We were rapt by the wildness of North Leelanau as a rare late April snowstorm heralded our arrival. The U-haul bounced along the 22—a lightly upgraded Conestoga wagon. Pine boughs sagged with white epaulets, and crocuses along the road were either buried or gasping for air through violet lips. Fields and maple woods dwarfed old farmhouses and the regrettable angles of subdivisions. After parking, our dogs hopped in the snow like rabbits as we chased snowflakes with our tongues. 

The locals, however, expectant of spring, were none too enthused. “Now is when I can feel the bar walls starting to close in on me, ya know?” remarked the manager of the brewery in Northport. He paused, waiting for us to confirm or deny his suspicion; we ordered another round. “Mostly, I was excited about getting my motorcycle out of storage.” 

With the help of a few friends sharing special “lifetime” mugs, he told us stories of boiling down maple sap in catering pans over a campfire, ice fishing with hot dogs, afternoons sailing naked on the glassy water, raging bonfires in the snow, football games on empty Leelanau beaches too numerous to name in one sitting. Despite a contagious bout of late winter mania, his attitude reflected more than the well-known joviality of the midwest. It was also more than the casual intensity of Michiganders most evident in the emphasis of the first syllables of consonant-led words—“fire”, for example, is not “fy-ur,” but rather, “FY-ur.” People here emanated the enchanting glow of a well-kept secret—one I especially was unfamiliar with. 

We had packed up everything from our double shotgun in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, where we had run an organic urban farm for years. Our garden abutted the river levee, where we grew all we could and often less, hosted guests on farmstays, dumpster-dived outside restaurants to feed our chickens, and drank too much wine with friends. Evading speed cameras with duct tape on our beater’s license plate as we delivered vegetables, we were able to see the other side of the city’s night magic: dungeon-like service industry bars blasting death metal at dawn, street cleaners roughly approximating their jobs, gutter punks curled up tight with their stringed instruments, their dogs, and each other. 

There was no precipitating event that caused us to sell and move. There are the practical reasons: Betsy is originally from Traverse, we desired a larger tract of land, family is here. Mostly it was that when the page of our life story turned, we noticed that the setting was no longer in Louisiana, but that it was here in Leelanau, at Green Bird Organic Cellars, and our fate was to abide. 

As a New Orleans native, not only had I never been to Northern Michigan, I was unaware of its existence as a specific cultural entity. New Orleanians are well-known for poking fun (with a brand of creativity that is spontaneous and vulgar) at just about anyone not located between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. This place does not even show up on our national map of potential locales to send up. The contrast was initially graphic, coming to a head in the first days of our time here when Betsy awoke to a cold wood stove, an ice-flecked toilet bowl, and my sky-tilted scream: “WHAT ARE WE DOING UP HERE?” 

Many of our first customers, all regional folks, at the winery agreed, singing in their soft melodic vowels that sail to the horizon. “Loooong way from down south!”...“CO-ld enough for ya?” Folks here are also versed in dishing it out to outsiders, but with a disarming tenderness only a midwesterner could pull off. 

It was also clear that for many Northern Michiganders, New Orleans occupies an intimate pocket of their hearts. Though the Crescent City is not for everyone, especially those who get haplessly stuck on the demented Disneyland track of Bourbon Street, it was fascinating how many came to the winery sharing once-in-a-lifetime stories about the city. New Orleans is the kind of place where somebody from everywhere has fallen desperately in love with a stranger or gotten mugged by a street performer, but day in and out, locals regaled us with tales of their own unforgettable connections to the city. 

And gradually, then at once, the walls dividing the two places collapsed, and what remained were the commonalities of the city of my birth and the county where our two kids would be born. Bookending the middle stretch of America, these two communities stand vigil over their own entrancing magics: defiantly, quixotically, and with joy. 

New Orleans opens a rictal grin over its inevitably impending disasters, be they hurricanes, floods, or general municipal incompetence—arguably it always has, when author Lafcadio Hearn in the late 19th century described the decadent debauchery and romantic violence of the French Quarter as an end-of-days scenario. Fast forward 150 years, a friend who runs a plant nursery in the Marigny has a tattoo of a frolicking skeleton in a pink tutu with the words, “Doom is inevitable. Gloom is optional!” Everything and everyone (sometimes begrudgingly) are imbued with a Bacchanalian joie-de-vivre that ramifies out from the eccentric downtown communities where artists conjure the celebratory costumes of whatever festival is always around the corner; where the paragon of boredom is talking about your job, and to actually do your job is considered even worse. Journalist Gwen Bristow summarizes the esprit de corps of fellow New Orleanians when she writes, “...we expect to find pleasure…until the last flagstone on Chartres Street has been ground to dust by the feet of pilgrims on their way to the French Market…Here we are less aware of the tumult of the days than of the fact that we live each day only once and should enjoy it.” The coda could have been written about Leelanau’s buried treasure of a town: Northport. 

While Leelanau’s northernmost town lacks the gallows glee of New Orleanians, its denizens know precisely how extraordinary and worth-preserving is their little fold of the universe. Due to its rural location, long distance from either an interstate or a metropolitan area, and with a population of less than six hundred, Northport should be a dreary, moribund community indistinguishable from thousands of American settlements whose memory fades long before they actually do. Undeniably, the tip of the county harbors dramatic views, miles of beaches, lakes and streams, multigenerational farms, and unbroken woods, but what actually sets the town apart is less tangible. The Northport area has become a bastion for progressives, LGBTQ+, alternatives, artists, and crunchy leftists. Festively adorned golf carts buzz around town, where live music may emanate from as many as three bars on a weekend. A John Cage-inspired event brings thousands of visitors each September; there is an annual drag show that attracts hundreds. In and around town there are multiple art studios, a city-quality cafe and an actually hip bar, a pasture-raised goat farm and an old organic orchard. In just the last two years, Northport has licensed the only marijuana dispensary in Leelanau and now has an open container allowance for partiers in its downtown area. Walking out of the brewery on that first night, scrawled in pink chalk on the sidewalk were the words, “Ted Kaczynski Was Right!” 

There is a pulsing creative verve in this faraway place; Betsy has lovingly dubbed it, “the island of misfit toys.” As outsiders, we have been welcomed to this place of refuge with open arms, as New Orleans welcomed Betsy so many years ago. 

The origin of this identity is unclear, though its coalescence is undoubtedly recent. To belong somewhere is to give oneself to it without qualification, and that is what the people of this town have done in the last decade; this has become a distinguishing cultural characteristic in which we are honored to participate. 

In fits and starts, in pleas for help and stubborn determination to get no help at all, through tractors that broke down if you looked at them the wrong way, and horrifying chainsaw tutorials, after dozens of small farming youtube videos with awkward farmers too close to the camera, and books so well-worn that pages would fly away like geese, we gave ourselves to our own Northport project in re-inventing an already-existing organic winery. In 2018, we began re-stringing trellis wire, spreading compost, bucking up fallen hard wood for the stove, and cursing the labyrinthine paperwork. With four wine club members, an empty tasting room, and a cooler full of wine, there was room to grow. 

At Green Bird Organic Cellars, nestled in a hidden valley on a dirt road half a mile off the 22, just south of Northport, our mission, as it was in New Orleans, is to practice regenerative agriculture and serve to a conscious customer base our truly fresh and local products whose honest beginnings and ends you can see right before you. We farm about half of our fifteen acre property with a combination of various grape varietals (both fresh and for wine), apples, and vegetables. Sheep and chickens rotationally graze the property throughout the year, providing fertilizer, inexpensive mowing, eggs, and meat. No food goes to waste here. We farm everything ourselves—husband, wife, friends, our children (sort of), a few employees, and volunteers. We make our own wine and cider, and only sell out of the tasting room, with rare exceptions. We are not trying to be Bordeaux or Napa; in our wines and ciders, we are unique in that we are unabashedly Northern Michigan: fresh, clean, bright, proudly here. 

Six years on, a typical weekend day here: you wend out of the verdant tunnel of maples and lilacs to our rows of riesling and pinot gris, where the vineyard post tops are painted the Caribbean pastels of the French Quarter. As you continue past eighty-year-old ida red trees, you will find these tropical colors dressing up every farm building. A massive flamingo sculpture overlooks small groups milling about in the orchard, feeding the chickens, drinking wine in the sunshine, taking selfies with the sheep. You order an Idyll Farms cheese board as brass music lightly throbs out the speakers. I am chasing our kids away from the concord grapes as Betsy harvests tomatoes with furious precision. Daniel pours a glass of merlot and relates how over the winter he scooped ice off of our cider to make a one-of-a-kind batch of apple jack. George is serving wine club members while sharing stories of his erstwhile adventures as a touring jazz pianist. Curious customers tour all of our facilities with one of us, from the underground wine bunker to the coral and yellow mobile chicken coop. 

Our wine club has surpassed one hundred members; some pasture areas, once beach-like in composition, have seen topsoil growth of five inches; since 2020 our grape yields have increased over 500% without the use of chemical fertilizer. And yet we still have so far to go. Regenerative agriculture, with its insistence on rebuilding the landbase through natural, historical means like animal rotation and biodiversity, is the keystone of the slow-life movement, which shuns quick solutions to deep-seated socio-planetary crises. If our goals were achieved in little more than a handful of years, then they would be at cross-purposes with the heart of our project. A sweet daydream I keep like a secret is of our two sons, Heron and August, many years from now, hand-tending the vines, caring for the animals, drinking too much wine with friends, and cursing the Kafka-esque paperwork of government regulators. 

Green Bird is a deeply personal ballad to the places we adore most, and to the values we hold most dear. In its essence, we want to show our customers, friends, family, children, and maybe even the younger, more selfish seasons of ourselves, that the immutable law of farming, of relationships, is that nothing can be taken which was not first given. And that we do not have to be so morose and serious about it all. Bristow again: “The world is in a most perplexing state…but we cannot spend our time wrinkling our foreheads over the future of civilization when the present gives us so much to enjoy.” Despite it all, maybe even because of it all, our lives may be filled with a radical and immovable jubilation.

Tim Hearin is a New Orleanian happily living in the hills outside Northport, Michigan. He and his wife, Betsy, father-in-law, and two young sons own and operate Green Bird Organic Cellars—a regeneratively-farmed orchard, vineyard, and garden. He lives for his family, the landbase, good wine, revelry with abandon, and his comrades.