Peg Herring's Blog - Posts Tagged "fudge"
On Fudgies and Cone-lickers
The Fourth of July approaches, and with it, armies of fudgies, cone-lickers, and cabin critters, otherwise known as tourists.
I don't know what people in other parts of the nation or the world call those who come to visit, gawk, and enjoy their home territories, but here in Michigan, "fudgie" is the accepted term. It began on Mackinac Island, where fudge shops abound and every visitor seems destined to purchase a slab of sugary chocolate. Fudgie is not really an insult, although it can be. The people who work at the gas staions in my hometown laugh about fudgies who complain that they can't find our McDonalds. We have several families of McDonalds living in the area, but that's not what they mean. The answer is "We don't have one, but if you drive twenty miles due east, there's a town that does."
I once told a visitor that there is only one stoplight in our whole county. She froze in disbelief, a look one might call "the fudgie stare". It comes with the realization that they really, truly are removed from hospitals, movies, professional entertainment, box stores, 24-hour Rite-Aids, fast food, and sometimes cell phone and Internet connections. It's a culture shock they may have understood intellectually before arriving, but being unable to use one's iPad is another thing entirely.
In return, the fudgies sometimes call us cedar savages, picturing us holing up during the winter with a chain saw by the back door and jars of canned fish in the basement. Like most stereotypes, there's a grain of truth in both images. Fudgies do buy lots of fudge, ice cream, and silly tourist things like birch-bark notepads and pine cone coasters. And cedar savages do a lot of cutting and stacking wood so we'll be ready to get through the winter.
Not me, of course. I could keep warm for months just burning the multiple editions of my last manuscript.
I don't know what people in other parts of the nation or the world call those who come to visit, gawk, and enjoy their home territories, but here in Michigan, "fudgie" is the accepted term. It began on Mackinac Island, where fudge shops abound and every visitor seems destined to purchase a slab of sugary chocolate. Fudgie is not really an insult, although it can be. The people who work at the gas staions in my hometown laugh about fudgies who complain that they can't find our McDonalds. We have several families of McDonalds living in the area, but that's not what they mean. The answer is "We don't have one, but if you drive twenty miles due east, there's a town that does."
I once told a visitor that there is only one stoplight in our whole county. She froze in disbelief, a look one might call "the fudgie stare". It comes with the realization that they really, truly are removed from hospitals, movies, professional entertainment, box stores, 24-hour Rite-Aids, fast food, and sometimes cell phone and Internet connections. It's a culture shock they may have understood intellectually before arriving, but being unable to use one's iPad is another thing entirely.
In return, the fudgies sometimes call us cedar savages, picturing us holing up during the winter with a chain saw by the back door and jars of canned fish in the basement. Like most stereotypes, there's a grain of truth in both images. Fudgies do buy lots of fudge, ice cream, and silly tourist things like birch-bark notepads and pine cone coasters. And cedar savages do a lot of cutting and stacking wood so we'll be ready to get through the winter.
Not me, of course. I could keep warm for months just burning the multiple editions of my last manuscript.
