Follow the light

MACKINAW CITY, Mich. – This would be it … a life lived in a lighthouse.

The winds high and constant. The waves hitting so often that each blends into the next, their march ashore a single, continuous roar.

The rear of the cottage, near the road.

This cottage that we're borrowing has faced such winds and listened to such waves for more than 90 years, with success, it seems.  It remains sturdy, well-built and well-tended.  Much like the lighthouses that still circle Lake Michigan.

The cottage and lighthouses are of the same era … when structures up here were built to last, against the worst elements.

Sure, there are signs of renewal at this place. A small patch of floorboards on the front porch looks newer than its neighbor planks. Also, I believe the stairs to the second floor have been replaced – a good thing, considering their steepness.

But beyond that, it’s hard to detect much that has changed.

The cottage sits about 60 feet from the road, which rolls its way south from Mackinaw City along Trail’s End Bay.  The two-story structure is not easy to spot, and when we first arrived we missed the turn. The driveway is very narrow, guarded on both sides by large pines, birches and dense undergrowth. 

Once found, it’s better to back your car in to the drive, because you can’t see up or down the road when you back out.

The front of the cottage, facing the beach.

The cottage is of white clapboard with dark green trim. The roof is standard shingle, though stained from the trees and time.  Outside most windows are thick shutters, which presumably are closed for winter. But in the summer, they are tied open – although last night the clasp on the one nearest my bed had some wiggle room; the wind used the shutter to sporadically knock, like a drunk wanting in.

Entry to the cottage is gained by a back stair, nearest the road, or a front stair, nearest the beach.  Steep stairs seem standard at this place.  Not that they’re insurmountable.  Hardly.  But for once handrails prove handy. We pull ourselves up like we’re hauling in the day’s catch.

The dogs, with no hands, must leap up the steps using momentum to clear the threshold.  Usually it works, though Riley came sliding backward once.  Linus, the more timid climber, would sometimes stop halfway up.  He’d march himself down, then launch himself again.

The back stairs lead to the kitchen door.  A walk through a strange door always inspires first impressions. And the first thought here is of a long step back in time. Dark-stained tongue-and-groove paneling climbs the walls and covers the ceilings. Perhaps ash. The carpentry is superb. The floors feature hardwoods, well-worn but still handsome. The kitchen cabinets are austere but with antique knobs that function.

The Hotpoint ... ice box!

The kitchen is a small space, maybe 10 foot square, with a sink on one side and a green, shoulder-high refrigerator – an old Hotpoint – on the other.  A compact propane stove/oven, coffee maker, ‘80s-ish microwave and a four-slice toaster are stacked near the door.

I remember my folks owned the same kind of Hotpoint when I was in grade school, though it was white, not green. We called it an ice box, not a refrigerator. Its frost-encrusted freezer, about the size of an old milk crate, has room for two ice trays. Its door proudly proclaims, “Frozen Foods.”  A freezer was a big deal then.  So was frozen food.

Open ... what a freezer!

Only when you close the kitchen door do you see the stairs behind it, rising up to the second floor.  There are 14 stairs, with a handrail.  But unlike the other handrails, which are wooden, this one is steel pipe – solidly placed but cold to the touch.

Upstairs there are two rooms, on the north and south. The ceilings and walls are paneled identically to what's downstairs.  Each room features two double beds with inviting, heavy blankets and puffed up pillows.   The windows are a delight, especially those that face the beach; they swing open wide, letting in the smells of lake and pine.

The north bedroom has a special purpose, though.  There, in the middle of the room, stands an obelisk to forgotten days – a white shower stall.

The large windows upstairs.

Not an ultra-modern, ultra-fixtured stall from the latest collection of Kohler or American Standard. No, this metal closet features a single, small showerhead, and it is 1930s-tight – one person only, and that’s if you’ve been minding your diet. 

The stall is so close to one of the beds that a jump from bed to shower takes three feet and as many seconds.

The shower is positioned at such an odd spot because it sits directly above the kitchen’s plumbing.

It’s more evidence that this is a cottage of proud but simple architecture.  Yes, the walls are sturdily built. But unlike most homes that hide plumbing and electrical pathways inside walls – so that they can snake every which way, often to rooms far away – these walls are not hollow.

So the cottage’s pipes and wires are nailed and screwed securely out in the open, on wall and ceiling … like a man’s circulatory system turned inside out.  And the most direct route is the one taken.

Perfectly safe, by the way … and ingeniously simple to maintain.

Back in the kitchen, a closet door stands three feet to the right of the sink … storage for food, perhaps?  Until you open it and discover a toilet and small sink – the cottage’s single bathroom.  So a half-bath, with its other half upstairs.

Like the shower-bed combination, the proximity of sink and toilet offers convenience … say, for the cook who’s boiling a three-minute egg but also must do his business before the timer dings.

Warm and friendly.

Half of the downstairs is the living room, stretching the width of the house with a large fireplace centered on its western wall.  The fireplace is a beauty. Built of large Michigan rocks, it drafts well, even in high winds. Off the southeast corner of the living room is the main bedroom – smaller than those upstairs, with one bed, but with ample windows.

On either side of the fireplace are French doors that open to the front porch.

At last, the porch …. 

It wraps the front of the cottage, offering a broad view of Trail’s End Bay through a thin filter of pines, birches, squat evergreens and tall beach grass. The massive exterior of the rock fireplace sits at the back but in the middle, its diameter like a California redwood.

French doors, one of two sets.

The dogs love this porch; their noses twitch, their eyes glimmer as they spot a gull or chipmunk. We sit on its swing and, with coffee cup at hand, we read or write or just watch the waves tumble in.

And, of course, we watch the sun set, a different artist taking hold each night. Bold, red brush strokes one evening, soft hues of green, blue and deep pink the next.

Finally, there is the broad beach itself, the sand pristine.  You get there through the porch’s screen door, down the stairs, and along a narrow, sandy path that winds its way through the trees and deep growth. 

Though short, the curving trail suggests mystery and memories … 90 years of adventure. 

Up the road sits the old McGulpin lighthouse with its own path to the shore. Its job was to safeguard the ships as they moved through the treacherous Mackinac Straits.

This is how it would be to live there and work there, I think. To exist in a finely crafted structure tested by time, your ears filled by the lake’s immense sound every day, your eyes dancing to its towering white caps. To walk that path.

But also to know that, just short of nightfall, there will be a crimson horizon that must, really must, usher in your own light.

Rock stars

Although I’m writing from Michigan, time away from work means time to catch up on my reporting.

It was only two weeks ago that I was in Bellingham, Wash., visiting daughter Meghan and fiancé Eric.  It was a quick trip over a few days – a plane to Seattle, then the short drive north. 

I’m not sure why I’ve had this traveler’s itch lately.  But itching it … fly fishing last month with Zach in Colorado and now traveling to our nation’s most northwestern corner … felt mighty good.

The hike begins.

You see, there was a task at hand.  Meghan, who is doing graduate work in geology at Western Washington University, is embarking on a research project.

At its core, the job is to monitor the movement of rocks and bluffs along the shore of the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve north of Bellingham. 

And here’s the remarkable part:  Meghan will do it by collecting a family of rocks, drilling tiny holes in them, inserting in each a tiny device, then sealing them back up.  On the three bluffs, meanwhile, she’ll fix three permanent markers – a giant “X” on each hill, essentially – from which she can measure shifts in the bluffs’ walls. 

She will monitor this movement by using a massive LIDAR machine – a box-like unit that employs laser methods to track distance.  I imagine something akin to the fiery rays that emerged from the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones’ first movie.  But I trust it’s safer than that. ("Don't look!")

This is serious business, though. Such studies of shore movement tie into the current debate about global warming, rising oceans and coastal erosion.

Eric has his own research project … at Mount Baker, the towering volcano-formed mountain east of Bellingham.  He reports that his efforts have been slowed by this year’s unusually deep snows, which have yet to melt.

So this weekend we’ll focus on Meghan’s.  In our next visit, next month, we’ll visit Mount Baker.

To the beach!

So I flew in Thursday night, and Friday morning the three of us were up early … grabbing donuts and coffee at Rocket Donuts, then driving Meghan’s Jeep north to the Whitehorn Point.

We were to hike in to the Point, round up the rocks, pack them in backpacks, then hike them out and eventually deliver them to the geology building at WWU.  That’s where the drilling would be done.

Any hike into Washington woods is a step into a lush, verdant world of giant ferns, thick, moss-laden trees and damp coolness.  Slugs of various varieties inch across the path leaving their telltale trail of stickiness behind.  Birds chirp rather than sing, it seems,  their calls muffled by the dense forest.

The hike in was quick.  The last 50 yards took us down a steep hill where we spilled out of the green to the beach below.

And there we saw the objects of Meghan’s affection: Rocks … a bumpy blanket  stretching north and south.  And not just small guys but big ones, too. Some emerged  from the beach like surfacing whales; others towered in water just yards from our reach.

Rocks everywhere!

We pulled off our packs, and Meghan gave us instructions.

“We want them no smaller than 2 millimeters in length or width, and no larger than 15,” she said.  “And get different sizes.  We don’t want them all the same size.”

Oh, and one other important point:  Don’t grab the most interesting or attractive, even though that’s your tendency, she said.  After all, the rocks will return to the beach at some point with their devices enclosed.  You don’t want one or two of them snapped up by a hiker and carted off to, say, Portland, San Francisco or, heaven forbid, New York City.

Decisions, decisions!

We made quick work of the collecting, and Meghan fine-tuned our catch by splitting them into three groups – small, medium and large – and casting out those she deemed less suitable.

We packed them in our packs, but before hiking out we walked the beach some.  Much as a Washington woods teems with life, so do its beaches.  The low tide revealed sea anemones clinging to rocks. Gulls flew overhead. Seals were not far away.

One of Meghan's bluffs.

We visited Meghan’s three bluffs, and she explained the challenge of monitoring their  movement.  How do you fix a permanent marker on something ever-shifting? But that’s for her to work out, she said, and will probably involve conversations with the land owners up above.

We grabbed our packs, now heavy with the chosen rocks, and headed back, arriving safely at WWU. There we deposited the rocks.

This wouldn’t be our only foray into nature this weekend.  Hardly.  That afternoon, we also visited Deception Pass, the blue-green channel of seawater whose entry is guarded by Deception Island.

Deception Island.

If you recall, I wrote about Meghan’s idea of holding their upcoming wedding on Deception Island.  It’s a fine idea, assuming a flotilla and wet suits are in order.

But we found an intriguing alternative. We hiked up Bowman Hill and discovered an isolated beach within walking distance from a parking lot.  Deception Pass, with its splendid bridge, lies to the west; Deception Island is a sentry to the west.

Whether that will be the location for the big event requires more assessment

Meghan tells of a place for the wedding; Eric looks!

Meantime, we circled along the cliffs, emerald blue waters always within eyesight.  Far below we could see scuba divers scouting the islands, and a few boats leaving v-shaped wakes at their sterns.  And at the western-most side of the hill, we heard a sharp “Slap!”  echo off the bluff. Then another.

“Slap!”

It was a mystery noise, until we saw two seals at play, their tails slamming the water, sending the hard sound bouncing off the waves.

It was a good day: rocks and research in the morning, wedding planning in the afternoon.

Tomorrow we would do some serious hiking, up – very much up – the Pacific Northwest Trail to Oyster Dome. 

Happily, I lived to tell about it.

To see photos of this day’s trip, click here for the rock party, and click here for the walk near Deception Pass.. Watch the blog for a second post soon: Tales from Oyster Dome: “Are we there yet?!”

Heaven's other corner

MACKINAW CITY, Mich. – We’re in Michigan again, although this time a bit farther north, near the city where the Mackinac Bridge connects Michigan’s Lower and Upper peninsulas. It is a massive structure that divides the sky, although its important purpose is to connect this state’s south and north.

No other state is cut in half the way Michigan is.  So it’s no surprise that the bridge’s designers made this link stately, grand, a visual and architectural splendor.

We came here by way of our former cottage on Glen Lake, about two and a half hours to the southwest.  It still stands, although we sold it to the National Park Service nearly two years ago.   We leased it back for one year, and last October we vacated it, pulling and tugging and packing up more than 35 years of memories from within its simple red exterior and ash interior walls.

The Park Service is to knock it down this year.  We’ve found that the Park Service is slow, methodical … what was supposed to have been done soon after June is still undone in mid August.  Word now from neighbors is that the cottage will be leveled after Labor Day.

So we stopped by one last time, to see how the cottage looked.  We both fought sadness, but I couldn’t stop my perception:  The cottage seemed shrunken, fragile, much the way all of us will look when our time is nearly up.  Perhaps it was the lack of fresh paint, or how the usually well-tended flowers and shrubs were wild, unkempt. 

Or maybe it was the grass circling the place.  Usually neatly trimmed, green and lush, it had gone to seed … a foot tall in places, the wind off the lake bending it into waves like the water itself.

The dogs loved its thickness, rolled in it.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about it – at least at first. Its tallness made the cottage seem … diminished.

But I’ve predicted here that, in the end, knocking down the cottage would be a good thing.  The National Park Service guards our treasured parks well, and it’s an honor to see our small piece of property return to its natural state, to permanently become part of the bigger Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.

So as sad as this day could have been, I took heart.  And it helped that growing amid the tall stalks of grass was an amazing array of wildflowers – bright, perfect purples and yellows and whites.  This, I thought, is a stunning preview of the land’s return to what was original, natural, wild and wonderful.  And it happened so quickly.  It will continue so.

“I’m ready … it’s time for new things,” I told Cindy, who wiped away some tears. 

We climbed into the car, the dogs jumping ahead of us. Riley was wet from a swim in the lake.  We drove out the drive and up the hill toward Empire – for the first time ever we didn’t look back – and headed east to Traverse City.

Once through Traverse City, the new began.  Sure, we’d been north of Traverse City before, along Michigan 31.  But never like this; we looked with fresh eyes at what was different from what we’d known. 

And there is much.  Charlevoix, an old resort town, is a bustling harbor of quaint shops and ships of all sizes.  Petosky, founded by a Presbyterian minister, boasts stately Victorian and gingerbread houses on its hills overlooking the vast blue expanse of Traverse Bay.

And then there’s Mackinaw City. While tourism feeds the commercialism here, with a mix of a pedestrian mall, street arcades and even a nightly laser-light show, beyond the city the quiet bond between Nature and man again takes hold.

We found such a place west of town, atop a low beachside hill on Lake Michigan’s Trail's End Bay.  The water is but 30 yards from our screened-in porch, where I’m writing this now.

There’s a whole other post to do describing this cottage that we’ve rented.  While we considered our Glen Lake cottage to be basic, this makes basic seem 22^nd Century.  Its owner, Ross, tells us it was the first cottage built along this shore, in the ‘20s, by a railroad company that saw profit in bringing Michigan’s southern residents north.

It is old, but that is its charm.  So more on this place later.  (Although here’s a teaser: While the toilet sits just three feet from the kitchen sink – a remarkable convenience – a shower requires 14 stair steps nearly straight up.)

Meantime, tonight, we cooked in the cottage’s small kitchen, sat after dinner on this porch enjoying Lake Michigan’s westerly breezes, then carried the same chairs that we used so often on our Glen Lake dock to the big lake’s eastern edge.

There we watched a startling sunset, and hoped anew that, knowing Glen Lake is Heaven’s coveted corner, it can’t be – must not be – the only one. 

The river runs through us

WALDEN, Colo. – I mentioned that this town has two restaurants.  The previous night for dinner it was the Antler Inn.  For breakfast, though, Zach and I preferred the Moose Creek Café.

There’s a theme here, clearly.  Brand your eatery to the big outdoors.

The good news is that neither establishment was serving prairie-dog pot-stickers.

I could spend a whole post describing the café.  The food was great.  The wait staff consisted of two young, enthusiastic German women (I think German) – perhaps sisters – who were polite to a fault and quick to deliver our order of basic eggs, sausage or bacon and toast.  In their downtime, they’d huddle in a booth and happily chatter back and forth in their native tongue.  

Neither of us knew what they were saying, but it was clear they were darn content living, and serving food, in Walden.

But I digress.

On come the chest waders.

Day 2 had arrived. 

We met Mike after breakfast at the fly shop. Yesterday we learned the basics of fly fishing under Mike’s tutelage at a couple of high-elevation lakes.  They were perfect classrooms, and Mike the teacher was tolerant.

The only risk to Zach and me was snaring each other with a wayward hook.  Or stepping in bear poop.

We avoided both, though the opportunities were endless.

Today, though, we would step into the fast-moving waters of the Norris River, a mountain stream that tumbles into the valley of the Headwaters Ranch southwest of Walden.

That required some new equipment.

We moved to the back of the shop, and Mike pointed us to a rack of chest waders.

“What’s your size?” he asked.

Zach ready to go.

Chest waders are in the hip-boot family, but they remind me of what Ed Grimley, Martin Short’s character, would wear on Saturday Night Live.  You know … pants pulled way above the belt line.

You see, chest waders are like Rubbermaid gloves that reach your armpits. But in this case, because they’re for the legs, they run vertical, reaching from your toes to, well, your chest.  There are shoulder straps, too, much like the two straps found with bib overalls.

There’s also a belt that you cinch in the middle, around your waist.  Mike did that; Zach and I, for some reason, did not.  That decision made us look a bit chubby. Or at least me.

Mike's boots ... made for walkin'

Oh, and there also are heavy boots.  The boots, like hiking boots, slip over your rubber-clad feet. They can wander the water’s depths while your feet remain dry.

We hopped in Mike’s truck and found the Norris.  We quickly donned our gear. 

Rubber-clad now, I felt like a human-size Gumby ... though my abbreviated walk was more that of Neil Armstrong on the moon than the super-slide of Pokey's buddy.

Mike got our fly rods ready; I slipped my camera bag on my back and we wandered along – and eventually into – the stream.

Here our tactics changed from the prior day.  This water moved fast, so you used the current to carry your fly downstream; the stream featured deep pockets, and shallow spots, too.  And eddies, where the water seemed to stop.

The water was so shallow in spots that I couldn’t fathom that fish lurked below.  But Mike said otherwise.  And so we let our lines go.

Looking for the sweet spot.

Now, I confess I was a bit impatient.  It reminded me of Christmas morning as a youngster … I’d see one present, but then I’d spy a slightly bigger one, and I’d abandon the first for the second.  And then leave the second for the third.  And never open a single one until reason returned.

So it was along the Norris.  I’d spy a decent, deep spot.  But then I’d peer up stream and see a second spot, even deeper.  “There must be fish there!” So I’d give the first spot only a few turns, then move on to the next.  And the next.  But I’d get no bites. Not even a nibble.

My restlessness meant I’d left Zach and Mike a good distance down river.

Mike eventually came 'round the bend and spotted me.

“Zach got one,” he said, matter of factly.

“Really!” I thought. “So there are fish here.”

Zach lands one!

I was chastened.  Because then I learned the hard lesson of the soft art of fly fishing.  Oh, patience is required, of course.  But that’s expected of any fisherman, whether using flies, worms or spin-cast lures.

No, the bigger lesson was the moment – to savor being there, to hear the water, to see the sun’s rays shatter on the river’s surface and move atop the ripples like a thousand fireflies. The fish are bit players in that experience.

Accomplish that state of mind, and the fish will come.  Or not.  Who cares?

“You don’t need to catch any stinking fish,” a wise friend posted to me on Facebook during our drive west. “Just enjoy the journey.”

There were three lessons I learned:

-       Face the flow: When crossing the current in chest waders, face the current and shuffle your feet from side to side.  Don’t walk perpendicular to it like you would crossing a street, because this invites the current to push your down-river leg wide. The risk is that you do the splits, and your chest waders fill like a water balloon. And who knows where you’d float to, assuming you'd float at all. Remember: Like problems, face the river head-on.

-       Beware of what’s unseen: Here I thought the primary danger was the rapid water. But I ambled ashore to get around one bend, and I stepped into an abyss … a swampy mix of black water and vegetation that swallowed my left leg up to my waist.  My right leg remained high and dry, but now I looked like a pretzel.  Somehow I pulled my leg out of the ooze, accompanied by a big “thuuuuuck!” sound, before the boys caught up to me.  Good thing, too. I saved Mike the trouble of hitching one end of a rope to my middle and the other to his truck and popping me out like a cork.

-       Leave the phone behind:  About half way up the river, I got a text message.  Typically, that’s not a big deal.  But when you’re so dumb that you leave your smart phone in pants during a fishing trip, it becomes a big deal.  Thinking it might have been an emergency, I first tried to force my arm inside the waders. But the waders were now  a sausage casing. No wiggle room.  So I unstrapped the waders, peeled them down to my knees, grabbed the phone and … saw that my credit card company, Capital One, was concerned that charges were now mysteriously showing up in Colorado.  “Duh, you dull-witted Vikings … it’s because I’m in Colorado!”  I wanted to toss my card and the phone into the Norris.  But that would’ve been dumb and dumber.  At least the phone part.

But interestingly the biggest lesson was that, as with much in life, I succeeded when I didn’t try so hard. Sure, in the end, Zach caught more fish than I.   But the fish did come after I relaxed a bit; I caught my share, though by that time I didn’t care so much.  The journey, you know ….

And being with Zach in such a setting?  Incredible.

From left, Zach, Curt and Mike ... oh, and Bear.

That night we returned to the Antler Inn and shared dinner with Mike and Zach’s other friend, Curt.  We finished with a picture in front of a stuffed bear. And the next morning, Zach and I ate our last breakfast at the Moose Creek Café – eggs over easy with German konversation in the background.

And then Zach and I headed east to Denver, following closely the swift-moving Poudre River along Colorado's Highway 14.

We saw six moose on the way, an antlered clan gathered in a valley.

We started the day at Moose Creek Café.  Then less than an hour later we saw six moose by a creek. What’s Zen in German?  I think “Zen.” 

Doesn’t matter.  Life’s like that.

For more photos of this leg of the journey, click here.