  Romance/Love
This week: Edited by: Fyn  
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'The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'Gitche Gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.'--Gordon Lightfoot
' By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. '--Longfellow
Fresh home from the Shores of Lakes Huron, Superior and Michigan, I am a very tired and glad to be home Fyn! |
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Love. Can one fall in love with a place? I'll be honest. In 1996 when I last left the state of Michigan, I vowed never to return. I hated it. It was FLAT. The roads were all straight lines. It was flat!! No character. Flat corn fields or soybean fields or sugar beet fields. And did I mention flat? I'm from New England. I missed my oceans, my mountains, my hills and valleys and vast forests stretching out past the ends of imagination. So I happily left.
Then events conspired or transpired and in 2004 I returned to Michigan. I now had compelling reasons to stay but they had everything to do with a person and nothing to do with the state. I moved to a tiny (or so I thought) town with but one stop light. Loved the man, grew to love the town. Now after a trip around the non-flattened 3/4s of the state I'd yet to see....I've fallen flat out in love!
For those of you who read last week's 'For Author's Newsletter,' you caught the beginning of my ten day trek around Michigan. From Mackinac Island we headed north to Whitefish Point on the shores of lake Superior. 38 degrees and windy on June 16th, it was cold! We explored the Shipwreck Museum and heard the tales of the 'Edmond Fitzgerald' and the retrieving of the ship's bell. Gordon Lightfoot's song will never be 'just a song' henceforth, for I now know much more about the wreck and the folks involved. In a wind that threatened to blow us over, we walked for a while on the sandy beach at Whitefish Point. We looked out through the waves and thought of the many ships that Superior has taken to her depths. I think that had it been 78 or 80 degrees out, that I would have been shivering non-the-less.
Back down that lonely black top road to Tahquamenon Falls. Deep within the wind sheltered woods, where mosquitoes rival B-52 bombers, lie the paths and endless stairs leading down to and up from both the lower and upper falls. Given a prior week of unrelenting rain and storms, the falls were spectacular, the woods, thick and deep.
At one point on the path leading to the upper falls, I stood in one place and took seven pictures. None were the same. One was of an eagle soaring high overhead, just barely visible in the tree tops. Another of a butterfly dancing on the water's glittery sparkles. Another of a tree shooting straight up for a couple of hundred feet. Another of a parent telling her exuberant child to 'use her cathedral voice in the woods so as not to startle the wildlife.' Details. And I think, a looking deep. Looking deep beyond the surface whether it be people, the woods, a series of words, or series of worlds.
Back roads. Dirt roads that weren't on the maps and just enough that were, to confuse and confound us. Deer watching us with curiosity and elk calves gamboling across the fields. Seasonal roads that had been almost washed away in the preceeding week's storms and which, I expect, we may well have been the first to travel since. An hour's drive turned into a three hour adventure. Sticks stuck upright on the sides of roads approximately a tenth of a mile apart yet not consistently so. Miles and miles of unrelenting trees, dirt roads, and deer. No cars. No houses. No people. Just miles and miles of wilderness....and those sticks stuck upright on the sides of the roads.
We finally wended our way to civilization and found a place to stay. The next morning we woke to storms and cold and we halfway expected it to start snowing at any second. The rest of the week included more waterfalls and rock formations along Lake Superior. 1271 pictures later found us meandering back across the Mighty Mackinaw Bridge to the land of the troll below. We moseyed down along the shores of our third great lake, Lake Michigan.
My vision of Michigan has been forever canted sideways. The places I saw and the people I met were both awesome and awe inspiring. We spent our final two nights in a town so small that you could hold your breath longer than it took to pass the restaurant, library, bar and handful of inns that made it Arcadia. Great little bar with the nicest people who love their tiny town....and their state and their country. As do I.
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Romance/Love: June 25, 2008 Issue [#2463]
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