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.

Great Lakes II

I had to cut that last post short last night because the mosquitoes were driving me up the wall. Everything they say about mosquitoes on the UP is true. If you come up here, ever, do NOT forget your bug spray.

Great Lakes I

We are camped on the Indian River in Hiawatha National Forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. So far it seems like everything they say about the UP is right – the mosquitoes fly in flocks, the water is crystal-clear, and the people are just about the nicest on earth. Except for that guy who cursed at me at the toll booth as we crossed the Mackinac Bridge. Oh wait, I cursed at him. Never mind.

We left Dexter on Friday in order to spend Friday night at Tom and Mikki’s in Clio. The next day, Saturday, we got a bit of a late start (Patrick and I like to usually be on the road by 10 am at the latest – but we didn’t leave Clio until 1:30 in the afternoon). With Tom and Mikki following on Tom’s Harley, we crossed the lower peninsula’s countless miles of farmland via two-lane roads until we reached the Ludington area on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Manistee National Forest.

The campgrounds at Manistee are around $12, which means you get prime real estate near the roads and paths to the beaches, plus running water and a hardly-bearable bathroom. To camp in the “backwoods” (aka, 150 feet off a road) is free – and peeing in the woods smells a lot better than peeing in the bathrooms they had there. We’d planned on backwoods camping anyway, but it was nice to see just how smart we were when we pulled a little bit off a main road to find a sprawling campsite complete with fire pit.

Since we have two tents (one 4-man tent for car camping and one 2- man tent that we’ll use once we do more backpacking), we set up camp with two tents and, before it got too dark, the four of us headed down to the beach to take in the lake.

After visiting the Great Lakes again, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to live near an ocean. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’m a Jersey girl through and through who wouldn’t give up the shore for all the freshwater glacial lakes in the world. But seriously, these lakes are gorgeous, and you have none of the nastiness associated with oceans to go along with them – no salt air, no smelly fish, no rancid low tides. Just clear water, silky sand (in most places, that is) and, yes, waves.

We walked down the beach at Manistee for a while. I mostly lagged behind taking pictures while the three of them wandered ahead. I wandered into the waves mid-thigh and hardly noticed – the lake was warm as bath water. The water was this fantastic clear blue-green-brown color – almost like the color of a pale beer bottle or an old telegraph insulator. The little waves crashed on the pebbles and sounded like wind chimes.

It was strange camping with people other than just the two of us. The more people we meet and spend time with – especially on this trip – the more Patrick and I realize that, despite our obvious differences, we have a lot more in common with one another than we differ.

We’re both really quiet people, we’ve found – like right now, Patrick is off making macramé jewelry in the campsite and I’m sitting here writing. Sometimes we go hours at a time in the car with no music. We speak only as loud as is absolutely necessary to be heard. I think I used to be a much louder person than I am now (well, I know I was) – but something clicked in me a few years ago that made me shut up and open my ears. I think I have learned a lot more this way.

We’re also both relatively goody two-shoes. We were laughing the other day that pretty much everyone we know smokes or otherwise ingests pot – except us. We’re the last people on earth who have no interest in it. So it’s nice that, wherever we are, when everyone wants to offer us pot at every turn, we both say “No, thanks.” It would get really old really fast if one of us smoked and the other didn’t. And if both of us smoked, we’d be really broke by now.

Here’s an important one: We’re both very clean. Being on the road, it’s not easy to be spotless all the time, but I’m a hygiene maniac – so if I’m not totally freshly showered and laundered and perfect, I have very good ways of hiding it so everyone thinks I am. We wash dishes obsessively and with the scrubby side of the sponge. Every other night or so Patrick will almost completely unpack the car, tidy everything up, and re-pack it again. We aren’t obsessive and ridiculous about it – you can’t be, when you have two people living out of a station wagon – but when it comes down to it, we’re pretty organized and put-together.

So after a relatively shitty night’s sleep, for whatever reason, I woke up and we headed back down to the beach for a morning swim. The water felt a whole lot colder than it had the previous night, but we got used to it fast as we waded further into the waves that were cresting at three or four feet – just like a calm day at the ocean. Patrick and Tom, reviving their common Floridian childhood, tried to bodysurf on the larger waves, but generally failed. Mikki and I just bobbed in the water and laughed at them. I had brought the soap and a washcloth down to the beach to wash my hair in the lake, but I was having a good enough time just swimming around that I didn’t bother.

For some reason, I find myself wanting to swim pretty much constantly on this trip. I always liked to swim when I was a kid, and had a brief stint on the swim team, but it was never an obsession like it has become on this trip. If there is water, I will swim in it. I don’t know if it’s a side-effect of having lived in Santa Fe for so many years, being so waterless, or if it’s just some new weird quarter-life obsession I’ve developed.

Either way, a morning dip in a cool lake was a great way to start the day. By about 11 am we said goodbye to Tom and Mikki and hit the road, headed North – just the two of us once again come Sunday afternoon.

Our big destination yesterday (Sunday) was Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, on the pinky of the mitten of the lower peninsula.

Rain

Posting from Clio, Michigan, a little town outside Flint. We spent the week in Dexter, just outside Ann Arbor, but sleeping in the same bed for 6 or 7 nights was starting to wear on me - so we moved on.

Here in Clio, Patrick's high school friend Tom and his wife Mikki put us up in a camper they have in their driveway - a perfect guest house, complete with air conditioning. Today they will follow us on their motorcycle as we head over to the west coast of the Michigan mitten. Tonight we'll stay in Manistee National Forest and tomorrow will head to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. After we conquer that, we'll head to the Upper Peninsula and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Everyone has asked if we'll be going to Isle Royale National Park. The truth is that I'd love to go, but the ferry to get over there is pretty expensive. Seeing as we're doing this trip as cheaply as possible, anything pricey is a no-go.

We've been lucky thus far that awesome friends have put us up for a night or two along the way - Pat's uncle in Burlington Flats, NY; a friend-of-a-friend (Amanda and Daniel) in Rochester, NY; my brother in Pittsburgh; Amanda in Columbus; Marcia and her empty house in Dexter, Michigan; and now Tom and Mikki in Clio. When we haven't stayed with friends, we have either found free camping in state and national forests (not many people know that, as long as you're 150 feet off the road, you can camp for free in most national and state forests; no amenities, of course, but it's a place to sleep), paid for camping (we don't like that), or one night we slept in the car outside Akron.

We pulled some gear out of the car and I layed down in the trunk (I have a station wagon), and Pat attempted to sleep in the front seat - however, due to all the stuff behind that seat, he couldn't put it back, so he didn't get much of a night's sleep sitting upright. I was fine, though. My feet were near the back of the front seat and my head near the trunk, and I popped the trunk so right near my head I got fresh air and could listen to the rain. I was a little cramped, sure, but overall I didn't have a problem with it.

So here were are, about to get on the road again. I have a friend in Minneapolis who we'll hopefully catch at home before she leaves on vacation on Aug. 2 (I'd hoped to spend my birthday, Aug. 3, hanging out in Minneapolis, but it looks like I'll spend it in the car somewhere in South Dakota - whatever, could be worse), but after that, we're unlikely to encounter any more friends until Missoula, Montana. Emilie, one of my best friends, has been living in Great Falls, Montana for the last few years, but of course she is moving away from there mid-August, and I think we'll be getting there just a few days too late to see her.

Patrick and I have been eager to get West. I'm eager to get where I don't know where I am - to somewhere I've never been, or at least haven't been in a long time - a landscape that keeps reinventing itself. Anywhere I know feels too close to home to be an adventure. Today I will be glad to get to the shores of Lake Michigan, and when we head into the Upper Peninsula I will be even more excited. My mom told me stories of paper mills and fog horns and pea-soup clouds on the northern shore of Lake Superior in the '70s - I could do without the paper mills (have you ever smelled one? truly horrid), but the fog horns I'd like to hear.

I never imagined I would be more comfortable West of the Mississippi than East, but I think it's coming down to that. I need to move slower and see more. I need to have a line of sight that isn't punctuated by so many buildings and trees. Green has been lovely to see and smell and feel again, but I need to get back to the plans - and eventually the desert.

I got thinking about the concept of wanting to be somewhere new, and why it was that I was simultaneously craving being back at my little casita in Madrid, New Mexico. The hill out back of my casita is always new. There are always new birds and new plants and new rocks and old rusty metal and tumbleweeds blowing across it. The old broken-down building just behind the neighbor's house is still new to me. There are so many mountains I haven't crawled under and through. And even places I have always been - downtown, the mountains, the arroyos - keep being new, keep reinventing themselves, keep turning over people and faces.

Somehow I don't feel that constant newness anywhere else.

There have been torrential rains in the Northeast and Midwest these last few days. The other night a lightning storm actually prompted a tornado warning in New York City. Indeed, it's raining here in Clio, and parts of Chicago are under four feet of water and being evacuated. The same rain is moving across the peninsula of Michigan now, and we're about to drive into it.

Bring it on.

Pictures 24: General Grant National Memorial and Riverside Church

On our last stop of our pictoral tour of Manhattan, we have made it all the way up to Morningside Heights (122nd Street, to be exact) in Riverside Park, home of General Grant National Memorial, also called Grant's Tomb. Just down the block from Grant's Tomb is the ever-impressive Riverside Church, which we visited in the same trip, so I've included those pictures here as well.

A Civil War hero and America's 18th President, Ulysses S Grant was pretty well-liked among the public - over a million people attended his funeral in 1885. His tomb is the largest tomb in North America - I guess it's like an American pyramid. The national memorial currently houses exhibits in the main room, but an extra pavilion is being built across Riverside Drive to house the exhibits, so that the memorial itself can exist without too much extra distraction. I think this will be a great move, and I'm excited to visit the tomb as it was intended to be: A "simple" monument to Grant and his wife.


What would a new site be without the thumbs-up from Patrick?



19 more images below the jump.

Pictures 23: Federal Hall National Memorial

Call me daft, but a lot of Revolutionary history is just too distant for me to truly grasp. I have known people who get just as jazzed about Revolutionary history as I would about something that happened yesterday, but I just can't do it. I think part of that may be because much Revolutionary history happened in the Northeast, and so much of the Northeast has changed irrevocably since that time, so it's hard to get a sense of what the landscape was really like back then.

That being said, Federal Hall National Memorial was still cool. It's down in the Financial District, just a stone's throw from the New York Stock Exchange, and is the site of George Washington's oath of office. It also originally housed the first Congress, Supreme Court and Executive Branch offices. Must have been a little crowded.


I was here. See? There I am!

7 more images below the jump. Click any one of 'em to make it bigger in Photobucket. Go ahead, click it!

Pictures 22: Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site

There are a few recurring themes that come up as you travel around the Northeast's National Historic Sites and National Monuments, and it's fun to piece them together as you travel along. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has come up a lot (more on him when we get to the Hudson Valley), of course George Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt are three of the big ones.

My first acquaintance with Teddy Roosevelt was at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in Manhattan. Roosevelt (called "Teedie" as a kid) grew up wealthy and weak - he was a small and very unhealthy child, so he often sojourned to the country to help his lungs (he also drank gallons of coffee and smoked cigars when he was about 6 years old onward, but that's another story). As a result, he grew to love the outdoors and became the burly, strong and wilderness-obsessed 26th President that we know him as today.

I really enjoyed this historic site. It is tucked back on 18th Street and blends in seamlessly with the buildings around it - so much so that the rangers there said they have had visitors who tell them, "I've lived on 20th Street my whole life and never knew this was here."

The house had to be entirely reconstructed. Roosevelt lived there until age 14 (that's 1872, for anyone who's keeping track), but after the Roosevelts moved out, the building changed hands many times. It was completely unrecognizable when the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association acquired it after Roosevelt's death in 1919. Over the years, the organization pieced the house back together by calling relatives and friends, painstakingly tracking down pieces of furniture, decorations and art, and somehow figuring out what wallpaper hung in each room and precisely how each room was laid out.

Now, about 90% of the furnishings are original to the family. The entry level is more like a museum exhibit about Teddy Roosevelt, including memorabilia and a collection of political cartoons, and when you take a tour upstairs you get to see the house itself.

Touring this site was awesome. Since the tour groups are small (there were only 5 people in our group), the site is set up so that you can walk right into the reconstructed rooms - they simply ask, "Don't lean on anything," because most of it is original and, if it's not original, it's probably a just-as-old period piece. There is no Plexiglas, no railings, no velvet ropes. I can understand this layout not working so well for larger tour groups and larger homes, but for this situation it was really great.

Without further ado, here are some images. We visited this site on June 17, 2010.


The outside of the building.


Downstairs - in what would have been the basement/kitchen/servants' area back in the day - is the museum-like exhibit of countless documents and artifacts.

21 more images below the jump...