#upper peninsula

Sugarloaf Mountain

I can’t believe I got to see the northern lights so clearly last night while visiting the U.P in Michigan.

Backpacking in the Porcupine Mountains Michigan's UP, September 2024

This is not the ocean. This is Lake Superior in winter.❄️

An inland sea locked in ice and fury — waves detonating against frozen cliffs, emerald water surging beneath a ceiling of icicles. Trees entombed. Shorelines sculpted into ice castles. Every crash adds another frozen layer.

Lady Superior doesn’t freeze quietly. She creates monuments. Cold. Violent. Beautiful. Untamed. 🥶🌊

The Toledo War (1835-1836) was a minor skirmish between civilian militias on the Michigan/Ohio boarder over which state had land rights to the port city of Toledo. It ended with Ohio “winning” and getting claim to Toledo, but as consolation Michigan was given its Upper Peninsula (UP). The UP was freezing, wooded, isolated by two Great Lakes, and basically seen as worthless. But that changed when MASSIVE mineral deposits (mainly copper and iron) were discovered there in the 1840’s. A mining boom followed, and the UP became the country’s largest supplier of metals by the 1860’s. UP copper and iron generated more wealth than the entire California gold rush. However, the mines started to dry up after the 1920’s, and Michigan’s economic center shifted to Detroit manufacturing in the 1930’s and 40’s thanks to Henry Ford.

Severance takes place in a fictional state (PE) that is freezing, wooded, isolated by large bodies of water, and within reasonable driving distance of Milwaukee Wisconsin. Mark W. said he canceled a timeshare in Grand Rapids, Michigan to work there. Cobel’s hometown is an abandoned industrial port city with what seem to be old mines out back. Dr Mauer whistles “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, a song about a disaster on Lake Superior. There’s enough circumstantial evidence there for me to say the UP is a likely enough location for PE geographically.

So let’s imagine a hypothetical version of the Toledo war which ended with Michigan getting Toledo and the UP becoming its own state (PE) in 1836. Kier Eagan was born in 1841 according to the wiki, so he’d be a child right at the start of the mining boom. Without direct ties to Michigan and Detroit, we can imagine PE’s economy developing differently, with more manufacturing done where the metals are already extracted. And Michigan would never have its early economic boom, changing the landscape that would let Henry Ford rise to power and Detroit manufacturing to dominate.

So let’s say Kier establishes his manufacturing/metallurgy businesses in PE through the mid to late 1800’s copper boom, and when the mines start drying up after the 1920’s, Lumon shifts their location around, establishing the current HQ on top of old copper and iron mines for access to underground caverns to build the severed floor within (same as Aperture in the portal franchise), and focuses on their salves and medicine. Industry flocks to PE instead of Detroit, Kier becomes the face of American business instead of Ford, and the rest rolls naturally from that. Let’s say Houghton got named Ganz for some reason and Michigan Tech was Ganz College, and you’ve even got Mark and Gemma’s hometown, since that school was founded in the 1880’s for metallurgy and mining engineering anyways.