Writing and Wayfaring: A Wayfarer In Her Natural Habitat, Part 7: Lake Michigan

Sunset over Lake Michigan

I trust a lake. Because the lakes I've known are tender places, maybe the tenderest spots on the skin of the earth. Lakes have been giving to me, and to everyone I share them with--not like their sisters the seas, so selfish and treacherous, so fickle and taking. Oceans are bitter, biting, killing--lakes are sweet. Sweet as breezes, sweet as sand softened by the night, sweet as cold, fresh water.

In the center of my country, there's no other kind of water--no bitter waters, no selfish seas. Instead there are as many freshwater sources as there are twists in a tornado's walk, as there are circles in a hawk's life of flight. In the central north of my country the lakes are more mighty than many. We call them great--the Great Lakes. We don't say it as a boast. We say it as respect. The Great Lakes give us inland people their water to drink, their fish to eat, their sunsets and sunrises to adore, their waves to watch, their coolness in the summer, their thick skins of ice to test in the deep freeze of winter. They give us horizons and views that coastal people claim to only know, that coastal people don't even know we inlanders possess. Which means they give us secrets too. They give us mystery that adds contours to the unending flatness of the surrounding lakeland, that adds magic to the bleakness of a forgotten flyover region. They give us refuge from the sense of emptiness and dullness that so many inland and Midwestern and flyover people are told is their hopeless affliction, a hopelessly bland and benign character the fault of their hopelessly bland and benign home landscape.

Sand sculpture on Lake Michigan beach

Milda's Lithuanian market, small-town scene in Michigan, USA

"Flyover-country complex" is no joke. I used to think I was deficient. Not just ordinary--but deficient. Bland. Naive. Too sweet. Too nice. Too Middle American. I used to go long distances to other places because I thought what I needed to know, to experience, to be, was absolutely lacking in the place where I came from. Other places had all the answers, all the necessary experiences. Other places had all that was worth giving and all that I needed to take to stop being so deficient. Mountains, oceans, canyons, culture, tradition, exoticism, authenticity, depth, meaning--everything I needed, everything that couldn't be found back home. One of those first other places was a place on the sea, surrounded by ocean, neighbor to mountains and cliffs, devoted spouse to tradition...and to isolation. Its abundance of everything I'd lacked, everything I was deficient in, shocked me and overwhelmed me. Hooked me too. I believed I had nothing to bring to the place--and it had everything to give me.

Me on beach in Union Pier, Michigan

Penny sunset, Lake Michigan

I had my first real encounter with the sea there, my first ocean swim. All my swims growing up had been in fresh water, if not in public pools. It's not that I didn't know seawater is salty--it's that I hadn't thought about it at all before entering the sea, that I hadn't prepared for a significant difference. I remember how the taste of the seawater choked me when I accidentally swallowed a bit. I gagged on the bitterness. The salt water stung my eyes and nostrils. I unthinkingly brought the back of my hand up to wipe away the salt flavor and stinging, like I would in a lake, and just dosed myself with more poison. Because that's what the sea felt like to me at first--like poison. (Recently I learned I'm not the only one from my part of the world to have this kind of reaction to the ocean. From Indiana man Kurt Vonnegut: "I am one of America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.")

There were other unusuals--the ways of tides confused me at first, I distrusted the depths of the swimming areas off the beach, there were jellyfish in the waters to contend with at times, and seaweed often clung to me fiercely and wrapped itself around me as I tried to swim, like lost children only recently re-acquainted with a long-estranged mother. And unlike the shorelines of Lake Michigan, I could see land across the waters from the beach of this otherwhere place--the mainland. The view from the shores of the Great Lakes are limitless--from the Atlantic though...well it seems it all depends where you stand.

Union Pier beach, Michigan

Warren Dunes, Michigan

I adjusted with time to saltwater swimming, just as one adjusts to the greater bitterness (and less sweetness) one experiences in life over time. Now, I no longer find seas so strange and foreign shores so foreign. I also no longer find my home landscape so lacking. Perhaps I'm even not so deficient, and never was to begin with. Perhaps it's oceanic people, seaside and saltwater people who need the broader point of view, who need to come to my part of the country and re-discover the reality and importance of freshness and sweetness, rather than people from my part of the country going off only to reckon with bitterness. Maybe the moral goes something like this:

Tell you something," the raven said. "I was flying over the Midwest once." He stopped abruptly, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and began again. "I was flying over the Midwest. Iowa or Illinois, or some place like that. And I saw this big damn seagull. Right in the middle of Iowa, a seagull. And he was flying around in big, wide circles, real sweeping circles, the way a seagull flies, flapping his wings just enough to keep on the updrafts. Every time he saw water he'd go flying down toward it, yelling, "I found it! I found it!" The poor sonofabitch was looking for the ocean. And every time he saw water, he thought that was the ocean. He didn't know anything about ponds or lakes or anything. All the water he ever saw was the ocean. He thought that was all the water there was.” -- Peter S. Beagle, from A Fine and Private Place

A backpacker traveling through the Midwest

Midwestern outdoor decor. Bíonn chuile dhuine lách go dtéann bó ina gharraí.

When I first started this blog, I infrequently would put up a post with the title "A Wayfarer In Her Natural Habitat" and then name the place I was posting about. I'd share pictures of me in this "wayfarer's habitat"--i.e., some place I'd traveled to, some place usually on the hit list for world wayfaring types: Australia, the salt flats of Bolivia, New York City, Paris. The idea was that for travel-lovers like me, the world is my habitat, the world's roads are where I feel most at home. Sort of a "citizen of the universe" meets "anywhere but here" philosophy. But then I stopped traveling so much, and I forgot about the "natural habitat" theme. And after seeing so many other parts of the world--and trying to judge them gently as a good traveler should--I think I started to see the parts of my own world more gently, more generously, with more sweetness.

This blog has noticeably been focusing more on places in the American Midwest--inland places, flyover places, freshwater country, sweetwater states. Mainly because these days that's all I can afford. Economically and emotionally. Bitterness has been a surprising running theme in my writings since this blog started (here and here, for example). I used to write of its necessity and naturalness in life and the landscape. I still stand by that point of view. Bitterness serves a purpose. But like everything else, bitterness has to make room for other tastes, other flavors, other sensations and spaces. Sweetness has its purpose and place too. Just as flyover folks have their own depth and authenticity, the Midwest has its own beauty and mystery, and lakes have their own limitless horizons. And me, supposedly deficient, naive, too sweet, too nice me...I even have my own depth and beauty and limitless views, my own sweet, perfect, whole, freshwater/flyover woman integrity.

This blog began as the record of a person going to see other places in the world. This blog now asks those other places to consider returning the favor. These writings are me asking other places to come and see me.