Great Lakes III

I had to cut that last post uber-short last night because it started to rain. After a few little drops on my laptop screen, it continued to rain until Pat and I were in the tent during torrential downpours and ridiculous red lightning bursts that lasted for what seemed like hours. I laid there on my back and watched as first the tent ceiling would flash, illuminating the poles and seams, then it would go dark and the pattern would show up in negative, only to have lightning flash again a second later and the negative would float again. I realized during the storm that you could probably drive a car perfectly fine in the storm; it was only ever dark for a split-second at a time – the rest of the time it was bright as day.

So anyhow, that is what kept me from writing all this down last night.

Now I am dressed in bug-resistant garb and the sky is blue, so there will have to be some other less-expected occurrence for me to cut THIS post short.

We got to Sleeping Beat Dunes National Lakeshore on Sunday, July 25, and expected to be able to find camping in the primitive campground at the park. We rolled into the park relatively early in the day, counting on the few walk-in sites that campgrounds tend to reserve for same-day reservations, but found that we were too late anyway. All the campgrounds were full.

Pat got irritated and said we should just say screw it and head to the upper peninsula. I told him to shut up and that we’d find a campsite just fine – there were state forests all around Sleeping Bear Dunes and we wouldn’t have a problem finding a backcountry site.

First we tried calling a campground in Garey Lake State Forest to see if they had any sites available, but the state forest offices were closed so no one answered. Instead, we went to the road that the campground was on, a small dirt forest road outside the town of Empire, and did some driving to see what there was to see.

On forest roads like those, there are often private residences and properties interspersed within the state or national forest, and property owners are often vigilant with “POSTED” signs along these roads to discourage people like us from camping there. Along this road we saw a few signs like that, including a few offshoot roads that were clearly marked as private drives. We also saw, however, a number of Michigan state signs asking visitors to keep out of the forest because of newly-planted trees; this told us it was state land.

We drove along the road a ways until we found an offshoot road that was not labeled as a forest road, but was probably cut by other campers in the area because it led somewhere particularly nice. We turned down it, and in less than a quarter-mile we ended up in a beautiful field of thistle ringed by pines. We got out and investigated the road; ours were the only recent tire tracks, and we looked all over and couldn’t find any POSTED signs. Our best guess, then, was that the land was state-owned, and that we could camp there.

After we’d staked out that nice spot, we got back in the car and headed back to Sleeping Bear Dunes to explore.

The story of why the area is called Sleeping Bear Dunes strikes me as particularly sad. It’s printed in all the park brochures and has probably developed a trite and convenient tone to people who work or live in the area, but for a tourist like me, it rings new enough to be effective and touching.

An old Anishinaabek Indian story says that a long time ago, in what is now Wisconsin, a forest fire drove a mother bear and her two cubs out of the forest and into Lake Michigan. They swam all night, but eventually the two cubs began to tire. The mother bear finally made it to the other shore, but the cubs succumbed to exhaustion and drowned just before reaching land. The mother bear lay down on the dunes to wait for her babies. The Manitou turned her into The Sleeping Bear, a prominent dune, and then created the two Manitou Islands just off the coast to mark the spots where the cubs disappeared.

There are a lot of little stories like this to describe land formations all across the country, but usually they honor heroes or legends or particularly powerful beings. This story, unlike many others, I found particularly sad because it describes a mother who will never be reunited with her babies. As I read the few sentences in the brochure I expected a happy ending – that the cubs made it and they were happy and lived to old ages and eventually went to govern the islands that were created to commend their bravery. But it wasn’t like that.

All in all, the park was nice – you just don’t get massive dunes like this except for on the coasts of the Great Lakes. The beaches there were just as nice as any I ever visited in New Jersey, with fine sand and calm waves. They were admittedly pebbly here and there, but overall the swimming was great – and there is tons of it. Patrick and I opted for swimming between the Glen Haven Historic Village and Sleeping Bear Point.

To get to the latter, you have to go from a parking lot and down a huge dune to get to the beach – and when it came time for us to pack up and leave, I just didn’t feel like climbing up the huge dune again. Thankfully, since Patrick is ridiculous, he said he’d be happy to take a jog up the dune, get in the car, and meet me about a quarter- or half-mile down the beach at the Coast Guard station/maritime museum. Perfect. So I meandered down the shoreline and Patrick brought the car around and everyone was happy.

After swimming and driving around the park a bit, we were tired but not quite ready to end the day – not to mention we didn’t want to break out the camp stove and make dinner at our state forest campsite, just in case it was someone’s private property and they smelled the mysterious aroma of ham coming from their thistle field. So we went over to the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, which has been in operation since 1967 as a scenic drive around what was then Sleeping Bear Dunes State Park. The 12 stops on the scenic trail mostly focus on the ecology and geology of the dunes, including nearby Glen Lake and the beech-maple forests that grow right next to the sandy, stark dunes. The best stop on the drive, however, was number 9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

You get the perfect sense of just how huge the dunes are. As approached the edge of the dune, it basically looked like the sand dropped off at a sheer cliff 450 feet above the lake. The sun was beginning to set when we got there, so it was casting a blinding shine over the water. As we approached the “edge,” we saw that it was actually a steep dune that ran all the way down to a narrow beach at the lake – the angle of the dune must have been 60 degrees. People were still trying to clamor up and down the hill. I just don’t see the appeal – the view is totally spectacular from the top, and once you get all the way down there, you’re on a beach like any other… And then you have to climb back up 450 vertical feet in loose, hot sand. Not my idea of fun. But there were a bunch of people doing it, most of them kids who I bet slept really well that night. I guess it’s worth it to say you did it, but I can say I did a lot of other cool things that didn’t cause so much physical pain.

After the scenic drive, we returned to the campsite to find it just as deserted as we’d left it. We parked the car and explored the outlying land a little – we heard a dog barking off in the woods and the occasional car drive down the main road we’d come in on, but other than that – and a conspicuously newly-planted tree surrounded by chicken wire – we were completely alone.

Being so totally alone again in the woods, after spending two nights with Tom and Mikki and a week before that in Michigan and two nights before that in Columbus, was particularly sweet. Pat and I function in a lot of the same ways, take comfort in a lot of the same things and enjoy much of the same activity – so we spent the evening enjoying each others’ company, reading, making jewelry and, eventually, getting a fantastic night’s sleep (despite some suicidal bug that buzzed and thrashed itself against the outside our tent for the better part of the evening). The sky, of course, was lit by residual sunlight until after 10 pm, and in the morning when we woke everything was soaking wet with dew, but that’s part of the package.