Circle Tour Part I, Untamed Wilderness to Tamed Utility: Subduing the Original Forest Primeval

I came across the famous image above years ago when a worker in the university civil service system in charge of the huge serial collection in the University of Illinois Library’s main stacks. Astonished at the obvious prowess of the teamsters able to cart white pine logs like that from the original forests in Michigan, I remember how the photograph triggered a recurrent feeling, on the other hand, of sadness and longing to know the great American forest in its “original” state. This is a series of three posts that chronicles a road trip last month along Michigan’s “Circle Tour” route in search of a meaningful encounter with the state’s ancient forest of white pine. More poignantly, it’s an episode in a life-long quest to resolve that recurrent feeling typified by my reaction in the Book Stacks Office long ago.

There is often something special about long-lasting things that are “all original.” That intriguing quality is due to the things somehow escaping the human hand of alteration over their entire life span.

For example, the antique jelly cupboard in my dining room is all original. Made around 1880 out of poplar and pine, it’s never been stripped and refinished. It sports its original red paint with a rich patina deepened by over a century of oxidation. All its back dust boards are intact. Places where people pawed, including door latches and the areas surrounding them, are still darkened by years of handling. The square-cut nails and door hinges that fasten together its parts date to its  origination in some kitchen cabinet maker’s shop. Such integrity promotes perpetuity and commands my admiration and respect.

When applied to nature, original usually means, “untrammeled” or wild. Such places keep their “natural” quality because they’re usually far away from our domesticating hands. They’re over there in the “wilderness.” Wilderness has always maintained an ambivalent status in the western world. Historically, it has been either attractive and enchanting, or repelling and loathsome. Environmentalists canonize its spiritual and ecological values, while moralists denigrate and warn against its pantheistic properties, and capitalists calculate its monetary and utilitarian potential. It either must be delivered with the zeal of a moral imperative or must be conquered and pillaged of its treasures with an equal zeal of a moral imperative.  The battle over its status and its fate in the American landscape and in the American mind is legendary. And in my case it’s a personal one.

 Ansel Adams Bull Creek Flat Redwoods ca. 1960

For me, wilderness has always been the ancient forest. I have marveled and mused about forests beginning with winter camping as a Boy Scout in the Laguna Mountains of San Diego County and backpacking in Sierra forests at the age of fourteen. I remember poring over a book I found in the library of First Colonial High  School in Virginia Beach, part of the Life Nature Library series, entitled simply The Forest. Such intent pondering fed a growing resolve. I applied to the number one forestry school in the nation, State University of New York College of Forestry at Syracuse, but attended Oregon State University, starting as a forestry major, and ending with a degree in Botany. I have taught forests and the role of plants in the biosphere ever since as a high school science teacher, including having honors biology students collect longitudinal data along transects in two forest preserves for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

There has always been a tinge of tarnish to the quality of my experiences tromping through the woods, however. It’s because all forests are in someone’s ownership and control, even if that includes the public. And ownership begets alteration, subduction under the utilitarian hand of some form of management. We put our hands all over the things we own. It means, historically, that American forests were conquered and appropriated long ago, starting with the tall white pine in the north woods of New England for ship masts, proceeding to the great white pine belt of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula for building up Chicago, burnt to the ground in 1872, and ending with the grand Douglas fir forests of the Pacific Northwest for house framing and the coastal redwood in California for decking and grape stakes.

I have felt sadness and longing for the original, unaltered ancient forest on this continent all my life. It too once possessed an integrity and self-managing  perpetuity that commands my admiration and respect. I’m a member of the generation that inspired Joni Mitchell to pen the Woodstock anthem that includes, “And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” The ancient forest is for me the Garden of ancient biblical verse. Modern psychology posits how we have an evolved cognitive ability to figure out how to turn its resources into benefits that fulfill our honest survival demands. Biblical myth posits how this knowledge also banished us from being an integral part of the garden because it contributed to our self-aggrandizing and secularizing power grabs leading to complete autonomy and lordship over all, symbolized by acquisition of power through eating from “the Tree of Knowledge.” But we’ve not forgotten its original state. Neural networks preserve an ancient memory of these kinds of places and nowadays spark a synaptic wistfulness to somehow see the wild places again and learn what they have to teach about the nature of ourselves and the world.

Seekers include Cincinnati artist friends of mine who trekked to the Black Forest of Germany for inspiration to depict what dark woods can do now to synaptic patterns in the brains of modern type folk who are long since divorced from them by the inexorable process of taming and civilizing the wilderness. Their project, called  Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running, is a result of their explorations. “The maiden is one of many reoccurring characters throughout the work,” my friends write, “characters who are attempting to reach a primal and blissful state of being that evokes a sense of drama and mythology.”

Once a natural state, it must now be sought after. Providing the context and impetus to their searching for nature, literally a natural state, is the forest. In June of 2011, I saw their last big project, Majr Gazr, at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati. It employed videos, futuristic geometric architecture, and various fiber-arts elements to invite me to become physically involved in a series of installations called “relaxion stations” as a metaphor for an inner psychological journey. I was made to exchange my shoes for a  pair of wool felt slippers and ritualistically reconfigure myself, which included taking in a hypnotic video of a dark forest that was projected onto a set of curtains. My mental alteration would allow the Maidens to take control of my journey. The series of exhibits was an artistically mischievous, witchy, and ecstatic depiction of nature meant to show that, as a culture, we can’t easily define what nature is anymore. Manipulators, we have restructured nature for own purposes. The Maidens say this includes, for instance, romance. “Working in well-managed parks and planted forests, (the Maidens) exploit the artifice of those environments,” turning them, with a sense of mockery and defiance, into vehicles for romance. More than a literal representation of the wooded outdoors, forest images they used symbolize our psychic, complex self and how civilization has removed us from once spontaneous human intuition and impulse. Changing the forest physically changed the human changers psychologically.

Forestry got its start in Germany. The original hardwoods of the Black Forest are now mostly pine. Change began when the first German tribes fought the dark, howling wilderness, beating it back and away from their homesteads down to uprooting the stumps for farm fields. It was a moral imperative that they win this fight. The German terms wildnis and wildor signify wildness and wild game, respectively. The sources for our definition of terms having to do with the wild and alienating places and their contents are in Northern Europe, which was once heavily forested. Inhospitable “wilderness” thus had specific reference to the woods.

Much of the oral tradition of the forest dwellers preserved by the fairy tales of Brothers Grimm retain vestiges of the crusade to subdue and domesticate it and enduring lessons projecting from the enterprise. One outcome was a two-fold meaning, depending on one’s point of view, to the term wildnis. It could mean alien, mysterious, and threatening. It could also mean, on the other hand, beautiful, friendly, and capable of elevating and delighting the beholder.

Bruno Bettelheim, famous director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, where my daughter attended all of her high school, suggested in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales that these traditional stories, often set in the forest primeval, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. They are generally about the individual's responsibility to the community and specifically about parent’s responsibility for their children and the loving yet embattled interactions between them. Problems are often due to failure of community member’s duty, despite the best intentions. The witch character who figures so prominently isn't just a scowling old hag, but a key symbol of moral ambivalence. Primal forest set the tone for primal human instincts and behaviors.

European immigrants brought their instincts and behaviors to the fight for survival in America. The dark, sinister wilderness once again had to be conquered. They succeeded. Anymore, we must look hard to find wildness in the low places where rich soil stews in summer, where water slows as it finds its low point, and where warmer temperatures all combine to guarantee high enough productivity for humans. All such lands were long ago stripped of their original forest cover and taken over for farming. The grand expanses of the wilderness in the western regions of the United States are nice, but they’re mostly found high up in the mountains in the midst of bare rock and ice where productivity for human consumption would be reduced to a minimum because of the hostility of climate and terrain. Where is the wilderness of the low lands, the unplowed tall grass prairie in Illinois where I live, and the vast uncut swaths of white pine in Michigan?

19,000 acre expanse of Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie Park in NE Illinois, once an arsenal, now slowly being restored to its “orginal” state 

35,000 acre original forest, mostly hemlock that escaped logging, now in Porcupine Wilderness State Park in the UP; backpacked in 2004 and 2005; no similar tract containing white pine in either Michigan peninsula

END OF PART I. CLICK HERE FOR PART II

Circle Tour Part II: “Where Have All the (Michigan White Pine Forests) Gone, Long Time Passing?”

The story that describes the fate of the vast swaths of white pine in Michigan can be told in pictures. Serving as another kind of Grimm's fairy tale, telling it helps to resolve my conflict with inheriting a morally ambiguous and troublesome legacy involving wilderness.

The nation in the nineteenth century was made of wood. Railroads ran on beds of wooden ties and across wooden bridges. Homes, factories, schools, hospitals, churches, everything was made of wood.  And so, of course, was furniture. The insatiable demand for it would be satisfied by Pinus strobus, the eastern white pine. Found in northern states from Maine to Minnesota, white pine grew tall and straight and knot free. It was light and floated well on log drives. It was soft and easy to cut in sawmills, yet strong, durable and resistant to decay.

Early 1800’s New England drop-lid blanket chest; old lacquer on original red stain; dovetailed drawers; original hinges, lid lock

Who wouldn’t love the stuff? The wilderness of the Maine north woods for instance, supplied the big boards for a Connecticut River Valley blanket chest that’s in my living room, shown above. Quilts and blankets were a staple of New England winters, and I love the size of the box above its drawers, large enough to hold a family’s winter bedtime warmth in summer. It’s made entirely of eastern white pine.

Dust boards on blanket chest back hand-planed white pine over 18 inches in diameter, cut from the center of the log

By 1840 it was apparent that the traditional sources of white pine in Maine and New York would be unable to supply a growing demand for lumber. Timber barons and saw mill owners cast their eyes to the white pine found in the mixed hardwoods of the northern half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Because of the initial lack of steam machinery, cutting the pine and moving the logs in the woods happened only in winter when wood wound down slippery snow trails drawn by draft horses on sleds. From 1840 to 1870, lumber companies set up logging camps near the rivers that filled with men from Maine, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Seasonal camps consisted of log houses, including bunkhouses, cook shanty, barn, blacksmith shop, camp office and store, which typically included living quarters for the foreman and log scaler. Camps were shoddily built and abandoned once the trees were gone.

Though all ethnicities filled the camps, most of these “shanty boys” were of Irish and German descent. Scandinavians came later. Native-born workers outnumbered foreign-born by 1890 in two important lumbering counties, Muskegon and Manistee, by almost two to one.

Sunday saw boiling and drying sweaty clothes, and entertainment playing simple instruments and singing songs. The foreman forbade the use of liquor to eliminate fighting. The camp store sold tobacco.

Drying out was a constant of camp life. It was part of life centered around the pot bellied stove when in camp. Lumberjack identity was forged through stories told during the cold winter nights. From these stories came the tall tales about life in the north woods, Paul Bunyan.

Mattresses were stuffed with sawdust or feathery tips of coniferous branches. “Feeling lousy” meant being infected with body lice,  one source of irritation in the camps.

Men were up by four for breakfast. Staples consisted of pancakes, salt pork, potatoes, bread with rose hip jelly to ward off scurvy, pie, and coffee. Staples were brought in by the barrel load. Eating off of china as opposed to tin was a scarce amenity much in demand.

The iconic axe of the “Paul Bunyan” lumberjack, as the primary tool in the woods, was short lived.

Cross cut saws quickly replaced old fashioned axes.  Improvement in efficiency was too compelling for them not to. It’s interesting that the mythic character Paul Bunyan is never depicted with one. Is his ubiquitous ax a sign that saws contributed in part to a shameful demeaning of the noble labor of the lumberjack?

Saw crews cut the white pine into uniform length. Lumberjacks, most often single men in their twenties, worked from dawn to dusk six days a week, cutting, hauling, and piling logs. They were paid between $20 and $26 per month in addition to room and board. Those who stayed on in the spring as river drivers received higher wages due to the grueling nature and the very real dangers of their job.

Draft horses replaced oxen. Paul Bunyan never traded in his blue ox Babe for one, though.  A sled, drawn by just a pair of them, could haul 15 tons of logs. Contests were held between rival camps to see which could stack a load the highest. Most loads, despite the economic incentive to maximize yield, were less due to the risks.

Simple machines, including levers, inclined planes, wheels and pulleys, plus horse power, took millions of logs from the pine lands.

A special crew set up and maintained the trails from woods to river. Special water sprinkler wagons ensured icy, and thus more slippery, sled tracks to enable the horses to haul the heavy loads. To avoid skidding on the down-hill, potentially disastrous to the invaluable horses in front of the loads, they dusted the trails with wood chips.

Before steam engines and railroads made it to Michigan, wood could only move by water. The state, crisscrossed by a network of rivers large enough to float logs, such as the Saginaw and Muskegon, provided convenient transportation to sawmills and lake ports. Logs were piled thirty feet high in winter, awaiting the spring thaw.

The river drive was dependent on a good winter snowfall to provide a spring run-off that enabled the rivers to carry huge logs to the sawmills.

Logs having reached the river mouths piled up in the harbors.

Associations were formed to cooperate in the sorting of logs into a pond or bay where floating "booms" of logs separated the property of one company from that of another.

A log mark (the logging equivalent of a “cattle brand”), stamped onto the ends of logs with a marking hammer, determined ownership.

The first sawmills were logically located at the mouths of the driving rivers. Like the men in the woods, mill hands worked long hours. They did not face the isolation of the logging camps, but their working and living conditions were often worse: noisy, dirty mills and dingy, cramped housing. Although mill workers received higher wages than loggers, from $30 to $50 per month, they had to provide their own room and board. They were also more likely to have families to support in contrast to the “shanty boy” (implying single) loggers.

Much of the downed timber was rafted to sawmills in other cities along the Great Lakes once ship technology grew powerful enough.

The sawmill was the first unit of the lumber industry to achieve increased output through technological improvements. Although water-powered mills were still common in the 1860’s, steam saws, whether up-and-down or circular, were rapidly replacing them. Steam saws so increased the capacity of the mills that it became necessary to devise faster methods of handling both logs and sawn lumber in order to avoid pile-ups and delays.

Other innovations reduced waste. The first circular saws of the 1860’s had wide blades that produced mountains of sawdust. They wobbled as they cut, so that boards more nearly resembled washboards than lumber. Within a few years, however, these problems had been solved. The widespread adoption of the band saw in the 1880’s further reduced waste. Metal technology now made it possible to build a saw with a thin band of steel operating as a continuous belt that cut both rapidly and efficiently.

By 1869 Michigan was producing more lumber than any other state, a distinction it continued to hold for thirty years. Many of Michigan’s cities---Saginaw, Bay City, Alpena, Cheboygan, Onekema, Traverse City, Manistee, Ludington, Muskegon and Grand Haven, began as sites for lumber mills.

A Michigan-initiated innovation during the 1870’s was responsible for a large increase in logging production. The Big Wheel, invented by Silas Overpack of Manistee, enabled cutting to continue in the snowless seasons by providing an alternative to sled transportation. Logs were chained beneath the axle and dragged. Once the inertia of the load had been overcome, it was relatively easy to keep the wheels moving.

This is a logging camp in summer; with the invention of the Big Wheel, the seasonal winter camps could proceed, instead, year round.

By the 1870’s steam power came to the north woods in the form of the Shay locomotive.

Steam power also increased the efficiency of lifting and loading logs.

Like the logging wheels, the narrow gauge rail helped to make lumbermen independent of the weather. Trains could be used in place of sleds year round for the relatively short run to the riverside banking grounds, or the river drive itself could be ended by carrying the logs to a mainline railroad depot. In addition, the logging railroad was sufficiently economical to allow cutting in areas once considered too far from the nearest driving stream to make sledding practical.

Shay locomotive on narrow gauge rail in summer

Interlude: Timbermen and Technology

The era of Michigan lumbering occurred during major improvements in technology during the height of the industrial revolution. Technological inventions that netted greater efficiency and thus a faster demise of the white pine forests, vividly shown in these pictures, had a huge impact on the lumberjacks. One source for understanding this impact is their oral traditions that come down to us in the form of stories told by the shanty boys. Storytelling served not only as entertainment during long and cold winter nights in the shanties, but affirmations of pride and effective means of encouragement. Stories recounted their brute strength, hands-on skills, prowess, and daring in the woods. They help to provide insight into the demise of the tall timber, the self image of those responsible, and the impression that  technological improvements had on them.

An important background to our understanding that impression is the observations of  the Frenchman Alex De Tocqueville who visited in the 1830’s and later wrote his conclusions about American manners and attitudes in his important work, Democracy in America. He was the first to state how Americans didn’t notice the wilderness; rather their “march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers,” and reducing the forests to lumber and the lands they once covered to farms. The American worker improved himself at the expense of the wilderness, which merely served as an occasion for the project. Pride in conquest was earned by means of old world technology he was familiar with, hand-held and ox-drawn plow, ax and shovel, sail schooner, water powered mills, all using simple machines, wheels, levers, screws, pulleys, and inclined planes.

The American attitude behind the ever expanding empire that De Tocqueville described on his travels across America was responsible for generating and celebrating mythological heroes who symbolized moral development and improvement in character through work. These heroic role models grew ever more fantastic in the imagination of the oral traditions because they had the important functions of myth, to help justify the intentions of the people and explain the origins of this intent and its consequences.  In the north woods, the mythological hero par excellence was Paul Bunyan.

I vividly recall a Disney cartoon I saw on the 7 pm Sunday evening show Disney Presents entitled simply Paul Bunyan. Cartoon Paul “63 ax handles tall” sent trees flying like toothpicks with his double-bladed ax and stacked logs a mile high with the help of his ox companion Babe. Thanks to You Tube, I get to see this story again 54 years later.

Walt Disney Presents Paul Bunyan, Part 1

Walt Disney Presents Paul Bunyan, Part 2

Tall Paul by his actions legitimated the past and held out promises for the future when audiences heeded his model of self-improvement. Thus Paul served as an archetypical object lesson in a deeply imbedded tradition motivating Americans in the nineteenth century, the so-called Protestant Work Ethic. Formulated by Max Weber, the tradition received its impetus from Calvinism that posited man’s moral depravity, his sin, and his need for deliverance from it. Triumph over sin was, of course, the fitting sacrifice for its expiation by God himself through a deliberate act of death on the cross. But who would benefit was complicated by the tradition of predestination, that the fate of every individual regarding heaven or hell had been decided since the beginning. And no one could know for sure if they were amongst the so-called “elect.” According to Weber, Protestants who were successful producing wealth could look to that success as a sign of election. And the manner that would generate wealth was hard work and upstanding character… such as that of Paul Bunyan.

The cartoon depicts Paul as clean cut, despite a five o’clock shadow, simple, upstanding, and confident in the work he performs.

With my double-bladed ax and my caulk-nailed boots

I follow timber’s call

When there’s work to be done there’s no mess’n around

Just sing right out for Paul

Hey Paul! Hey Paul! Paul Bunyan!

I’m comin’, boys!

He’s sixty three ax handles high

With his feet on the ground

And his head in the sky

Hey Paul! Hey Paul! Paul Bunyan!

Bunyan takes no notice of the felled wood. Cartoon logs are as light as pretzels, and they sprinkle like sugar. It’s just what he does. What matters is the act of doing it, which is driven by personal responsibility and a clean conscience. These moral improvements lead to success and wealth, signs of election. His life style isn’t shown as upwardly mobile over the course of his indiscriminate chopping away, which is consistent with the work ethic’s tenet that wealth gained through work isn’t for spending; rather for accumulating as a sign of God’s elect.

Paul is God’s surrogate, responsible for acts of creation, such as the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota by his stomping around, and the Tetons made out of flat ground kicked up when he and his ox playfully wrestle.

The narrator states, “Before long the sawmills had enough timber to last a lifetime. And that opened up plenty of new farmland.” This gave further justification to the moral incentive to accumulate timber wealth as a sign of election because cutting down all the trees benefitted the farmer. From blade to plow, the heavenly work just goes on.

There is moral ambivalence on the part of this big player Paul, however. With the timber of wilderness converted into towns of civilization, Paul finds himself crowded. He resolves the conflict by moving to new timber. He serves as a tool of legitimacy for the perpetual razing of the forests  because it causes civilization to expand. Again the object is himself who serves as a surrogate for everyone working in the woods toward which he and they are indifferent, an attitude that appears consistent throughout the cartoon.

Disney depicts how Paul’s work extends civilization all the way to the West Coast. “Civilization had arrived in the great Northwest,” the narrator explains. Ships are shown entering San Francisco Bay bringing immigrants who need wooden houses. Paul logging in the Pacific Northwest is providing them with that timber.

Then something ominous and foreboding happens. A character named Joe Muffaw demonstrates the new invention of the steam-powered chain saw for felling timber. Paul is appalled, indignant at this affront to the muscle power and skill of the lumberjack. His reaction leads to confrontation. The resolution is a contest to see which method, ax or steam power, is most productive. They each in an hour attempt to cut more than the other, piling up their logs in a measurable heap.

My memory of this episode is so strikingly vivid because I, as an impressionable 8 year old, was appalled at the mindless mowing down of trees depicted in this pursuit of triumph and glory. Muffaw won by a quarter of an inch. I notice that this victor is portrayed as a wily, pompous, conniving little weasel of a man that is obviously meant to vilify him. Outmoded and thus outdated, vanquished Paul sadly exiles himself to Alaska where there’s still plenty of room and where his cavorting with Babe in it causes the Northern Lights.

The advent of steam power and its rapid hegemony over horse, brute labor, and skills using hand-wielded simple machines thus had to have greatly affected the lumberjack, as the story of Paul Bunyan attests. Positive impacts on the efficiency of getting the logs to market caused negative impacts on the lumberjack’s self image as a forest laborer and the prospects of his continued employment in the woods. Isn’t this always the result of new technology turning skills into obsolescence and proud workers into displaced employees?

This cartoon may not have turned me into a labor activist, but it may singlehandedly have turned me at the age of 8 into a wilderness purist.

PEAK LUMBER PRODUCTION BY RIVER VALLEY

In 1889, the year of greatest lumber production, Michigan produced 5.5 billion board feet, meaning wood a foot square and an inch thick.

In their haste to move on to new sites, lumber companies usually gave little thought to the lands they were leaving. By the 1870s stumps and branches already littered much of northern Michigan. There was no longer any barrier to erosion on cutover land, and the dried debris created an enormous fire hazard. At the end of the dry summer months, fires frequently broke out, sometimes moving into still uncut timberlands or settled areas, as in 1871 and 1881, when fires broke out across the state. Some were so hot that the accumulated seed bank that could spawn the next generation and all remaining soil nutrients were roasted into oblivion. A century later, stumps stand like ghosts of forests past, the land unable to regenerate anything.

Lumber companies had no desire to retain logged over land, and thus they tried to sell large tracts of it in the 1880’s and 90’s. They vigorously promoted the former forests as good farmland, ready for the plow, but experience soon proved that this was not the case. Found only in Michigan and designated the official state soil in 1990, Kalkaska sand is little more than a thin layer of gray sand atop a thick layer of brown and yellow sand left behind by the glaciers. Pine needles do not easily break down into humus  and lie undecayed on the forest floor. So humus does not build up a rich organic bank of fertility. Similar to tropical forests, the fertility of the land is locked up in its forest cover and thus leaves with the trees. Moreover, since sand is highly permeable to water, which leaches away nutrients when it goes, there is little moisture and nutrients available for crops. 750,000 acres in the heart of the cut over pine belt having this soil simply could not support continuous farming. Families that had put all their savings and hopes into such a farm often had no alternative but to give it up when they could not pay their taxes. The State of Michigan ended up acquiring tax delinquent land as well as acreage simply abandoned by lumber companies. A glance at the map shows one of the largest land holdings of state forest of any state in the U.S.

 1929 Cadillac 341B

By 1920, the pine exhausted and the forest left in squalor, the great era of Michigan’s original white pine forest came to an end. Get rich timber mining, politically legitimated by the desires of a growing nation, had extracted 162 billion board feet of the wood from the Michigan wilderness in just 80 years. After the big cut, the abandoned land burned again and again in gargantuan fires millions of acres in size. History is rich in lessons gained from investigating empires when they decline and fall. The irony of the timber empire and its demise when the white pine ran out is that the Michigan timber barons went on to invest their capital in the next empire, that of the automobile.

END OF PART II. CLICK HERE FOR PART III.

Circle Tour Part III: Close Encounters with Remnants of Michigan’s Original Forest and Lakeshore

Surely the original pines of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula timber belt are all gone, every one. Not so I discovered almost thirty years after first seeing old black and white pictures of the big logs in the book stacks of U of I’s library. It turn’s out there’s a 49 acre remnant stand overlooking the valley of the East Branch of the Au Sable River in Crawford County. It’s preserved in Hartwick State Park. With that image still in my mind of a horse-drawn sled laden 30 feet high with pine logs as wide as Michael Phelp’s arms winning the Olympic 100 meter butterfly, I set out two weeks ago on a pilgrimage to Michigan’s last stand of ancient Eastern White Pine.

To get there would be according to a method worthy of a pilgrimage. I would add to the white pine Mecca the goal of hugging the edge of another vestige of Midwest wilderness, Lake Michigan. In fact, starting in Chicago, I would drive the entire length of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula portion of the Circle Tour around the great lake, staying right next to the shore line.

This route and its first guide book, now out of print, were the work of tourism promoters led by Jack Morgan of the Michigan Department of Transportation in 1987. Distinctive signs were posted along all the 1,100 miles of Lake Michigan's shoreline. After studying the official route, however, I decided that it wasn’t pure enough for me. I saw little roads nearer the lake than the official route.  The designers even allowed for four-lane freeways that struck me as profane, in defiance of the romantic memory I have of a time when two- laners were the rule. Slow travel is  less divorced from the  landscape and promotes a richer travel experience. You can see more. It’s more educational. I remember, for instance, learning verse reading Burma Shave ads along the little roads in the scrub country of Florida while growing up. “Better try; Less speed per mile; That car may have; To last awhile. Burma Shave”  I thus would proceed  to alter the route so that I would stay on  two lane roads that were in closest proximity to the lake.

This proved to be a challenge. Such a circuitous route made out of interconnected pieces of roadway was like tracking the migration meanderings of a living, breathing animal. Roads change, especially given how Michigan rivers emptying into the lake most often have small and large natural lakes around which lumber-era harbor towns formed that one has to skirt around. Maps don’t agree, such as about the inevitable closure of the main routes through the many growing harbor towns and their rerouting farther east. It was like Boone hunting bear. I found myself tracking obscure signage like broken twigs and veerings in the road like oddly placed footprints. I learned that municipal, county, and state roadway jurisdictions don’t operate with uniform clarity and standards of maintenance.

Circle Tour route follows Sheridan Road five blocks from my house.

Get ready, the cat is loaded with day’s worth of Priority brand fish-flavored nibbles, check. Get set, the car is loaded with camping gear and two coolers, one for food, the other for beer, check. Go, but only after sating the OCD tendency of reviewing security repeatedly with audible chants. (e.g., “The door to the basement is locked. The extra key is under the sill. The mail has been stopped.”), check. The Circle Tour started just down the street on the lake. Lakeshore Drive to downtown Chicago is my daily commute. Continuing on down the drive, which is U.S. Highway 41, it merged with combined U.S. Highways 20 and 12 at 95th St. Veering left onto Indianapolis Blvd., the combination lost 41, which veered right as Calumet Blvd, and continued as combined 20 and 12 into East Chicago. I turned left onto Industrial Highway to continue on 12, leaving 20 that continued south and east. Industrial Highway became 4th Ave. through Gary. 12 merged again with 20 to become the E. Dunes Highway. U.S. Highway 20 veered off again to the right as Melton Rd, and U.S. Highway 12 as Dunes Highway all by itself headed east out of Gary.

Travel along the south shore of Lake Michigan was ridden with tolls to avoid, overlain with stark images of crusty American industrialism, and hot. Old cement embankments, originally poured in perplexing patterns of infrastructure, and now decayed and weakened by their battles with water erosion and pioneering weeds poking through a puzzle of cracks, slowly gave way to more open urban spaces wafted by a sense of the blueness and staid ballast of nearby Lake Michigan.

U.S. Hwy. 12 along the southeast curve of the lake is one of the Blue Star Memorial roadways that pay tribute to active armed forces personnel. National Garden Club chapters  have maintained signage of such roads since 1945. It skirted sand-swelled Indiana Dunes National  Lakeshore, distinguished by the University of Chicago’s Henry Chandler Cowles who performed pioneering work there in the study of  ecological succession. I had been taken to it for the first time when a graduate student for a plant ecology class at the University of Illinois. U.S. 12 continued past it to New Buffalo where Sheryl Crow would be playing at the town casino.

Then the trickiness started. The Red Arrow Highway nearer the shore somehow veered off from U.S. 12 near the Indiana-Michigan state line. I wanted to take this in lieu of the official Lake Michigan Circle Tour route that puts the traveler on Interstate 94. It was confusing, but bearing left put me on it in a manner that I don’t remember and off of U.S. 12 that continued east along the old 1820’s highway between Fort Dearborn in Chicago and Detroit.

Named after the 32nd Infantry Division of WW I fame, the Red Arrow Highway followed the lakeshore lined with quaint resort towns that include Grand Beach, New Buffalo, Union Pier, Lakeside, Harbert, and Sawyer. I had waited till after leaving town to fill up the gas tank, which was bound to be cheaper outside Chicago. Sure enough, an independent pump in New Buffalo was selling gas for $3.48 per gallon (vs. $3.85 in the city).

I made lunch on a picnic table at a free beach I found that the locals use. It was next to Warren Dunes State Park. Whereas the park charged a $5 daily user fee, I ate and then swam for free. I had to scrounge to find it. The locals don’t advertise.

Red Arrow then veered east in St. Joseph. I had to get off it and onto something other than Michigan’s other Blue Star Highway, U.S. 31, a part of which has been overridden by Interstate 193, with other long stretches north upgraded to freeway standards. Unfortunately, it’s also much of the Circle Route up the lake’s east shoreline all the way to the Mackinaw City Bridge that goes over the Straits of Mackinac to the Upper Peninsula. From this point on I’d have to watch carefully to stay off it and lakeside of it.

That other something in St. Joseph was M-63, which followed old U.S. 31 to Hagar Shore where it then veered right. I stayed left. I was now on Blue Star Hwy. or County A-2. 10 miles north of Hagar Shore and 3 miles north of Palisades Nuclear Power Plant at a Y in the road I veered left onto 76^th street at DeGrandchamp blueberry farm. I saw a man riding high in the cab over a blueberry harvesting machine that rumbled along on wheeled stilts between the rows of blueberry bushes while shaking the branches and letting loose a cloud of little blue dots into catch trays. Pick-yer-owners wandered elsewhere amid the bushes. I followed 76^th Street to where it turned into Monroe Blvd. on entering the town of South Haven.

Right on the lake, I passed a public beach. It was hot, and I was going to cool off there. Parking half a block east on a side street, access was easy. But first I had to find shelter in public to change. I used open car doors next to a van in an otherwise vacant lot. Lake Michigan’s east shore gets the prevailing Westerlies. And South Haven is far enough north for the winds to hit the beach broadside. The air and water were clear as glass. Waves crashed the shore. It was bright like the South Pacific without salt, and sun reflected in flashes off the water like a Morse Code mirror. People looked happy. A sailing frigate left the pier that had a lighthouse on its end. I set the cooler and chair in the sand and enjoyed liquid refreshment both inside and out. Just lovely with a quality way higher than that offered by the artificial sand public beach down the street back home in Evanston, open to the public with an $8 token. This beach was free.

I crossed the Dykemann Street bridge, turned right onto Northshore Drive and left back onto Blue Star Hwy. that follows old U.S. 31 or County Rd. A-2. In the little town of Glen, I got off at 70^th Street, followed it to St Rd M-89. I turned left onto 68th St. or County Rd. A-2 with views of the lake up past Douglas and Saugatuck, two towns across the street from each other. Intrepid lake-hugging took grit.

Time was running out on the day, with many miles still left before reaching a tucked away campsite called Driftwood Valley in the Cadillac/ Manistee Ranger District of Manistee National Forest. So at Holland I booked up a long freeway stretch of U.S. 31 toward Manistee. That was OK. The plan was to drive inland to the Original White Pine, then up to the Mackinaw City Bridge, and then thread the absolute lake edge on two lane roads down to Holland.

The sky grew menacingly black. I booked at 70 mph east on State Road 55 through the forest. It was sprinkling. Then the deluge began. At Wellington I turned south into the forest’s interior. Taken from a website was the following instruction.

“From Wellston, take Seaman Rd. south 3.9 miles through Dublin. Just beyond the grocery store, turn right, staying on Seaman Rd. and go 3 miles to the town of Irons and 10 1/2 Mile Rd. Turn right onto 10 1/2 Mile Rd. and go 2.5 miles to Bass Lake Rd. Turn left onto Bass Lake Road (south) and go 0.9 miles to 10 1/2 Mile Rd. At 10 1/2 mile Rd., turn right and go 0.8 miles to the campground.”

Confusing? Yeah; “Simon Says” in a torrential downpour at dusk. Instinct and odometer readings were my GPS along with rolling down the fogged up window to read signs in the storm. The last “10 1/2 Mile Rd.”, for instance, was “10 Mile Rd” in the real world. Intuition replaced instruction in order to be confident that the latter was wrong.

Then a sign said “No camping, day use only, go to Bear Track to camp.” What? No way. It was getting dark and pouring. During a break in the storm I hustled my tent together before it really began to dump water. Sheet lighting with out thunder raged right overhead like strobe lights in a disco. A cold front had come to fight a warm one, so, it still being warm and me still in swim gear, I stripped to the waist and sat in the tent to learn never to put a tarp under a tent. Edges just catch the rain and built a deepening pool for the tent to sit and capsize in. There was no let up so I just swam to the car and let Jackie Evancho’s CD’s bring tears to my eyes while scooping cold pesto with corn chips and swilling beer. Two hours later it still poured. I lifted the dome tent, scrapped the tarp, poured out the puddle like a tea pot, put in the bag, and hoped to stay dry. Stormwater pelted deafeningly onto the tent’s rain fly like a waterfall for twelve hours.

So the web site was out of date. The Forest Service had closed “The best kept secret in Michigan.” That morning I realized why. The Little Manistee River gurgled through a magnificent second growth dry-mesic deciduous forest of northern red oak, white oak, shagbark hickory, and some red and jack pine. The forest floor was open and park-like, completely free of the invasive European buckthorn and garlic mustard that chokes the Cook, DuPage, and Kane County Forest Preserve Districts back home. Dainty flowering natives dotted the sandy soil instead. Filtered sunlight dappled the grainy deck. Patches of ferns accented the more shady areas. No point in spoiling that. The campsites sat silently where decaying  posts lined gravel parking pads that  indicated their former positions. I was alone. I had the only picnic table and fire grate. So I spent the day drying out, exploring the creek, watching kayakers drift along Little Manistee River, and reading in a camp chair with a fire and hot food to keep me company until the next morning, enveloped by the best kept secret in Michigan.

At 8 am the rain came back. But I was packed up and spent the second torrential downpour driving on to Hartwick park's rolling hills, built out of ancient glacial deposits that separate the Manistee and Au Sable River watersheds. The rangers were nice, asked if I had a poncho, gave me a map, and got paid the $8 daily use fee.

Bearings set, encased in new rain gear, I trekked into the Last Stand. The rain just continued to drizzle, but kept the public sequestered in the picnic shelters and campground. I passed through a lot of regenerating red pine until I got to the center. What I saw was reminiscent of the alluvial flat groves of Sequoia sempervirens, the California coast redwoods, accented accurately on this day by drizzle like that of the wet coastal winters in northern California. Here was a classic original northern dry mesic pine forest, Old Growth, the Ancient Forest primeval, unmolested by man, Mecca. Pattering rain and solitude magnified the immensity. I looked up and up. The interior of this grove consisted of a rare type of climax community. All members are shade tolerant types, with their young able to grow in the dim light of this dark temple. Eastern hemlock, American beech, and sugar maple all contributed to the Hansel and Gretel-like darkness. The dominant type, however, occupying the emergent canopy strata of this grove, was 400 year old “original” eastern white pine, the king of pines east of the Mississippi.

*In his important first book, The Mountains of California, naturalist John Muir attempted to evangelize the reader regarding the “glorious” white pine of the west, Pinus lambertiana, sugar pine. I hadn’t needed the coaxing. The species had already made an impression on me. I knew that their cones are the largest of the pines, 18 inches in length. I remember one that sat on a cupboard in a communal house in Urbana in 1979. A young woman enrolled in a forestry master’s degree program at the University of Illinois and taking dendrology pointed to it on a tour. I concurred with her, since I was quite familiar with the species having hiked John Muir’s Sierra for years. Later we got married.

*wedding announcement, hand-drawn, sepia pen and ink, Urbana, 1985

What Muir said about grand old sugar pine speaks well enough of its eastern cousin.

“The trunk is a smooth,* round, delicately tapered shaft, mostly without limbs, and colored rich purplish-brown. At the top of this magnificent bole, long, curving branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm-like crown. The wispy needles are about three inches long, finely tempered and arranged in rather close fascicles of five at the ends of slender twigs that clothe the long, out-sweeping limbs… No lover of trees will ever forget the first meeting with the sugar pine, nor afterward need a poet to “listen to what the pine-tree saith.” …The sugar pine is free from conventionalities of form and motion. No two are alike; and, notwithstanding they are ever tossing out their immense arms in what might seem most extravagant gestures, there is a majesty and repose about them that precludes all possibility of the grotesque, or even picturesque, in their general expression. They are the priest of pines, and seem ever to be addressing the surrounding forest.”

*wedding announcement, hand-drawn, sepia pen and ink, Urbana, 1985

I sat down, dug my hand past the thin topsoil to the gray B horizon of the classic Kalkaska sand, and said a prayer of thanksgiving for being able to witness this relic postage stamp of original American wilderness. It makes me think now about “wilderness,” an ambiguous term freighted with meaning of a symbolic and deeply personal kind. I remember a cartoon series about the eighth century English epic Beowulf that I drew for my high school senior year English class. It examined words such as deor (animal). Prefix it with wil (intent), and you have wildeor, which means willful creature not under the control of man. The antagonist in the Beowulf tale is a wild, savage, fantastic beast inhabiting a dismal forest such as this. He must be subdued.

The hero Beowulf subduing the villain Grendel in the classic Old English epic

Much of the writing of the American author, Nathaniel Hawthorn, that coincided with the beginning of the depining of Michigan’s forests, preserved the visceral repulsion of the wild landscape that early pioneers, especially Puritans, brought to America. To Hawthorn, wild country was “black” and “howling.” It symbolized man’s dark and untamed heart. In The Scarlet Letter, the primeval forest around Salem, Massachusetts represented the moral wilderness that Hester Prynne wandered in for so long. Even though it also represented freedom from social ostracism, such total license would inevitably lead to irresistible temptations. Concomitant with the human soul, subduing it, reclaiming it, civilizing it was a moral imperative.

Also coinciding with inauguration of Michigan’s big timber era, was the Frenchman Alex De Tocqueville’s 1831 trip to America that generated his big books Journey to America and Democracy in America. By July he arrived in Michigan Territory in order to see wilderness for the sheer pleasure of it. Not wanting to see it for its utilitarian potential, lumbering and land speculation, mystified his American hosts. He wrote, “Living in the wilds, (the pioneer) only prizes the works of man,” while Europeans valued wilderness because of its novelty. He concluded, “In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet.” Americans were about subduing America.

Since the modern term wilderness really isn’t a thing (place); rather, a status or process, it was hard to fathom while sitting there what this forest must have really felt like when attached to the rest of the lower peninsula of Michigan in presettlement times. And ecologically, the predator beasts at the top of the food chain, indicators of true wilderness, are gone, the wolverine, badger, grizzly bear, and, of course, the timber wolf. They either have been subdued or the forest is not extensive enough to support them. The most one can hope for in the fragments of ancient Douglas-fir forest in Oregon where I went to school is the spotted owl, which got listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. I remember how much a bone of contention it gave the timber-dependent folk in Klamath Falls, Oregon where I taught my first year of school in the late ‘80’s.

That the Hartwick pines exist today is a fluke of economics and ironic human need. The Salling-Hanson Logging Company out of Grayling was busy cutting into this area in 1893 when the national economy collapsed. The infamous time is known as the “panic” of 1893. Lumbering operations everywhere ceased. Back to normal in the 1900’s it was deemed impractical to return to this area because it was too small to justify refitting it for logging operations. So it sat. It would have eventually been cut, but in 1927 Karen Michelson Hartwick purchased over 8,000 acres of land, which included these once 85 acres of old growth, from Salling-Hanson. Mrs. Hartwick was the daughter of Nels Michelson, a founding partner of the logging company. Soon after that, she donated the land to the State of Michigan as a memorial park to be named for her late husband, Major Edward Hartwick who had once partnered with her father. As ironic luck would have it, the daughter of a timber baron saved this old growth to commemorate a timber baron.

Can this forest sustain itself? Probably not. The old growth dates back to major fire disturbances during the Pilgrim era of American history. Pine germinates on open, sandy soil, free of cover and competing hardwoods, conditions fire provides. Hundreds of years later, trees are big enough to withstand periodic ground fires. I saw lots of charring on the behemoth trees. These fires thin the forest of competing understory, and the big trees just get bigger and poke higher above the canopy. Natural regeneration of climax community growth then occurs piecemeal. When a giant falls, it opens up a “light gap” in the canopy. Understory species compete to fill it, beech, maple, and hemlock, but not white pine. The forest floor has no bare soil for pine seeds to germinate in, and it’s too dim for shade-intolerant pine seedlings to grow up anyway. I saw no younger pine in the understory near the light gaps. Even if there was pine, the absence of predators nowadays has given a huge deer population chances to wander with a voracious appetite for pine needle browse.

So what will likely happen? Wind storms, such as the hurricane-force one on Armistice Day, 1940 that reduced the stand by one half because of its vulnerable small size, and old age will eventually take their toll. When the giants are gone, they’re gone. I and you can’t buy early tickets for the next show centuries from now.

I camped with the locals in a roadside state forest campground near the once logging headquarters of Graying. Problem with them is they have an inordinate fondness for fireworks, especially on weekend nights like that one. Knots of teenagers around their campfires got drunk enough for remorselessness in their noise-making.

My Scott 1069 plate block commemorating Soo Locks that manage changes in elevation during ship passage between Lake Superior and Lake Huron; first sold by the U.S. Postal Service in Sault Sainte Marie June 28, 1955; signed by stamp’s designer, picture engraver, and letter engraver

I drove U.S. 131 and the official Circle Tour U.S. 31 in cheery sunshine up to Mackinaw City to begin the lake hug south to Holland. I passed a packed fair of small engine enthusiasts in Charlevoix County. Gasoline combustion as a power source completely replaced steam in the woods, the mill, and everywhere between by 1920. I left 31 at Carp Lake and took County C81 through the wetland scrub to Wilderness State Park, which juts out from the LP’s northern tip into the lake. I set up the beach chair system with books and beer overlooking the Straits of Mackinac. As I sat and read, I watched a big, red, classic-looking lake hauler coming in from Lake Huron. The bay was shallow and strewn with rounded stones. Getting out into the deep required breast stroking over them. I floated on my back and watched a least tern hover like a helicopter before diving after luckless fish like a Dauntless bomber during the Battle of Midway.

To get to Petoskey on Little Traverse Bay required driving back roads not on the map to the lake edge of Emmet County’s convex curvature. Once there, St Rd M-119 wound like a roller coaster through the “tunnel of trees,” a profligate thicket of hemlock and maple saplings, mostly. I pitied the would-be vacation and retirement home owners who thought they had found Shangri-La. They had, given the stupendous views of Lake Michigan way above the water line . But only some had afforded the necessity of uprooting the toothpick forest of the tunnel to get at the view. The road was only one lane, with a pair of painted white lines marking the two edges. Bulleting a fast Ferrari through the forest past the hamlets of Cross Village, Good Hart, Harbor Springs, and Wequetonsing would have been exciting, but the Honda Accord did alright.

M-119 merged with Circle Tour U.S. 31 in Petosky. I meandered it’s mostly two lane width down the lake shore to Traverse City. There were state forest campgrounds east of it, but I got lost looking for the unmarked road up to Mayfield in the forest that accessed them. A local at a cash register confirmed I was on the right one, Co Rd 611, Garfield Avenue. The dirt road the campgrounds were on was not on the map. But it showed they were located along Boardman Creek that winds down to the West Arm of Grand Travers Bay. I turned onto the dirt road right after crossing a creek, figuring it was the right one. The sign said River Road, but it was actually “Brown Bridge Road.” Miles of dirt took me nowhere. So I ducked down a sand incline figuring it would hit the creek where I’d set up a camp. I had 5 gallons of water, so it didn’t matter not to have access to a campground well. The car almost got stuck in loose sand. Luckily it hit a dirt road, crossed the creek, and there was one of the campgrounds.

Primitive state forest campgrounds are the cheap get away destinations of the Michigan locals with modest incomes. I wedged in a spot between RV’s and pitched the tent, scrounged for firewood, and set up for frying chuck, adding beans and a can of cubed tomatoes, and McCormick chili mix. A sign said No Fireworks, but I could hear them on the other side of the forest road. The people on my side made nary a noise, all bound up by their metal cocoons, sight unseen. A half moon hung in the clear sky over my campfire.

Grand Travers Bay that separates the mainland from Leelanau Peninsula is bisected into the West and the East Arms by a rail-thin peninsula traversed by St Rd M-37 out to a now defunct lighthouse. A sunny drive past little wineries took me to Old Mission where one of the first permanent store buildings still operates. This area was first settled by whites when the Presbyterian Board sent a man to minister to the natives in 1839. The Indian Bureau sent others to manage their presence, no longer free to do as they pleased. A recreated school house/church with the original bell cast out of coin offered a historical retrospective. Ottowa and Ojibwe natives taught the minister that cherries, apples, and other fruit trees grew well. Orchards dominated the economy till 1970’s when the first imported French grape root stock was stuck into the sandy soil. Generations of the same family had run the store until recently. Bicycle tourists and church goers congregated out front, a Sunday morning. I read the weather forecast in a paper from the newsstand. Mission Point Lighthouse, right on the 45^th Parallel, once guided mariners through the west side of the bay. The Coast Guard decommissioned it in 1933. The desk clerk had grown up in Geneva, IL, so we chatted about changes along the Fox River since I had lived just north in St. Charles for many years after she had left Geneva.

A zig-zag back down M-37 and up M-22 took me to the end of Leelanau Peninsula. M-22 then hugs Lake Michigan down to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Seashore. The North campground was primitive, no RV hookups. I got one of the last 3 available for a $12 fee. This 30 mile-long park is a composite of former state and private holdings. The main feature is the huge dunes that have formed atop clay and gravel plateaus making many 450 meters high. The second growth back of the huge dunes indicated a healthy mixed hardwood forest community, again, with no invasive growth choking the ground. Downed firewood of high quality was the most plentiful of the trip. I gathered a bunch, set up the tent and lit out for restored Sleepy Bear Point Lighthouse Station.

Before its decommissioning at the start of WWII, the station guided mariners through treacherous shallow, rocky shoal waters of Manitou Passage between North and South Manitou Islands. Military regimentation and constant training kept coast guard personnel ever ready to release life boats from the boathouse by rail which were then hauled by horse down the beach to the latest wreck.

I set up my beach chair station on the empty beach with a view out to the islands and watched the sun drop low in the sky. Then I hiked unspoiled wilderness between the lake and the interior woodlands. I followed xerophytic beechgrass and sand cherry pioneers on shifting dunes into more stationary dunes held down by mesophytic, later-successional stage creeping juniper and jack pine. Being natural plant communities on ever-changing, self-renewing dunes, a refreshing vitality permeated my observations on this hike.

Next day, a hike in the bluff forests farther inland revealed open woodland of northern hardwoods, including mid-successional red oak, white ash, and black cherry, and late-successional American beech, sugar maple, and eastern hemlock. The rancher who once owned this forest managed it well. Selective logging still left behind superlative maple and some of the largest understory cherry, famous for the big board furniture represented by some of my antiques, that I’ve ever seen. The highest point afforded a grand view of Sleeping Bear Bay and the Manitou Islands. A cadre of high school cross country runners out on an exercise run high fived me on my way back.

Sleeping Bear Point from midway down national lakeshore park

I’m glad my intro to this park was from the north end. The south end, dominated by Platte River and its run to the lake was congested with RV campers who were dependent on the full hook ups in the much larger developed campground and who fed the local economy that catered to the dominant entertainment, high density canoeing, rafting, and tubing down the Platte River to the lake. I drove on past.

I drove the most coastal route, M-22 down to Manistee and then drove the two-lane U.S. 31 that I had raced up earlier in the week before the big rain down to Ludington. The economic downturn of 2008 has put many a vacation or retirement home on the market but, enchanted by the sights down famous M-22, I stopped anyway at a realtor’s in the bitty harbor town of Onekama and perused the possibilities. Stops in other harbor towns big and small, all filled now with recreational sail and motor boating infrastructure and their clients, reminded me how, historically, these towns around the natural river mouth lakes were once harbors choked with logs and the mills responsible for sawing up and shipping out 162 billion board feet of the legendary white pine.

The last episode was to complete the Michigan shoreline trail of the Lower Peninsula, based strictly on two-lane travel. I had bypassed the two-laners in Ocean County in my haste to make camp before that big rain. It was perhaps the biggest challenge because the lake huggers were only county roads, specifically “B15.” I began with Business U.S. 31 into Pentwater. The turn off out of town onto B15 was elusive. I got lost. Finding it finally, I drove a spider web of left and right turns to keep on it, and the signage was sporadic at best. I saw dune buggies ply the high dunes of Silver Lake State Park with which winds have blown shut Silver Lake’s access to Lake Michigan. At the head of the harbor in Whitehall, I got lost again looking for the coastal road to Muskegon’s huge harbor. Successful at last I drove past the mansions along Muskegon’s waterfront, realizing that lawns under their big trees were reminiscent of my fight to return a similar habitat to natural conditions, chronicled here. And their harbor view was of the biggest coal-fired electrical generating plant and the coal pile that fed it I’d ever seen, the fight against such energy transfer which I chronicled here. Feeding the pursuit of wealth and showing off its conspicuous trophies often produces dubious results it seems.

Now that my shore-hugging and relic white pine tree-hugging mission had been accomplished, I got on the freeways to beat tracks back to Chicago. I was worried about my cat. As a strange but fitting finale, a good paddling buddy of mine in another Midwestern wilderness, the Boundary Waters Canoeing Area of Northern Minnesota, who I hadn’t seen in a year, during which time he had gotten himself married, drove past me south of Grand Haven. Recognizing each other, we stopped by the side of the road to chat, amazed at the chance encounter.

In the movie Jeremiah Johnson,  Robert Redford’s character, a rugged trapper and social outlier, was riding horseback in the trackless Colorado mountain wilderness when he chances upon a fellow trapper, also on horseback. Of course they would bump into each other out of the blue. The whole territory was theirs, and they weren’t surprised to meet up with each other at all. I’d like to think that bumping into my friend in the vast expanse of Michigan away from Chicago means that wilderness in the Midwest still exists. It actually does, if you make concessions involving attitude and posture. Used to backpacking in rugged western wilderness and canoeing trackless north woods lakes, I have had to make compromises with ideas about wilderness, given my age. Like the slide buttons on my computer’s digital image manipulator for color, exposure, contrast, and the like, wilderness too has slide controls, if you let it. I have used them in order to alter my perceptions of the landscape, always keeping in mind that, over time, wilderness changes along with the minds of its beholders. Trees grow older. I grow older. A wiser conservation ethic slowly grows. Little blue recycling boxes on the curb now are 50 gallon containers since people are willing to buy stuff made of recycled materials. Once that was unheard of. Maybe I can’t pop 70 pounds onto my back and hop 2,500 feet in elevation in a day’s hike without careful planning and cautions that before I never gave thought to. But I can find primitive camping opportunities. On promontories high above the beaches from Benton Harbor to Petoskey, bright lake water glistening like glass while receiving impossibly mellow wafts of prevailing westerly  winds mesmerized me and sent me sky walking in a seventh heaven. Like it’s written, wilderness is in the mind of the beholder.  So of course I would meet my friend “over there in the wilderness.” He too, a changing wilderness purist wise enough to recognize what can and cannot be seen, was traveling in a landscape of many changes.

The Michigan wilderness, as everywhere else, has been forced to surrender its natural barriers to American progress, prosperity, and power. Metaphor, the howling absence of God’s bounty that can be had only in the Gardens of Eden, met actuality, the tall tree wilderness  conquered and pillaged of its timber wealth. After settlement, it slowly became those more human inspired wilderness gardens of Eden on the sand plains of Michigan under the former stumps. Everywhere I went, I saw picturesque, gladsome grape vineyards, blissful blueberry farms, and cheery cherry orchards. Aldo Leopold’s conservation ethic had grown to replace rape and run economics in Michigan. Extension agents started working with land holders to manage their moorings in the landscape. One of the most eye-opening exhibits in a nature center was an interactive computer tutorial that offered choices if one were to inherit a second-growth mixed hardwood forest. Immediate timber harvesting for a payoff of $14,000 but then being forced to let the state acquire it later because that choice had reduced its productivity and future taxes couldn’t be paid became, instead, a series of informed management decisions that made less money, but enough to allow more ecologically sound improvements over time and thus allow the land to remain in one’s family for the future. This changed economy, meanwhile, had given me a glad opportunity to wander in a different manner of conveyance than in the past, adjusting the slide button along the wilderness continuum perception scale a little more toward the civilized, urban extreme, and  still satisfying the need to get out into it while I still can.

END OF PART III.

CLICK HERE FOR PART 1 AND HERE FOR PART II