Confessions – Motherlife

It’s not the Pacific

This is what I learned about the Great Lakes when I was in primary school.

H.O.M.E.S.

They meant as much to me as Mary’s Violet Eyes Make Johnny Sit Up Nights (Period). They were just as far away, distant, and unfamiliar.

The lakes I knew were usually small and too warm and slimy on the bottom with lots of salamanders and newts. Or inaccessible. Think Crater Lake.

Then we moved to Michigan. People who lived here said being at Lake Michigan was like being at the ocean. I was skeptical. Perhaps a tad more. Scoff-tical. A bit of salty pride mixed in there with a dash of defensive homesickness and a sprinkling of beloved memories of frozen legs and Dad’s big hands holding mine fast against enormous waves trying to knock me backward and pull me forward and loving every alive second of it, perhaps?

A lake is not an ocean.

My family used to go to the Oregon Coast for vacation, driving down the Columbia River Gorge, through the mountainous Coast Range of Oregon and at last arriving at the Pacific, rimmed with rocks and tide pools. It was so cold. The waves were enormous and loud, but once my entire body went numb, they were exciting. The wind whipped sand into my hair and eyes, my wind breaker’s sleeves flapping like an untrimmed sail.

My Dad bought kites for my brother and me one year when I was about 12. Some days were actually too windy to fly them, the days I could stand at a 30-degree angle into the wind without falling over.

If I pulled on one of the two strings of my rainbow kite it would tumble and flip to the left or right, swooping like a giant bird. Dad bought them from one of my favorite Seaside stores. It was filled with kites and windsocks, whirligigs and anything that would dance and turn in the wind. My brother got a blue and gray striped one that matched the sea and sky.

At the ocean, we ate too much taffy, played Dark Tower and card games, listened to the waves crash all night, spend hours carving sand into castles and dragons or digging holes big enough to climb into. No sunscreen needed. The ocean was so big and the sand so broad, I could look out into the ocean and my mind couldn’t hold it, had to clear.

This was the coast. This was an ocean. The Ocean.

There were whales out there, Humpbacks and Grays, rolling onto their sides, singing to each other. There were Puffins flapping in circles above Haystack rock, otherworldly anemones the palest red that sucked every tentacle in faster than I could blink an eye when gently poked, my finger dissolving into their squishy/sticky belly? Mouth? Buried clams squirting water up through perfectly round holes in the sand. Crabs and their crabby parts. Enormous ropes of stranded bull kelp made of some alien material impossible to break but so fun to play with.

Washington life was filled with riffs of the Pacific. Long Beach, cold but beautiful. Puget Sound, calmer, with mountains on the rim, ferries, and the two sea otters I’ve seen visiting the shore with their favorite rocks. The strait of Juan de Fuca and the Salish Sea, the San Juans, more open, stronger tides, Orca, sharper rocks, sea lions, and seals. San Francisco’s coast, urban and littered, but brighter somehow. El Salvador, hot, with palm trees and pelicans flying back and forth and shells in shapes I’ve never seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.

And now this lake. Lake Michigan.

H.O.M.E.S.

A year after moving to Michigan, we got in the car and drove north to Sleeping Bear Dunes. It was October, and the dunes were so much colder and bigger than I’d imagined. I carried our 2-year-old daughter to the top and looked out over the lake, the lake so big that it had no shore on the other side.

We hiked to Sleeping Bear Point and there she was below us, Lake Michigan. So blue she was almost teal. Two islands in the distance, the bear cubs. I was moved by the depth of the water, by the legend of mother bear, by the enormity that was as mind clearing as the Pacific, but less loud, slightly less intimidating.

Don’t get me wrong. I would never underestimate her or any of the Great Lakes.

Six thousand shipwrecks in the last two centuries, 1,500 in Lake Michigan. The winds can whip up across the water in no time and the largest ship to ever sink, the Edmund Fitzgerald, wasn’t 100 years ago. No, it was 1975.

This was unsalted water. This was a lake. The Lake.

The next year we drove a state’s worth of miles to get to the Upper Peninsula for the first time. And for the first time in a long time I breathed in the sweet, spicy smell of stands of pine trees and saw the familiar purple swaths of lupine. We were on our way to Marquette, and little did I know that while my husband spent his hours at a conference giving speeches, the girls and I would spend hours on the rocky beaches giving chances to the lake to befriend us. And she did.

At Eagle Harbor’s beach I watched five ladies in low beach chairs and swimsuits lay under the intense, but disappointingly cold, rays of spring sun, soaking up every thermal unit it provided. They all held books in one hand, fly swatters in the other, hovering over their bare skin, which I found odd, until the flies found me. Ah.

This was Lake Superior.

H.O.M.E.S.

We had driven far enough north to reach the end of the acronym. Gichi-gami was blue and bright and the coldest water that had ever embraced my body. There was a dock out there in Eagle Harbor, one that seemed easy enough to swim to, so I launched myself into the water, swam two strokes, and launched right back out. I hadn’t expected a polar plunge in the middle of May! My husband put our oldest daughter on his back, determined to swim there, but I warned him he would cramp up before he hit five strokes, and he quickly turned back. We were all breathless and laughing and swatting flies. An eagle flew overhead.

Copper Harbor, as far as you can get, and full of beautiful, smooth, speckled red rocks. It was a shoreline like nothing I’d ever seen. There were no tidepools, but there were rocky outcroppings everywhere to climb and explore. I traced my fingers and toes along the contours of the lake, almost intimately, in a way the Pacific does not allow.

And almost every summer since we moved to Michigan, we have been lucky enough to know someone who has one of those “cabins” or “cottages” every Michigander steals away to. On a fire lane in a stand of old growth woods it perches on metal poles, yes poles that reach down into the sandy dune and, I hope, meet some kind of sturdier substrate.

Each year the sand is washed away even further as the slow rise of the Lake marches towards these cabins, beating away the grasses and trees that hold houses in place. There is some debate as to how to save these cabins from the fingers of the lake. Some have built enormous retaining walls, a fast and almost adrenaline induced response to the loss of dune and home. But some research points to the lake’s long wisdom of reappropriating the sand in ways that save the dunes in the long term. Cutting off access to more sand could exacerbate the problem in the long term.

The lakes have been here for 20,000 years, left over from the sea, the ancient sea, the ocean of coral and fish. They hold 20% of earth’s freshwater, these lakes, lapping at the shore.

Does it have waves? Yes. Tides? Not really. Salt? No. Sea otters? No. Seals or sea lions? No and no.

But there are loons and sailboats. Plover and whitefish. And once, while camping at Wilderness Park, I caught sight of a wiigwaas jiimaan early in the morning out on Big Stone Bay.

Home.

Drummond

Little spider with eight long legs, so delicate, so skilled, and unsnappable. What are you made of? Sticks and stones and used up cell phones? Sugar and spice and leftover rice? Or some other brambular molecule that sticks to surfaces as if gravity were an after breath and my skin the surface of a planet.

She is gone, silently. I cannot find her now. But here is my tent, settled close to the beach on Drummond Island. Dromainn. “High ground” in Gaelic. Drummond. A Scottish name for “ridge.”

At the end of the summer, just after our girls went back to school, something drew me here, back to the land of islands, of watery channels of every kind, big and small, rushing through dunes overgrown with grasses. The northeastern most tip of Michigan, and the very beginning of more islands. Pretty soon, if I kept island hopping, the North Channel would greet me, then Georgian Bay. My eyes rest over the water of Pigeon Cove, just west of Rabbit Bay and south of Sturgeon Bay.

In front of me are several dots of tiny, treed islands. Like the back of a punch needled rug, multilayered textures of variegated green travel all the way to the edge of the water.

I long for a paddle board! To set out then set foot on them. Someday.

I am silent as a wish, but the lake is not.

The lake is rarely quiet. It rolls and rolls and rolls onto the shore. Sometimes, in the evening, I try to will it to slow down and rest, but it never stops moving, never stops coming. Water is like that. A power. A force. Wind is like that, too, and when you are sailing (I’m learning), both have a say, both are part of the equation. Only a sailor never asks the water or wind to be different. She trims her sails and guides the tiller accordingly, using what she is given to go where she needs, or wants, to go. Or choosing to wait until a better day. Fighting wind and water is rarely a good idea. I suppose burning oil overcomes their authority eventually, but only with great effort, and only for so long, not forever.

So, what am I waiting for here, silently, on the shore?

I am waiting for wild.

Where is the wild in me, and can I give her permission to come home, to set sail, to make her way across the water from the island I have banished her to? My teenage diaries are crammed with words about succeeding, overcoming obstacles with fierce singularty, lines and lines of disciplined hours with only one destination in mind, and she? She was left on the other side of the island, that undisciplined, carefree, irresponsible, in tune, wild and wonderful girl. Sometimes she would emerge in my moments, but with rules attached like ropes, so she turned to anger and screamed at me, and so I starved us both in fear. She waited. She is what I am made of. I knew we would need to meet again one day.

The winds are up my dear. Hold on. Do not fear. I am just learning to set sail.

Is that a cat?

It sits on our deck, huge and dare I say looming, eyeing our two actual cats through the sliding glass door, its little paws resting contentedly on its light brown belly, perfectly balanced on its back legs and long, gloriously flowing tail, waiting very insistently for something….for food.

It is the biggest squirrel I have ever seen.

It is not at all like the ground squirrels, or gray diggers as we call them, ubiquitous in Eastern Washington. Those squirrels do not live in trees, but in rocky outcrops and underground tunnels dug entirely too close to the septic tank’s main line. My Mom once hired a high schooler to eradicate said gray digger from our garden by “local means.”

Oh yes, he came, with his hunting license, his hunter’s orange, his rifle, and a lawn chair, sat quiet as a cat for at least two hours on our deck, his back to the house, watching the stone garden wall where the gray diggers were known to idle on warm rocks after stuffing their bellies with strawberries, and when the gun went off, “BAM!!” it scared us all ****less. Mom paid him. He packed up.

The next day, two more gray diggers sprouted from that same rock.

No, this “cat” is the eastern fox squirrel—brash, bold, beautiful, and as big as a cat. It’s as if an artist took a brush and blended the deepest shades of brown, tan, and rusted orange into one. Sometimes they drape themselves over our deck railing and sleep, waiting for someone to paint them. I’ve recently learned there is a name for this. It’s called “splooting.”

There are other squirrels in Michigan. Red and eastern gray squirrels (which include the black ones, somehow), and Michigan’s northern and southern flying squirrels (though I have never seen one) flitting in the treetops of our backyard and flirting with my newly bloomed tulips. I fire-walled those bulbs in the fall with black netting hidden under fallen leaves, fed them with bone meal and brought them through the last frosts of spring with burlap blankets, only to discover their superb, rich, red blooms decapitated one morning by hungry squirrels.

There are plenty of “local means” in Michigan that I could call.

A Michigan Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist had this to say in January, “It is not like anything you can get in the store, and it just has a very unique, light taste but kind of a nutty flavor in it.” (Detroit Free Press)

One day, longing for freedom from mothering and hoping to fill that hollow spot that needed my mother nature, I went to a patch of woods near our house. A rhythmic gnawing snatched my ear, and in the crook of a maple branch sat a fox squirrel. She held a pine cone in her clever, furry fingers, and chewed the seeds and spit the chaff out the side of her mouth, which was turned up in a kind of sideways crescent. Eye level with me, happy to let me watch the bright brown fur that outlined her eyes, the perfectly shaped tail that exactly mirrored the curve of her back, her thin lips, moving so nimbly and fast that the pine cone came apart in a blur of precision, leaving shreds behind like leaves on the trail until just a cone-cob remained.

She chattered at me, loudly. I had watched long enough.

Watching squirrels, the Iroquois story goes, taught people how to tap trees. Robin Kimmerer, a mother, plant ecologist and writer, tells the story in her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” Squirrels were hungry, and so were people. It was the hungry time—the end of winter and the beginning of spring—so squirrels gnawed at tree branches with their spile-like teeth and licked the sap that seeped out while it flowed up the outer and inner bark from the tree’s underground “root” cellar. Last year’s sunshine for this year’s life.

The squirrel-tapped sap froze on the surface and then—sublimation. It was so cold that water in the sap transformed directly into a gas, leaving a bead of sweeter sap the squirrels returned to for food.

Kimmerer describes how Native Americans around the Great Lakes used long, hollowed out logs to sublimate sap on a large scale. They poured sap into the shallow channel so it would freeze. Then, they would chip out water that was now ice, distilling sap with cold instead of heat to save precious fuel.

Sublimation.

This is the second year that we have tapped a tree in our backyard. Can’t get much more Michigan than the simple fact that we even thought about doing it. And a Silver Maple, no less, not even a sugar one.

As the smoke from our fire curled into our neighbor’s backyard, he did not miss a beat. “Boiling sap?” It does smell delicious. Our arch was rudimentary. The sap, smoky. Ten gallons of sap, 5 hours of solid burning, and 1 pint of syrup. We were as excited as kids when we poured it on pancakes and used it in cocktails. We live in a city of 50,000 people, and our neighborhood is full of maple trees and squirrels.

An urban sugar bush.

Everything is flowing, the tree sap, the blood in my heart, the Red Cedar River, the stories about people and squirrels who lived here for thousands of years before we did, and my gradual understanding of where my family lives, eats, and watches squirrels.

Nothing is still.

Especially not the over-sized squirrel sitting on my deck that destroyed my tulips and taught people how to tap trees.

The Marvelous Buffer of Time…

I notice, has worked to absorb and redistribute the last two years of pandemic shock waves.

Ebb and flow

In the fall of 2021, we dropped our girls off at their first day of school after a harried summer, but I swear I had just picked them up from their last day of school, which was a hair’s breadth away from their first day back at school after nearly a year of virtual school. The student’s excited voices and first-day-of-school smiles muffled by masks.

Low tide of loss

It feels like so much time has passed since my Dad passed, but it is the same two years layered on top of the girls’ interrupted school routine. Three summers, two winters, already, without him. The grief no longer crashes down on me. I pick up memories of Dad as I walk through a day like we used to pick up the sand dollars he loved on the Oregon and Washington coasts. Sand dollars are slime-fuzzy purple when alive, white as bone when they are not. They are easier to find than petoskey stones, but no less wonderful.

Wave swells

The cats aged, and the kids, and the chicken. I thought she was going to lay her last egg, so to speak, but she must have heard me say that out loud ’cause she perked (pecked?) back up and is still going strong. The garden has another two years of wild iterations. At the end of August, tall and stemmy, reaching out to bumble bees, smelling of anise hyssop. Now in 2022, two new apple trees cushoined in snow.

Soothing lake waves

The pandemic left our calendar hatch wide open, inviting friends from Ohio back into our lives. We met at Shavehead Lake. The startling name fails to keep ethereal swans away, or the people at the campground who brought our meals to the cabin each day and stocked our fire pits with gasoline-soaked wood chips. Kids tangled arms and blankets. We jumped into Shavehead Lake in late summer (warm), fall (still warm), and early spring (shockingly cold).

Then camping in Wilderness Park in June. Drive north until you get to the bridge, but just before crossing it, turn left like a troll and end up at Stone Bay. I took naps on the beach, grasses rustling, with beach spiders of every shape and size scuttling across endless games of tic-tac-toe in the sand.

And later that year, many trips to Lake Lansing, more to Lake Michigan, Grand Traverse Bay…as the pandemic waves came and receded, Michigan’s water bodies soothed the blows, provided days where I didn’t think about a virus or a mask because

I was on the water,

buffered by waves and time,

and by this last marvelous thing.

There were moments, days, I got angry with people who, during a pandemic in which hundreds of thousands have died, did not wear a mask in the simplest of public situations: a rest stop along Hwy 127, going north for solo camping on Drummond Island. I cursed at them under my mask. Glared holes into their maskless faces. Blamed them for the never ending worry of sending my kids to school without a vaccine, for stressing health care workers to the breaking point, for not considering the larger picture, the human landscape.

I fumed all the way to Detour where a ferry would take me across St. Marys River to an island, an island away from people. I got out of the car, stretched, tried to shake off my anger. Checked the ferry fare on a large board at the dock, decided not to buy food from a small food truck parked nearby, and was flooded with memories of all those ferries I took to Lopez Island, Washington, so many ferry lines like this and so many mis-remembered ferry schedules. I said goodbye to a boyfriend from Seattle that I had just broken up with on his way to miss the only ferry off of the island that day…A long night. A long time before this pandemic.

“Have you been on a ferry before?” he startled me from his Dodge pickup. Carharts, no mask, the kind of person I was recently furious with but also genuinely devastated by. My grief for people dying each day of Covid I absolutely laid at the feet of people who drove a pickup and wore boots like those.

“Um, yes, but not this one.”

“$20 round trip, and you can pay on the ferry.”

“Thanks. Do you live on the island or…?” Being nice on the outside, gritting teeth under my mask.

“Yes ma’am. I commute from Drummond almost every day for work.”

“That’s a nice commute though. I’ve never been on the island, but I’m thinking of camping there tonight and tomorrow. Do you recommend any good camping sites?”

“If it were me, I’d just drive into the woods and find a spot, but Yacht Haven marina has showers and a nice lawn you can pitch your tent on by the water.”

A little wary, I decided to stick to my original plan, the township campground on the northwest shore.

“Okay, I’ll check it out. Thanks.”

The ferry chugged in from its short jaunt across the river. It unloaded cars and trucks and even a semitruck carrying enormous tree trunks. The last ferry I’d been on was with my Dad–the last time I was with him before we knew about his pancreatic cancer. Then came the familiar routine: car doors shut, engines ignite, the line slowly pulls forward, this car left, this truck right, me straight behind a pickup towing a fishing boat. Engines off. Ferry pulls away, and we are on the water. I got out to peer over the tall rim of the boat and waited to pay my fare. The ferry worker never came. Annoyed, I went to find him.

“He’s got you covered.” Points to Mr. Carhart’s pickup.

Immediately my body went slack under this wave of unexpected kindness. All of my silent judgment washed away like jagged flotsam. The warm surprise of gratitude quickly rushed in behind.

I spent two nights on Drummond Island, a long, langorious weeekend of walks, exploring new geology (more on that later), solitude, loons calling in the morning, the most glorious sunset I’ve seen in a long time, wishing for a paddle board.

I had just enough cash to pay for my camping spot, $30, thanks to my ferry godfather.

Michigan smells different…

“Like we’re camping.”

The first positive words that came out of my mouth about our new home in East Lansing, Michigan were olfactory. I sat on the top step of the back deck, our 3-month-old cradled in my arms, back aching after moving quickly and sleeping badly and breastfeeding constantly, and breathed in the spicy, evening scent coming from the exhalation of old trees and the swampy-sandy soil I would soon be completely baffled by when trying to grow anything other than purslane (edible), creeping charlie (I confess I love the smell of it) or sedges (native).

I did not want to be on that step.

My back to our unfamiliar house, my eyes wandered along the tops of the pine trees concealing the parking lot on the other side of our fence, the human-sized eastern black nightshade and garlic mustard inside the fence and the enormous wild cherry leaning uncomfortably over the fence.

This was not the step I wanted to take.

We had been living in Columbus, OH (Michiganders, stay with me) for 5 years already, and I was ready to move on. True, Columbus had a food scene that satisfied the cravings of two, older-than-30-something graduate students who enjoyed a bite beyond Chipotle. True, our dearest friends lived in Columbus and our two-year-old daughter’s first, dearest playmate: all heartbreak (hearth-break) to step away from.

But if we had to leave, I planned to go west, all the way to the coast where I could stand and spit into the Pacific Ocean on any given day, as my Grandpa would say, or at least a river that ended up there. Somewhere between Oregon and Canada.

Instead, we went roughly 3 degrees North and 2 degrees West from the middle of Ohio to the middle of Michigan.

Columbus, OH:
39.9612 N by 82.9988 degrees W
East Lansing, MI:
42.7370 N by 84.4839 degrees W

People refer to Michigan as “the mitten.” There’s a reason why they do. You need them. Winters are cold. And long. I’m writing at the end of April and last week we had an inch of snow. No one gets their hopes up above freezing until the middle of May.

Oh, and Lower Michigan is a mitten-shaped peninsula, a wool-wrapped hand gently patting the frozen waters of the Great Lakes.

Michiganders do that thing where they hold up their hand in the shape of a mitten, fingers together, thumb out, and point to where they live. I swore I would never do that.

We bought our first home right in the middle of the mitten. Hold out your right hand facing away from you, fingers together, thumb out to the right and put your left pointer finger in the middle of the palm of your left hand. There we are. Dead center. Oops.

When I did the mitten thing for someone the very first time, my thumb, meant to be representing the Blue Water Area of Michigan (think Flint, Detroit, Motown, light houses, St. Clair River flowing into the largest fresh water delta in the world and driving south to Canada) pointed the wrong way. It was sticking itself into Lake Michigan instead of Lake Huron, looking to hitch a ride West (wait, is that right?).

I was inwardly rebellious of the entire lower mitten, not to mention the other one above it.

What’s the big deal with the cherries and the apples? I grew up in Eastern Washington with plenty of apples, cherries, apricots, peaches, pears and grapes. Washintonians also say “pop” instead of “soda” and we never drink either one with something called a Pastie (short “a” sound, not long). Trolls and Yoopers (no comment)? I tried it, and Superman ice cream is gross (Michiganders can throw some at the screen if you like). Can the Great Lakes compare with the Pacific Ocean? Why does everyone casually mention they’re going up North to their cabin for the weekend? What’s up there, and why does everyone have a whole other house, excuse me, cabin? Why can’t I just turn left without being forced to first turn right?! Do I have to love Sparty (my daughter fell in love the minute he mimicked her picking her nose at an MSU baseball game) or the Lions (I grew up loving Seahawks)? Will I need to learn Euchre (my husband’s family plays Pitch, for all you Nebraskans out there) or how to cross country ski?

Not my step

I eventually pulled my daughter close, got up from the top step of our deck, went upstairs and opened the bedroom window of our 1948-built home that first night, and almost every night after, because the air smelled good. Even though we lived in the middle of East Lansing in the middle of Michigan in the Midwest, that smell in the air was annoyingly, invitingly, invigorating.

Category Archives: Confessions

It’s not the Pacific

Drummond

Is that a cat?

The Marvelous Buffer of Time…

Michigan smells different…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply