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Great Lakes Forever
c/o Biodiversity Project
4507 N Ravenswood #106
Chicago, IL 60640
773-496-4020 phone
773-906-1303 fax
project@biodiverse.org |
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 “The first time I saw Lake Michigan, I thought it must be an ocean. I was five years old and my family had just moved to the Leelanau Peninsula, the little finger of Michigan’s mitten, and rented a hilltop house with a view of the lake. In the living room, centered before the picture window, was a brass telescope mounted on a pedestal, where I would stand on a chair at night and peer at ships on the horizon, each lit as bright as a small city. My father told me that they were ships five-hundred to a thousand- feet long, with cargo holds that could carry a hundred trainloads of wheat or iron ore. If they were headed south, they were probably bound for Chicago; if north, for Detroit, New York, London, Hong Kong. I would stand in our house and watch those large, bright, slowly passing vessels and sense connection with the world.
 It was a magical place to live. Our yard ran in a long slope down to the lilypads of South Bar Lake, with Lake Michigan a stone’s throw beyond. At the big lake was a beach empty of people most days and a playground of sandblasted swings and teeter-totters set precariously a few feet above storm waves. My memories of that summer are filled with painted turtles and watersnakes, with excursions down the beach in search of treasures, with ominous dark thunderstorms passing over the lake, lightning flashing in the distance. My mother had grown up a few miles down the shore in Glen Arbor, and my father’s parents owned a cherry farm and sugarbush a few miles inland, so for them it was a homecoming. For me it was a revelation.”
-Excerpted from Jerry Dennis’s The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas
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