Editor’s note: This column includes colorful quotations containing adult/suggestive humor.
PARADISE – A customer’s hot dog order was ready.
“I’ve got somebody’s wiener in my hand,” Chic Drozdrowski shouted leeringly through the carryout window of her food shack. “Whose wiener am I holding?”
Drozdrowski is the boisterous owner of Chic’s Hot Dog Stand, which lies deep in the snowy Upper Peninsula woods, northwest of Paradise. It’s unadvertised. It’s miles from any road or power line. The only way to get there is by snowmobile. And it’s somehow immensely popular.
“I’m a destination for people,” the 57-year-old said. “It’s kind of legendary now, I guess.”
Four hours a day, on four days a week, for four months a year, she serves hot dogs, hot chocolate, water and blueberry bratwursts — this place’s unusual specialty — to the thousands of snowmobilers who stop here. Half of them are astonished to find a hot dog stand, of all things, in the middle of the woods. The other half have long been regulars.
“This is awesome,” said Steve Klitzing, 63, who came from Wisconsin with his son. “I love it. Where else are we going to find a hot dog stand in the middle of nowhere?”
But the real draw is Drozdrowski, who’s wild and loud and outgoing. When people pull up in their sleds, she regales them with a torrent of bawdy jokes and explosive laughter and suggestive remarks.
A group of unsuspecting men, older and gray-whiskered, pulled up to the hot dog stand on their sleds. “I have a joke,” Drozdrowski announced in greeting. “Who can I pick on?” She approached the biggest one of them.
“What sex position makes ugly babies?” she asked him.
“Which one?” he replied.
“Go ask your mother.”
His friends crumbled in laughter.
Twenty-five years ago, Drozdrowski moved from downstate with her husband and daughter to these Upper Peninsula woods, miles from the nearest road or power line, where they built a house that’s completely off grid. It’s so remote that a local magazine once did a cover story about her daughter, Madison, because she had to ride a snowmobile 9 miles to and from school every day.
She gets electricity from six solar panels, while propane powers the fridge, the washer and the dryer. A wood stove fills her cabin-like home with heat. “When you walk into my house,” she said, “you’d never know I’m off the grid.”
There happens to be an intersection of snowmobile trails at the base of the ridge on which her house sits. “This is a place where everybody would just stop, regroup, have a cigarette, go pee, whatever,” she said. “I saw it all the time when I was going back and forth. And so I just threw up the hot dog stand to see if it would go. I thought it was a cool idea.”
The stand had been a small guest cabin next to her house. She hauled it down to the intersection, put a propane stove and a fridge inside, laced it with pine garlands and tree lights, then opened for business. That was 15 years ago. It’s become infamous since.
“I’m glad it’s here,” said Kevin Csirke, 69, a trail groomer on a break. “Everybody is, really. This is always like a destination. You got to stop at Chic’s. Stop by at least and say you’ve been here.”
A sign at the entrance announces, “Eats.” A snowbank is spray-painted with a pink greeting. A tree by the entrance is covered in dangling bras thrown by visitors in an ongoing tradition that Drozdrowski unintentionally started one day when she got irritated over a new bra that itched and threw it into the branches.
Since people treated it like a hangout, she made it a real one. She named the area Chic’s Corner, and added tables and chairs and a cornhole board with beanbags. Classic rock and country play loudly over a speaker. Hand-carved wood signs tacked up everywhere note the distance in miles to nearby cities, a hand-painted food menu on the wall lists her offerings. There’s no charge for any of it.
“Everything is run by donation,” Drozdrowski said.
A tip jar sits by the carryout window, and she tells people to make their own change on the honor system. “I don’t watch and I don’t keep track. I’ve had people come up here and hand me a credit card. You know, four hot chocolates and four hot dogs, and they’ve got two little kids with them, and all they have is a card. It’s like, ‘Where do you want me to swipe it?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we didn’t know.’ So I’ll just say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”
The stand isn’t much of a moneymaker anyway; her real job is cleaning Airbnb houses in the area and doing lawn care in the summer. Any extra she makes after costs, she says, is donated to the volunteer snowmobile trail groomers in the area.
“I just did it because I thought it was a good cause,” she said. “It’s not a gourmet meal. But it’s a nice little hitching post.”
She also keeps spare gas and oil in the shack, along with hose clamps and fuses, for snowmobilers in a pinch. She’ll call hotels in nearby towns for visitors to see whether there are rooms available, or to find out whether a gas station has premium in stock. “Just anything that somebody might want or need,” she said. “I just want to help them out. People would say, ‘Oh, we’re out of gas’ or ‘We’re low on oil’ or something like that. And so I kind of thought there was a need for that out in the middle of the woods, to help people.”
Another group arrived. “Chic! Do you remember me?” said a guy who’d pulled up. She didn’t know him.
“Yes, I meant to call you,” she shouted loud enough for his friends to hear. “You’re not the father.”
The hot dog stand almost didn’t open this year. After her recent divorce, the house had to be sold since neither of them could buy out the other. She expected to move away. Then a friend down the way, an investor she calls “Big Toe,” offered to help. He understood the impact of her hot dog stand.
“He says, ‘If you would like to stay in your house and live out there, and if you think you can do it by yourself and still run the hot dog stand, I’ll buy your place so that you can live, rent, and still run the hot dog stand,’ ” Drozdrowski said. “He didn’t want to see the hot dog stand go away.”
It was a Thursday afternoon, quieter than the busy weekends are. But snowmobilers were arriving by the dozen, mingling in groups, sharing stories of the trails, taking it all in. To get here means a ride through uninhabited forests that no vehicle ever sees. And this stop allows them to savor it.
A pair of brothers-in-law stood in the glittering snow under a deep blue sky. “The beauty is phenomenal out here,” said Mike Hubbs, 69, of Clio. “Just natural beauty. It’s just like God presented it. When you see the snow falling off the trees in the sun, and it sparkles, it’s pretty breathtaking, honestly.”
“Days like this — you can’t beat this,” Todd Tindall, 64, of Lapeer, said. “This is perfect.”
Like most others here, they were eating blueberry bratwursts, her most popular offering here, a nod to this area being the Wild Blueberry Capital of Michigan. She serves it on a toasted hot dog bun with blueberry sauce drizzled on top.
“This thing is way good,” Tindall said. “I’m telling you, you won’t go wrong with a blueberry brat. You don’t want to miss it.”
“Oh, it’s delicious,” said A.J. Jarabek, 62, of Holland, trying it for the first time. “I don’t even care if you don’t like blueberries. You need to try it. Delicious. Just delicious. It tasted just like breakfast.”
It was only Thursday, but it was so busy at the hot dog stand a friend was helping out. “When I open the window to greet people, it’s always like they’re disappointed not to see Chic,” said Sherry Kempel, 67, while handing out hot chocolates. “And I go, ‘Don’t worry, she’s here.’ ”
Kempel comes to the stand a few times a month — partly to help out, partly just to be here for the next outrageous thing that Drozdrowski says or does. “She’s just a very outgoing person, a lot of fun. I usually just sit back and don’t say a word. But she’s like yap, yap, yap, yap.”
“I like making them laugh, having fun, thanking them for riding the trails, coming all this way,” said Drozdrowski, who takes photos with every single visitor and posts them online. “You know, they could have stopped below the bridge, but they came all this way. People around here don’t realize that if it wasn’t for them, they wouldn’t have a job. If it wasn’t for the snowmobilers, we would be out of work.”
Another wave of snowmobilers arrived and looked around in wonder. Newcomers. Drozdrowski burst out of the hot dog stand and approached the unsuspecting strangers. “I have a joke,” she began.
John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Off-grid Yooper runs hidden hot dog stand in the woods
Reporting by John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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