shuttle, take outgoing bags to the proper boat, bike to the other dock, do the same thing, and then load all the incoming bags. It can be a physically demanding job, especially during busy times, but it’s generally pretty fun.

A number of the smaller hotels on the island don’t have the luxury of a shuttle, so their dockporters load the bags onto their bikes and ride them to the hotels. The guys like the one below are the real pros. I’m kind of a fraud compared to them, and as you can see, the ladies take notice. My panda didn’t keep their attention for long, or maybe I’m just not that handsome after all?

8:00 am – It’s officially my favorite time of the day. Our shuttle is on its way back to the hotel, so I saunter over to the public restroom, pick my favorite stall (always the far left one), and do my daily duty. My body is on a finely tuned schedule since my hotel provides breakfast, lunch, and supper at designated times. On top of that, my usual supply of food temptations (Kwik Trip, Culver’s, and Dairy Queen) are noticeably absent on the island. Needless to say, my bowels are at peak performance this summer, which isn’t something I can say often.

(I’m definitely not handsome after that last paragraph.)

8:15 am – Now I’m done doing my….you know. Our shuttle runs every hour, so I get to chill and watch the sunrise for about 30 minutes. I never take the scenery for granted.

8:50 am – Now I’m back by the Shepler’s dock waiting for the next boats to get in. This is where I spend a majority of my time. They always have the best 70’s and 80’s hits playing on the radio, so I finally hear “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac for the first time. It puts me in a fantastic mood.

9:47 am – Everywhere comes on for the second time, and it hits just as good as the first.

10:01 am – Everywhere is stuck in my head. There’s no escaping it, but that’s perfectly fine with me. It’s one of the greatest songs of all time.

10:35 am – I spent the last half hour listening to other great hits (“You’re So Vain”, “Baby I Love Your Way”, “Solsbury Hill”, “Higher Love”, etc.) but Everywhere finally comes on again. I don’t care that the song is 33 years old – it’s still the song of the summer.

11:04 am – I bike to the Starline dock, dodging piles of horse poop along the way. The scent from the fudge shops hits my frontal cortex (brain) at the same time my eyes lay sight on a big ole heap of poo poo, so for a second I’m tricked into thinking the dung smells good. It turns out the horse poop actually smells like horse poop.

12:15 pm – I eat my lunch while listening to Everywhere. Much like breakfast, lunch doesn’t vary much from day to day. It typically consists of rice, chicken, fish, and veggies. The food is really good, but it gets old after a while.

1:12 pm – I’ve lost some weight this summer, which is attributable to a consistent and healthy diet and a job that keeps me moving. I’m proud to have gone down a couple waist sizes, but maybe I got a bit too ahead of myself?

(My employee of the month chase is a story for the ages, but I’ll save it for another day.)

2:04 pm – This is the start of peak tourist time downtown, so the streets are overflowing with people, turning my bike ride back to Shepler’s into a game of Frogger. I veer left to avoid one group of tourists that aren’t paying attention, then I weave back right to avoid a fully grown adult that inexplicably doesn’t look before crossing the road.

Eventually I narrowly miss a high speed, head-on collision with a 12 year-old riding his bike down the road like it’s his own personal driveway. My only salvation is listening to his dad yell at him for almost killing me.

You can always rely on parents screaming at their children on Mackinac Island. Are you in a bad mood because you didn’t sleep well last night? No worries – Timmy is only a minute away from getting hollered at because he doesn’t stop whining about how hot it is.

Did you get in a fight with your girlfriend this morning? That’s fine. You’ll cheer up when Karen busts a gasket because her little Elizabeth picks her ice cream cone off the ground and starts eating it again.

3:00 pm – My shift is over, so it’s time to bike back to the hotel. Final stats for the day:

• Everywhere was played seven times, which is approximately 10 times less than it should have been
• I listened to 19 children get shouted at by their parents
• One pair of pants was split
• I almost hit 23 clueless tourists with my bike
• I heard 26 idiot Michiganders say “pop” instead of “soda”

Typically nothing too exciting happens after work, so let’s just skip ahead to 11:30 pm, which is the most important time of the day.

I’ve probably been sleeping for about an hour by this point, but my conscientious and respectful roommate just gone done with his shift, so he enters the room and turns his radio up nice and loud. His radio was already on because he doesn’t ever turn it off, and he tattles on you if you walk into his cell and turn it off yourself.

He’s in a long-distance relationship, so it’s finally time for him and his girlfriend’s daily chat over the phone. Luckily for me, he does this in the middle of our room at 11:30 pm when I’m trying to sleep. Even better, the cell phone service in the quorum is non-existent, so he uses FaceTime, which means I can hear the entire conversation.

This is where a sense of humor comes in handy. I could be livid about this guy being one of the most obnoxious human beings on the entire planet, but instead I look at the positives. This is essentially free reality TV for me, especially earlier during the summer when they often fought.

The below was my favorite phone call between the two. It’s paraphrased and edited for brevity:

“I’m sick of you always falling asleep when we talk on the phone. It makes me think you don’t want to talk to me” – Girlfriend

(I can confirm he always fell asleep)

“I work a lot of hours, so I’m always tired.” – Roommate

“Well, tell me that then. I want you to express how you feel.” – GF

“I feel like your expectations are way too high. We could talk on the phone for six hours every day, but that still wouldn’t be enough for you.” – Roommate

“I’m not frustrated that we don’t talk enough. I’m frustrated that our communication is terrible.” – GF

Roommate responds with something that I can’t understand. He’s either speaking Patois or I just can’t understand his accent – I’m not sure.

“Talking on the phone with you just isn’t enough because our conversations aren’t meaningful. I feel like I’m not growing with you or getting to know you. If you’re not growing together you’re growing apart. That’s how I feel”

Roommate instantly falls asleep and starts snoring so the girlfriend hangs up in anger.

I thought they were going to break up shortly after that, so it really sucked for me when they started getting along really well towards the end of the season. Their conversations became even more annoying and obnoxious when they weren’t filled with drama and fighting.

Shortly after he falls asleep, so do I. He snores louder than any human being on the planet, so I wake up numerous times in the night, but that’s the end of the day for a Mackinac Island dockporter.

This was an extremely brief look at a typical day for me, so there’s still many more random aspects of living and working on Mackinac Island that I found funny. I’ll be sharing more of these in the future. If you have any specific questions, feel free to leave me a comment/e-mail/Facebook message.