If you have ever spent a deer season in the U.P., or really anywhere in the northern Midwest, you have heard them, whether you knew it or not. A goofy song about the second week of deer camp, or a Yooper parody of Jingle Bells about a rusty old Chevrolet. Those are Da Yoopers, a comedy band out of Ishpeming that has been turning the everyday absurdities of Upper Peninsula life into anthems since 1975. And the roadside attraction they run might be the most Yooper place on earth.
Da Yoopers started when a couple of local guys, Jim DeCaire and Joe Potila, decided to poke fun at themselves, their neighbors, and the funny way Yoopers talk. The name says it all, Yooper for a resident of the U.P., and Da because that is how a Yooper says the. Their 1987 album Culture Shock gave the world two lasting classics: Rusty Chevrolet, which still gets played every Christmas up north, and Second Week of Deer Camp, which to this day turns up on the radio across the Midwest every single hunting season. They put all of it out themselves, on their own label, and never really stopped.
The Tourist Trap
In 1991 the band opened a place in Ishpeming they proudly call Da Yoopers Tourist Trap, right on US-41. It is part gift shop, part rock and mining museum, and part outdoor collection of the strangest homemade contraptions you will ever see, the sort of thing DeCaire calls Yoopervations, built out of boredom and a long winter. The two headliners are record holders. Big Gus is the world’s largest working chainsaw, nearly 23 feet long, six feet tall, three and a half tons, powered by a V-8 engine. Big Ernie is the world’s largest working rifle, some 33 feet long and around 4,000 pounds, and both are recognized by Guinness.
Yes, they actually fire
Here is the best part. These are not statues. They work. Big Gus rumbles to life on that V-8, though the crew keeps it from revving to full speed, mostly out of concern that the giant chain might come flying off across Highway 41. And Big Ernie once fired a rock wrapped in duct tape roughly two and a half miles into a nearby cornfield. The recoil was so violent it knocked the rifle clean off its truck mount and shattered the windows of a farmhouse down the road. It has not been fired much since, which is probably for the best.
Why it matters
The Trap is more than a gag. For a long time it was one of the only places you could buy anything with the word Yooper on it, back before Yooper pride went mainstream and the term landed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Da Yoopers, the band and the attraction both, helped turn a hard, snowbound, working-class corner of Michigan into an identity people are proud to claim. You can still pull off US-41 in Ishpeming, wander past the giant chainsaw and the outhouse exhibits, buy a Say yah to da U.P., eh sticker, and hear Rusty Chevrolet playing over the speakers. It is free, it is ridiculous, and it is deeply, unmistakably Yooper.
Every place likes to think it has a sense of humor about itself. Not every place builds a working 33-foot rifle to prove it. The U.P. did, and then wrote a song about it.
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Sources: Wikipedia ‘Da Yoopers’; Roadside America; Lake Superior Circle Tour; Atlas Obscura.
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