Wake to the Glory
Rives Junction, Michigan
michigan
True North
The trip has me thinking about growing older and the kind of life I’d like to live, even though retirement is a ways off. I have all kinds of thoughts about owning an orchard and living quietly by a lake. Up here, both may be possible.
Pictured Rocks
During our holiday, we spent time inside and outside the park, exploring the wooded paths down sandstone bluffs as well as cruising past the cliffs along Lake Superior. Both were scenic and humbling.
It’s a long drive, and a long boat ride, from one end of the park to the other. Along the way, we tried to take in as much as we could.
On the cruise, we sat next to a German couple, the guy had one of those big Nikon rigs with a couple of the big zoom lenses. I did the best I could with my aging (but still handy) Canon EOS M with a 22mm (35mm equiv.) lens.
God’s Country
Cross the bridge into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and you come into a different world.
Vast stretches of nothing. Straight, empty highways for as far as you can see. Water and forests and wetlands surrounded by three Great Lakes. Quiet and old and wild.
After our trip to Door County, Wisconsin, last year, we wanted a similar upper Midwest experience. We picked Munising as our home base, with a little cabin out in the middle of the Hiawatha National Forest, and ventured out into God’s Country to see all of that different world stuff.
We started the trip halfway there, in St. Ignace, right across the Mackinac Bridge from Mackinaw City. Like its neighbor across Lake Michigan, St. Ignace is a tourist town, but much quieter, and much less gaudy. After one night, the sun came up over Lake Michigan and we made the long trek through the U.P. to see Whitefish Point, sticking out into Lake Superior, and then on to our cabin in the woods.
Each day was an adventure – and a drive, since nothing was close by up here. That meant a lot of time in the car, and a lot of entertaining little kids, but once we got out and into the fresh air, we did our best to tire them out.
We were all tired. That was the point.
Around the Riverbend
Manistique, Michigan
Had a great vacation in the Upper Peninsula last week. More to come.
Bio Dome II
The light can fool you in winter. Sure, it looks sunny and bright, but step outside this artificial atmosphere and you’ll pay the price.
The midwest, in all its January glory.
We’ll watch from inside the terrariums, taking our time in both the arid and humid man-made climates.
Bio Dome
How better to beat the mid winter blues in Michigan than to travel to a jungle and a desert?
That’s what we did when the big snow storm came: a day for sledding in the driveway, and a day for heading out to Hidden Lake Gardens and enjoying the bio domes.
Hidden Lake is truly a hidden gem – out in the middle of nowhere, winding paths and lake trails, plants and trees of all kinds. The bio domes offer a desert environment, a lush tropical environment, and a simple greenhouse. Walk inside, and you’re somewhere else.
It didn’t feel like January in here.
Textures of the Season
Out here, where the roads are named after the family farms, we slide into the quiet season.
It’s all warm colors here at Adams Farm: yellows and reds and oranges. A few greens, but mostly the rustic hue of autumn.
The textures are everywhere, from smooth pumpkins and apples to mottled squashes of every different shape and size.
We’re crazy about the foods of autumn. I could live on apples and squash, while the kids transform into sticky hornet magnets with cider and donuts. We wipe our hands of cinnamon and sugar, we feel for the rigid pumpkin stems, and we toss the bumpy buttercup from crate to wagon.
This is what we live for – the texture of the season.
Bright Walls
It’s almost like all this is a bit too cool for Jackson.
International mural artists? Tons of people downtown? Beauty where once there was empty brick?
It all happened, thanks to the Bright Walls mural festival, this past week. But really, it started months ago with one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t go anywhere in town without seeing that sunrise-and-brick logo. The campaign worked, too, because people – both Jackson natives and out-of-towners – showed up in droves, slowing down traffic in an otherwise sleepy downtown.
Maybe it’s obvious, but here, right in front of all of us, was the power of art on display. It was a spectacle, sure, but it was also a reason to celebrate.
A reason to believe.
Hobbit Place
This is usually our springtime ritual, heading to the Hobbit Place, grabbing flowers and thinking about landscape decorations.
For this year, we went full autumn: mums, pumpkins, decorative gourds – the whole thing. As a Tolkien fan, I love the greenhouse’s name. As a person who cares about their yard, I appreciate their selection.
Tick tock goes the beat of the year. On and on we slide into fall.
Labor Day
It was about 7:45 p.m. Saturday when I swore for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
That first time, it was because Michigan, early on, was looking paltry against Notre Dame, and the weatherman kept interrupting the football game to tell us a thunderstorm was heading toward Jackson.
After that, I swore because a tornado was making a mess of our neighborhood – just 15 minutes later.
The second time I swore was because I watched a giant oak limb fall into our street, snapping the power lines and cutting our electricity. I don’t remember what exactly I said, but it was enough for my wife to spring into action, grabbing the kids and heading to the basement.
After that, it was a blur: torrential rain, downed limbs, no power, giant trees snapped in two, and a little crowd of drenched birds, shivering and frightened, gathered around a spared maple.
With the power gone, we made the best of our quiet night in the house. The next morning, we woke up to a new view of the sky: those majestic oaks that shaded our house were gone, as was a hunk of the magnolia in the back yard. It covered our dining room window, making it feel like we were in the middle of a hedgerow.
We were lucky. Our neighbors got the worst of it, losing most of their front yard trees and a few others – plus it was their power line I watched get cut in two. A block down, a street fell across the street, smashing a Cutlas Sierra. Another oak fell on top of a house, the trunk teetering like a seesaw. Strangely, a block or two in either direction, it looked like no storm had come through at all. Just our luck.
So we spent the next two days cleaning up from the confirmed tornado. Much like some John Mellenkamp song, we were small town people helping our neighbors, chipping in with a rake or a chainsaw when we could.
Labor Day, indeed.
