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
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.
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
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 76th street a
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 70th 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 s
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.
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
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 
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.
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.
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