Going Home
Greetings from Michigan, where I was born and lived the first fourteen years of my life. My love of nature began here (and next door, in Ontario, where we often went to visit relatives). For those of you who are not familiar with Michigan, it is a place of great beauty, comprising nearly a hundred thousand square miles, divided into two large peninsulas protruding into the vast freshwater Great Lakes of the American Midwest. The southern, or Lower Peninsula is shaped very distinctively like a mitten. The northern, Upper Peninsula is called simply the U.P., and residents are called Yoopers. As a boy I spent many happy times with my family on weekend and holiday camping trips around the Mitten, with occasional journeys to the U.P., crossing the great Mackinac Bridge spanning the Straits Of Mackinac between the two Peninsulas. In those days, the bridge was brand new, its five-mile length considered a technical marvel, and even now it remains one of the longest suspension bridges with two towers between anchorages.
But the bridge was only an interesting feature to my boyish mind, appealing to the nascent engineer and techno-geek side of my personality. What I truly loved, and still love about my home state is her vast natural beauty: her forests of white birch, pine, spruce, oak, maple, and dozens of other varieties of trees, with thousands of inland lakes, rivers, and streams. Along her shores are miles of enormous sand dunes, rising hundreds of feet above the lakeshore. I used to delight in picking through the rocks and stones on the shorelines to find fossil impressions, turning over fallen logs to see the salamanders and roly-poly bugs hiding beneath, making miniature canoes of birch bark to send on adventures downstream, and climbing high up into trees to get a new perspective on the world. In the autumn months my family would visit apple orchards, to pick a bushel of fresh apples (for which my tree-climbing prowess came in handy), and stop at the cider mill for gallons of freshly-pressed apple cider and cake donuts, still hot from the fryer.
A sure sign of old age is prattling on about the wonders of the past, but here's the thing: all of these magical delights are still here. The forests and beaches, the enormity of the Great Lakes and all the smaller, more intimate inland lakes, the great sand dunes, the apple orchards, the wildlife, are all around me. I took them in during the drive up through the Mitten, over the towering bridge, and across the U.P., and I felt years flake away from my psyche like a snake shedding its skin to emerge fresh and new. The magical, wondrous places of my early childhood were still here when I was a young newlywed, sharing with my bride the land of my birth. They were still here a decade later when we brought our children on a camping trip through the Mitten and across the majestic bridge. They were here five years ago when we brought our grandchildren and introduced yet another generation to the natural wonders of this place. And now I am back once again, connecting with my past, my roots, the first place that Nature held me tenderly and showed me her glory. I have traveled to many other places of indescribable beauty, and seen astonishing wonders in other parts of the world, and I love the vast, inexhaustible variety of nature everywhere. But when I need to rejuvenate a tired, worn spirit afflicted with the weary malaise of age, this is where I can find my youth. Nature is beautiful everywhere I go, but here is where she speaks to me most personally, and whispers to me most tenderly. Here, I can connect with the small boy who turned over fallen logs and looked with wonder at what lay beneath.
On the drive up through the Mitten today I stopped at a roadside rest, and walked up a short path to a scenic overlook. Mostly, it overlooked the highway down below, but also one could see the forest beyond, and a sliver of a lake through the trees. As I gazed at the sight, a man came up with his young son, a boy of about six, who looked out and mentioned to his father how the fall colors were coming in. Then he looked up into the sky, and said with astonishment: "It's the middle of the day, but there's a moon in the sky!" The look of wonder in his wide eyes, and the delight in his grin, told me I was right where I need to be. Once again, I have come home.