Old-time bait shop in remote Michigan town offers quiet, lakeside life to new owner

For sale: bait shop. Small-town, main street location. Comes with modest house out back, just uphill from a large lake that’s home to abundant wildlife. Seller is motivated.

CURTIS — This place helped save her. Now it’s someone else’s turn.

“This is a great job,” said Mick Treiber, 56. She was sitting behind the counter of her store, assembling another homemade fishing lure. “We’re one of the last traditional bait shops in the state. But it’s getting a little harder on me.”

Mick’s Bait Shop is for sale. Everything is included: the building, the stock, the faint smell of fish in the air and the old-timers who line up just outside the shop before dawn — the early birds getting their worms.

Her shop is in Curtis, in the middle of the Upper Peninsula, on a road that rolls between two large lakes. The town is small and remote, a family vacation spot known mostly for good fishing, rustic lodging and its Fourth of July parade. Phones often can’t get a signal here. It's all part of the appeal.

“There’s a lot of people that’s been coming for 75, 80 years to Curtis,” Mick said. “Generations upon generations come here just to kind of chill out and hang out. There’s a tranquility here that you don’t get anywhere else. It’s not backwards or anything; it’s just nice.”

She’s owned and run the bait shop for about a decade with help from her husband, Dave, 68. They used to live downstate near Lake City, where he ran a plumbing business and she worked at a hardware store. Several years ago, the pain in her abdomen became too much to ignore, and she went to a doctor. Tests revealed something devastating. An ambulance was called to take her immediately to a big-city hospital.

“They weren’t sure I’d make the ride,” she said.

Conveniently located within walking distance of downtown’s old-fashioned ice cream parlor, arts center, breakfast café and the Tally Ho bar. Two concrete minnow wells come with the property, as does a wall of mounted trophy fish and a cooler packed with night crawlers. Well maintained with lots of character.

The priest came in the hospital room to give her the last rites before her surgery. The doctors had summoned him. Mick’s outlook wasn’t good.

“The priest says, ‘Hey kiddo, I’m here to give you last rites.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not.’ He says, ‘Yeah, I gotta do that.’ And I said, ‘No, ‘cause I ain’t dying.’”

Those pains she neglected too long turned out to be Stage 3 colon cancer, and she plunged into grueling rounds of surgery, chemo and radiation. “When they diagnosed me I said, ‘OK, I’ll beat this.’ You have to do that. Eighty-five percent of this is positive attitude. We never looked back. And I’m still here.”

She couldn’t work at the hardware store anymore, where she was hauling 50-pound bags of grain around. But she was too young to retire. The couple owned a deer camp in the Upper Peninsula, on the outskirts of Curtis. They knew the pace was slow, the scenery calming, the lifestyle serene, and that a whole new life might lead to a longer life. They moved here during her treatment.

“But she had to have something to do,” said Dave. “She can’t just sit around.”

The town’s bait shop was for sale, and the opportunity seemed ideal. Fishing is in her blood — her dad used to travel the countryside selling his homemade tackle from the back of a truck, and he taught the craft to his daughter when she was little. She kept perfecting it, and she now has a workshop in her garage at home where she makes her own line of lures by hand, one at a time, at her own pace, when she’s not crafting them in her store between visitors. "Hooked on Tackle," she calls her line.

The shop is inside a little building on the town’s main road, crammed with hooks and lures and sinkers by the thousands, all neatly hanging in straight rows down narrow aisles. There’s a general store aspect to it, too; it offers a small selection of campfire cookware, paper maps, flashlights, snacks, life vests and BB guns for kids to sharpen their aim while on vacation. “It gets kids started, gives the kids a little something to do outside,” she said of the guns. “The more they’re outside doing something, the better it is for them.” In the fall, some hunting supplies rotate their way onto the shelves.

The few empty spaces between all the fishing gear have been filled over time with the uncontrived keepsakes of a rural store, like the graduation photo of a nephew taped to the worm cooler, the obituary of a departed regular, a child’s crayon drawing given to the bait shop lady in thanks for her role in their summer vacation, a bucket of suckers by the cash register for every little kid that comes in.

“We do well here,” Mick said. “The thing is, you get your money back just a little bit at a time. But people seem to like the shop. They like the nostalgia. It’s an old-time bait shop.”

It’s been almost a couple of years since they listed it for sale. Since then, a few people have stopped in with a familiar, far-gazing gleam in their eye, in which they see themselves escaping wherever they just drove in from, moving to a remote town in the north, working behind the counter of their very own country store, living a quieter life alongside a lake full of fish. The way she once did.

“A lot of people, as soon as they cross that bridge, their troubles go away,” she said. “People can go and just lose themselves. It’s just a different feel up here. It’s an awesome feel.”

Her husband already retired from his job. Now she wants to join him. But no takers yet.

The store comes with a full line of handcrafted lures, a deli case stocked with jerky and cheese, and aisles crowded with rods and reels, nets and bobbers, knives and scalers and spools of line. The offer also includes the solitude of a rural town, the bright stars of the country night, the longtime regulars who linger to talk and easy fishing just outside the back door. For sale: bait shop. And a whole new life.

A customer walked in with his two little girls. “Can we get a dozen crawlers please?” he asked. Mick put down the lure she was creating, got up from her stool and grabbed the worms from the cooler. The dad pulled out his wallet. The little girls looked around wide-eyed at the glittering colors of innumerable hanging lures. “You ready for your Dum Dum suckers?” Mick asked them cheerfully.

The family left, waving goodbye, and Mick went and sat behind the counter to take a break from standing. The cancer is gone, but the treatment took its toll. “Some of my stuff, the side effects, is getting worse,” she admitted. “It’s just physical stuff, from having had the chemo and radiation and everything.”

She picked up her unfinished lure and slowly assembled its parts. There was no rush to finish it.

“But hey, I don’t care. I’m still here,” she said. “And every day’s a good day.”

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: U.P. bait shop owner looks to pass along her store in Michigan's U.P.