The Pasta Smuggling Ring (Short Story) - 7/18/2022 8:44:55 AM
I found your tongue-in-cheek story quite amusing. However, in my sleepy afternoon Sunday I found reading the densely packed narrative extremely difficult. The solution would be breaking up the long paragraphs into smaller ones, larger font and a line between paragraphs and conversation to make it easy reading.
The FBI can only be brought in on interstate crimes. Michigan is all one state. Pasties are Finnish, I believe. The Mystery Spot does not defy gravity. It was built by a crafty deranged or drunk carpenter who got all of the angles wrong. I recall that there is one in the Black Hills and another one in Oregon and they all claim the same things. Franchise? Your title refers to Pasta, that is Italian and not related to the story at all. So I would definitely put the story in satire or at least, humor.
In 1965 with my newly acquired $100 rusted out 1957 DeSoto, after college summer school, I picked up my grandmother who had spent about a year in 1951 logging near the Lone Pine Mine. They lived primitively and she cooked while grandpa logged. We left Marshfield Wisconsin with my younger twin brothers who were seven for a camping adventure in the UP.
The first thing grandma said when we got there was, "If we see a sign, I want to stop and get a pastie." But I don't believe we ever did. She complained about it on the trip. No signs announcing their sale anymore.
We visited her old lumber camp, grown over, the Lone Pine, Porcupine Mountain, The Mystery Spot, the amazing Big Pool with blue-green copper water and huge brown trout, a couple of state parks in the east with amazing waterfalls and then, finally, back into Wisconsin on the Bruel River and Calvin Coolidge's Red Cedar retreat. A very memorable trip. I used the UP for much of my second novel, Alone? as a retreat for my astronomer naturalist where he cultivated the return of wolves and innovations against drastic climate change.
My cousin and her husband spent much of their summers and part of their retirement in the UP. I believe they have retreated to warmer climes. They may live full-time in McAllen Texas now.
Ron
