Lake Michigan shoreline near Charlevoix
The bright July Sunday was all mine. I was peering into the crystalline water from the head of a pier at one of Lake Michigan’s lovely little port cities. It was a searingly hot afternoon and I could feel beads of sweat running down my back. Still, the offwater breeze blowing through my hair and billowing my shirt made it passingly comfortable in an I-really-wouldn’t-want-to-be-anywhere-else sort of way. On the main drag, tourists were milling through the t-shirt and fudge shops but I had found a transient little refuge of communion with the big lake out here at the head of the pier, as surrounded by the benevolent expanse of fresh water as is possible while keeping one’s feet dry.
I have loved Lake Michigan helplessly since I was a child, and with age I’ve discovered urgency in the simple need to sit quietly with her and pass the time as marked by rhythms of boats and birds and waves and seasons and by summer Sundays where summer sunlight segues from saturated lazy-hot afternoons into attenuated long-shadow golden evenings and fiery sunsets. Twelve feet down, I see little stubby fish crawling around on the rip-rap and my imagination follows down after them to immerse itself in cool blue comfort. My work requires road-tripping through the states and provinces of the Great Lakes region and I keep finding reasons to intersect with the Great Lakes’ shorelines when I know I’ll have down time. I have my habits, in a few hours or so, I’ll shuffle over to the tavern and treat myself to a cold IPA and a cherry chicken salad but right now…right now she is laying a balm over the nerve endings that I’ve frayed with a work-week’s fill of crises and trivialities. I could simply congratulate myself on engineering this convergence of warm sunlight, cool breezes, sweet water, and time to let my mind wander. But, it’s bigger than me.
Lake Michigan shoreline between Ludington and Manistee
I started out intending to write this essay about a related topic. I have an essay gestating on a more specific and discrete story of Great Lakes’ natural history and conservation but I am an undisciplined writer. When I access the memory banks to write on any other related topic, my mind converges on that afternoon on that pier as an archetype of a hundred similar encounters stretching back to my boyhood. I need to clear out the queue. My beloved Great Lakes are distressingly burdened by pollution, and invasive species, and by exploiters who always seem focused on bigger, better, and faster consumerism. Even doing a bit of research on the related topic led me to the sad realization that those little stubby fish I was watching likely weren’t the native sculpins that I thought they were. They were likely invasive round gobies and the clarity of the water at the end of the pier was an artifact of invasive filter-feeding zebra and quagga mussels removing the plankton at the base of the aquatic food chain. And as much as I could be writing a mournful or reproachful essay about the threats to these lakes and the misguided policies that enable those threats, I just can’t. Not yet. The Big Lake is firstly and still majestic and still magical and she still is able to soothe the battered souls of those of us who take comfort in the peace of wild things.
Aldo Leopold once wrote that “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”* But he also bought a burned-out and depleted little floodplain farm and began planting trees. To decouple those facts is to miss an essential lesson. When Leopold took a break from planting trees, he rehabilitated an old chicken shack as a refuge for himself and his family – a place where he famously recorded the biological phenologies of his wild neighbors with scientific precision. But when the science could rest, he no doubt let his own mind wander. Even in its impairment, the latent wild beauty of that patch of droughty sand county flood plain was a refuge fertile enough for Leopold’s curiosity and imagination and the resilient plant and animal graces revealed to him at that place are woven in and through the elegant little book that forever changed the face of modern environmentalism. Despair is unsustainable. Work and activism on behalf of wild things is hopeful and motivating. Letting one’s mind wander into the retreat and solace of one’s local nature ties it all together.
Lake Michigan shoreline near Sleeping Bear Dunes
Consequently, beauty matters. Leopold of course knew it and wrote about but I need reminders. My time at the end of the pier may be idle, but was not wasted. I can wield an arsenal of scientific arguments for why conservation is vital for ecosystem services like food and timber and clean water and fresh air but focusing exclusively on our material needs cedes part of the argument to those who see nature simply as a collection of resource commodities waiting some clever idea for exploitation. Beauty in nature feeds a deeper need. But beauty is an abstraction unless you experience it, unless you seek it out. I am certain that I will once again take up the rhetorical armaments and do battle. But not now. Drinking deeply of the peace and beauty available to me at the water’s edge or in a shade of a isolated hemlock forest feeds something equally as essential and fuels a hopefulness audacious enough to lend my shoulder to seemingly impossible problems like climate change and invasive species. Does it matter if those little stubby fish are sculpins or gobies? Yes it does.
From Leopold’s unpublished lecture notes:
There must be some force behind conservation— more universal than profit, less awkward than government, less ephemeral than sport; something that reaches into all times and places, where men live on land, something that brackets everything from rivers to raindrops, from whales to hummingbirds, from land estates to window-boxes. I can see only one such force: a respect for land as an organism; a voluntary decency in land-use exercised by every citizen and every land-owner out of a sense of love for and obligation to that great biota we call America. This is the meaning of conservation, and this is the task of conservation education.
My biases are clear. For me, Leopold’s “force” is unusually connected to the Great Lakes and I think that that Leopold’s peculiar genius draws strongly on boyhood vacations spent in Lake Huron’s Les Cheneaux islands. Come and see for yourself. Do it on the cheap. Buy a $15 map book and find the public access points that are off the beaten path – you can still find ready public access to beautiful shoreline reaches that are blessedly ignored by most tourists. Listen to the waves. Take a chance on the little strip motel on the county highway or bring a tent. Swim in that sweet water. Go to the only supper club in the one-stop-light town and order the whitefish (our local sustainable fishery). Do this and you will discover at least a partial answer for the question sometimes asked on this blog about why we Cheeseheads and Michiganders choose to stay and fight.
But more importantly, do this to nourish your own soul with the beauty and peacefulness of the Great Lakes region. Let your mind wander. Let it motivate you to consider the natural gifts that inform your own sense of place wherever that may be and consider what makes it worth fighting for. There is ample evidence from the nature diaries on this site to suggest that we have among us writers that get it (thank you!). Progress in terms of conservation and sustainability likely begins in local greenspaces, parks, and natural areas. What drives your sense of place? Write an essay about it. Given the direction of the stories on this site lately, I’d be grateful.
Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
So get outside. And if you find yourself on a pier head near a scruffy middle-aged guy peering into the water, give me a smile and a nod. I’ll tell you more about those little stubby fish.
*Aldo Leopold. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches here and there. Oxford University Press.
First block quote: Meine, Curt. Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press, 2004.
Second block quote: Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions Press. 2013.
I am late with this but: Thank you to the Rescue Rangers!
