Advocate for Lake Michigan

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Joel Brammeier of the Alliance for the Great Lakes (http://www.greatlakes.org/Page.aspx?pid=243). He's the VP for Policy, which means he helps shape legislation, education, and grass roots efforts to protect and preserve the Great Lakes. He had suggested several books to read in an earlier e-mail exchange, and I had already read the books he listed.

Peter Annin's THE GREAT LAKES WATER WARS is an engaging history of water usage policy for the Great Lakes that details many legal skirmishes between the states and Canadian provinces which border the lakes and culminates with a detailed discussion of the Great Lakes Compact. This piece of legislation (which the Alliance for the Great Lakes was instrumental in helping shape and for also fostering its acceptance by all governing bodies concerned) is a landmark agreement on how and when and why the water of the Great Lakes can be used.

Access to fresh, clean water is going to be a defining issue worldwide in the next decades. The Great Lakes contains 20% of the world's fresh water. The Compact goes further to protect this water than any previous attempts to define the usage of this water.

My conversation with Mr. Brammeier was engaging and I will discuss many of the challenges facing Lake Michigan in my book about the trek: A 1,000 Mile Walk on the Beach.

Pre-Trek Planning

I was up north skiing this weekend at Crystal Mountain (the photo is the ski hills lit up at night). And, of course, I took some time to get out to the lake.

First, I went to Beulah, a small town at the base of Crystal Lake and stopped in at the Five Corners Store (http://www.fivecornersstore.com/). Bill and Patty Cary, and Bill's sister, Cathy, and stepson Billy were catching their breath after registering over a hundred fishermen and women for an ice fishing contest that day. They have a great store and they were excited to hear more about the lake trek. [Bill had coached my cousin Milene's son's soccer team, and she had mentioned my adventure to Bill.] They said that they'd love to stock the book in their store when it comes out, so I stopped in to meet the family and to see what they were catching out on Crystal Lake (perch, trout, and some fish that is considered to be 'freshwater lobster' that I'd never heard of before).

After promising to stop back in while on my journey this summer, I drove out to Frankfort, a cute little town on the shores of Lake Michigan with a deep, natural harbor. After stopping in at The Bookstore there (a lovely independent bookstore on Main Street), I parked at the beach. Oh, man was it cold! The wind was blowing and the sheet ice filled the mouth of the harbor. Outside the harbor, the waves had tossed and stacked the sheet ice into a rugged ridge about ten feet high.

I walked out on the pier a bit, until my ears (even under my hat and hood) stiffened with the cold. I love standing on the shores of West Michigan because the wind blows across all that water and it's clean and alive when it hits you. I've been to this harbor several times in all kinds of weather, and I stood their shivering and imagining what it would look like in June when I'd be walking this segment. It made me want to start right there, right then.

The start of the trek will have to wait, but not much longer. I will begin in Chicago, on the end of Navy Pier, March 16. From there, I will hike seventy miles (over five days) to New Buffalo, Michigan. Segment 2 will also happen in March, and Segment 3 in April.

One Woman's Trek of the Perimeter of Lake Michigan

My earliest memory of Lake Michigan is running down a sand dune. And not just any dunes, the ones at Warren Dunes. When I was a kid, it looked like insurmountable. My siblings and I would scramble all the way up, one step slipping back for every two steps up. The sand was hot from the sun. At the top, we’d take a moment to catch our breath and look down the lake.

The Lake. Blue water on and on and on. No seeing the other side, and it stretched left and right till it met the sky. The breeze off the lake blew up the dune, warming and lifting from the warm sand.

Lifting. There was so much lift off that dune that hang gliders would launch off the top and glide high over the parking lot and almost to the water, banking and stalling and turning. You could fly off that dune if you had the right wing.

We did the next best thing: we ran. The angle of the dune was such that we would run so fast that our legs could not keep up with our bodies, and we would fly, pitching forward, heels over head, over and over until we finally ended sprawled on the warm slope, panting, flinging the sand off our sweaty arms, digging it out of our ears. It was a blast. It was so much fun that once we got our breath back, we started running down again.

That exhilaration, that rush, followed by a cool plunge in the fresh lake marked me, and I haven’t been able to stay away from the lake for very long ever since.

But how do you really take in the lake? The scope of it, the scale, the depth and width? I’d heard those statistics about the Great Lakes, like, if you took all the water and spread it over the lower forty-eight states, it would cover to a depth of ten feet. When hearing this, I always picture the land under ten feet of water, how high that would come on my house and think: why in the world would anyone do that? Then I think that that isn’t really true, because the states aren’t flat. So, Denver would be high and dry a mile in the sky, but poor New Orleans would be extra flooded, maybe hundreds of feet submerged this time. And hasn’t New Orleans suffered enough?

And you hear statistics about the depth of Lake Michigan—the deepest spot being over 900 feet—and how you could stick the Eiffel Tower there and only have the top observation deck sticking out of the water. Now, that makes no sense to me at all. Who would go to all that trouble to prove a point?

And then Lake Michigan contains over a thousand cubic miles of water. Cubic MILES. That’s not even a useful measurement! Even the name for the lake, Lake Michigan, is derived from the Algonquin word michigami meaning ‘big lake.’ Even the Indians couldn’t articulate it better than that.

I’ve tried to get the scope of other large things. I’ve stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon, but couldn’t process the size of it until I descended, step-by-step, to the bottom, then ascended once again. After you do that, anytime you even look at a photo of the canyon, you feel it in your bones, your muscles.

I’ve driven around the lake, taken many trips along its edge. I’ve walked miles of its beaches, spent many joyful weeks jammed into summer beach rentals with friends and family. I’ve climbed the massive ice sheets tossed up onto the shore like modern ice sculptures during the winter. I walked the beach one early spring when these sculptures still remained at the water’s edge, but the sun was so warm that I took off my shoes to walk barefoot on the hot sand near the melting ice.

I’ve been on motor and sail boats on the lake and have even taken the Badger ferry across mid-lake. The name ‘Badger’ calls to mind a small, squat vessel with a bad disposition. I assure you it is nothing like that. At over 400 feet long and 100 feet tall, it is the only coal-fired steamer still in operation in the U.S. On this behemoth of a ship, its hold filled with cars and trucks and buses, about thirty minutes out of port, all you can see around the ship—even from the uppermost deck—is water. And that’s all you can see for the next three hours of steaming across the lake. This was one measure that allowed me to begin to wrap my mind around the scale of the lake.

I wanted to have a more intimate interaction with the lake, though, and thought that walking, step-by-step, around the perimeter would be the way to truly experience it. So I pulled out a map of Michigan and began to study the lakeshore, beaches, refineries, major and minor cities, stretches of parks, the wild expanse of the southern edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And I started mapping out this trip in segments that I would walk over one spring-to-fall stretch, always keeping as close to the water as possible and, if the water temperature allowed, allowing the waves to lap at my bare feet.

What follows is my account of this journey. Early spring through late fall, 2009, I will hike the perimeter of the lake in segments, beginning in Chicago and hiking counter-clockwise around the lake. I will post photos from each segment as I hike it, and then give an update of my adventures when that segment is complete. The shortest segment is 50 miles, the longest 185.

So, come along with me on this journey, this 1,000 mile walk on the beach.