Can you find the toad in the photo above?
I've been traveling through northern Michigan with my daughter, Lydia. Michigan has always been famous for two things, autos and the north woods. The auto industry isn't doing so well of late, of late being the last 20-30 years. Anyone who thinks the rescue and rebuilding of America should be left to "private industry" should first consider the hash that these supposed titans made of an industry we created and took to greatness. Yup, Americans will always want big SUVs and big trucks. The Hummer! Yee ha! I'm driving a 45 mpg Toyota Prius, vintage 2005, on this trip, which makes the $4.19 per gallon gas in northern Michigan tolerable, if not pleasant. It's my wife's car, and she got a call from the Toyota dealer about a month ago asking if she wanted to sell it back to them. Lots of folks clamoring to buy a used Prius, it seems.
Michigan has not figured out a way to replace the huge gap in its economy left by the dying auto industry. We stopped Saturday night at the home in the far Detroit suburbs (Oakland County) of my cousin Kathy and her husband Jeff. He's had a very successful landscaping business, but a lot of his clients have gone with the hard times. Jeff is resourceful, though. He has commissioned some local engineers to build a small bio-diesel refinery for him and a few other small business owners. They'll use the fuel to run their trucks. And he's getting into the scrap metal business, which is booming in Detroit. I had this apocalyptic vision, with music by Eminem, of the end of Detroit. Vast empty areas where the houses and buildings have been scrapped. Only the Renaissance Center, Tiger Stadium, and the Greektown Casino remain.
So far, Michigan's great northern forest and its many rivers and streams endures. Ernest Hemingway enjoyed it in the early 20th century, writing about it in numerous short stories. Writers still come to northern Michigan for solace and inspiration. We stayed at the home in Suttons Bay in Leelanau County (the 'tip of the little finger' on the Michigan hand map) of my old friend Bill Perkins and his wife, the Newbery Award-winning children's book author Lynne Rae Perkins. Suttons Bay is a perfect little small town, with a new independent bookstore, Brilliant Books, run by an Englishman who rails against Amazon.com.
Bill and I and Lydia kayaked the other day on the Crystal River, a shallow, moderately-fast stream that winds through the cedar and tamarack forests on its way to Lake Michigan. I managed to tip over twice, Lydia a lot more than that. Very enjoyable, even if we ended up wet and shivering at the end.
And then we took the ferry out to South Manitou Island, part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore created by Congress in 1970. I was last here in August of 1974, when I camped by myself for a week and finished the Faulkner novels I had to read for a senior English seminar that fall at Hope College. I was going into my senior year. Nixon had just resigned, and I was happy. I lay on the beach and read "The Sound and the Fury" and dreamed of being a novelist (I settled for writing non-fiction books).
The island has a circumference of about 10 miles. There once were 13 farms on the island, most of them German immigrants, which must have made this an interesting little 19th century colony of my grandfather's homeland. The dunes on the west shore are spectacular, and forest is slowly reclaiming all of the farms except two the National Park Service decided to preserve. I doubt the park could have been created today. A number of unhappy private landowners, including some of these farmers, were evicted by Congress under eminent domain in the name of the greater public good. Whatever the rightness or wrongness of what Congress did, the public now has a wonderful national park for the ages.
We didn't have a lot of time, so we took the guided tour of some of the island highlights. We saw the inland lake on the island--a lake on an island in a lake--and met painted turtles, garter and ringneck snakes, and toads, which abound here. If you haven't found the toad in the photo above, it's in the middle of the photo and has an orange slug attached to its back. I know. Yuckfest. But it's part of nature.
Back in Leland, the fishing village where the ferry docks, we walked over to a lecture by Richard Peck, a children's book author from New York City who has also won the Newbery Award. He wanted to meet Lynne, so we all converged on his lecture at the Old Art Building in Leland, a perfect Chautauqua-type venue. Peck, who is about 74, is a polished performer in addition to being an accomplished writer. I didn't agree with everything he said. He's from the Allen Bloom "Those Darn Student Radicals Ruined Everything" school of criticism. A big critic of multiculturalism and big defender of teaching Latin, a dead language likely to remain dead. But he believes in the value of words and writing, and that is good. Peck drew a full house, and signed books until late in the night.
Now we're in Holland, my hometown, and visiting my old haunt, the Herrick District Library, where I am writing this blogpost. More on my travels later.