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.