Yesterday, I flew up to Marquette, Michigan, to argue a post-trial motion in a medical malpractice case. Our firm’s appellate department is often called upon to handle appeals after medical malpractice trials, and we often start that off with the post-trial motions.
Despite living in Michigan my whole life, I haven’t been to the Upper Peninsula too much, and certainly not as far north as Marquette, which, by my reckoning, lies maybe five minutes south of the Arctic Circle. It’s farther away from Detroit than places like Chicago or Buffalo, so I took one of those tiny propeller planes. Amy helped me out by becoming convinced that I was going to crash to a fiery death because “those little planes crash all the time.” As if Northern Michigan is littered with commuter planes that went down before making it to Marquette.
With that uplifting reassurance, I set out for the airport at an ungodly early hour, and caught my flight to Marquette, which managed to arrive without crashing into the wilderness. Instead, it landed at the “International Airport” for Marquette, which is, well, kind of in the middle of the wilderness.
Marquette is really a very nice place, except it was very cold and there was snow everywhere. Given how far north it is, though, I almost felt like I should be watching out for polar bears everywhere I went:
ME: Your Honor, in response to plaintiffs’ assertion that …
POLAR BEAR: ROAR!!!
ME: AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!! Oh my God, it’s EATING MY SPLEEN!!!
PLAINTIFFS’ COUNSEL: Objection, Your Honor — counsel is bleeding on my files.
Fortunately, nothing like that happened. As for my hearing, it went about as expected. What was really quite cool about the hearing, though, was the courthouse. If you’ve ever seen the movie Anatomy of a Murder, the courtroom in that movie is the one I appeared in yesterday. It is a historic site, and really quite stunning. It looks like something, well, out of a movie. (As an aside, the movie is based on a novel by John Voelker, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice from the Upper Peninsula.)
After my hearing, I made my way back through the wilderness to the airport, where I again boarded what is, in Amy’s mind, a flying death trap for the flight home. It was quite the contrast to flying out of Detroit, which has about three gazillion gates and planes flying in and out all the time. When they print on your Detroit boarding pass to check at the airport to see whether your gate has changed, they mean it (and my flight out of Detroit indeed did change gates). The gate change is also likely to require you to go to a new gate in a different ZIP code. They print the same thing on your Marquette boarding pass, but there’s only two gates there: Gate 1 and Gate 2. They’re right next to each other. Which means gate changes aren’t really a big deal. Also in contrast to Detroit, when we left, we were the only plane leaving. In fact, we may have been the only plane at the airport. No long trip to the runway. And no waiting around for anything (other than, maybe, making sure there were no polar bears on the runway). That was very nice compared to our landing at the Detroit airport, where we ended up taxiing down the runway for what seemed like three hours before getting to the gate.
Jokes about wilderness and polar bears (which don’t really live that far south — I hope) aside, I rather enjoyed my day trip to the U.P. It’s really quite a nice place, somewhere I’d like to visit again. Maybe in July when there’s a little less snow.
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