Glen Arbor — Though much of what I show the world is from Michigan, most of my readers and followers are not. Some visited years ago when they were kids. They remember their family vacation Up North and getting a bunch of mosquito bites all over their legs. Others have relatives that live near the Big Lake and come back for a weekend every August. Others have only passed through for work, and most haven’t ever been at all. For these people, what I show is a bit novel and distant. Images from a state they only know on a map.
When you live in a place, you forget the place. Or, rather, you forget what’s special about the place. We have a natural predilection to take things for granted. We are spoiled and ungrateful, and so when we live near mountains we stop looking up at them, and when we live near lakes we stop swimming in them, and when we see the sunset every evening we forget to watch. Sometimes it’s only an observation from an outsider, a reminder of the objective truth, that helps us realize what we too easily forget.
It’s some of those observations from outsiders, people who have never visited our Pleasant Peninsula, that have, over the years, shocked me into realizing how unique and extreme our state is. Since I started sending out dispatches from Northern Michigan, I’ve received a disproportionate number of messages remarking, in awe, at the fact that the same place that looks almost like a Mediterranean beach in August looks like a Siberian wasteland in February.
All Michiganders understand that the lake is great and then the lake is frozen. It’s just the cycle of the seasons here, and it’s not special to us. But most places on earth don’t have this kind of high contrast. It’s a meteorological fact that most places on earth where sailing, swimming, and laying out on the beach and getting burnt to a crisp are normal are not places where snowmobiling, skiing, snowshoeing, sledding, and ice-fishing are also normal. And when it comes to Michigan, these things are normal not within the same country or within the same state, but in the exact same geographical location. It’s a fact that most places have a thinner band of variation when it comes to weather, lifestyle, and the things the people do outdoors in spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
There are examples of this high-contrast life we lead all around us wherever we look, but there are places where the reality of our extreme state of life in our extreme state of Michigan is most glaringly obvious, and most sublimely beautiful. The dune climb in Glen Arbor is one of those perfect places.
Most people who have memories of the dune climb remember a towering golden hill, hot sand, and sweating profusely as they scaled the 284-foot monster marking the edge of Sleeping Bear Dunes. It’s a good hike up the side of the dune, and it’s good and worth it. The top flattens out and you are surrounded by mounds of sand dotted with light green dune grass fluttering in the breeze that’s always stronger up top. You sit down on the sand, dig your toes under the hot granules and down into the dark cool layer, and look over Glen Lake, watching little boats leaving little docks, and the rolling hills of leafy trees. After sitting a while, you get up and decide that the best way to get back to your car is by running down the dune you just struggled to climb. Seeing how fast the forces of gravity will propel you, your feet finally give out, and you crash down and into the sand near the bottom.
But as with all things in our high contrast state, there is another side of the dune climb. If there is the summer sand dune then there must be the winter snow dune. It’s just as tall and just as hard, if not harder, to climb. Instead of bare feet and burning sand, it’s heavy boots and almost knee-deep snow. You trudge to the top along the side, next to orange markers leading the way. You breathe measured and heavy through the scarf covering your mouth, accumulating more moisture on your lips with every step. About three-quarters of the way up, you feel a little sweat on the top of your back if the temperature is over 20 degrees, and, once you arrive, you turn around and look over the same land though an altogether different scene.
Glen Lake is white with ice, the trees are bare, the dune grass is nearly all smothered with only the tallest of the blades peeking out over the drifting snow. The parking lot is almost empty, and you are almost all alone. Tourists don’t come to walk the dune when it’s snow white. So you sit down on the crunchy snow next to a little hill and look out over the severe, desolate winter scene that will, in just a few months, be buzzing with activity and the optimism of new life that spring always brings. And you look to your right for a while, and then your left too, and all you see is the dormant land. Little puffs of snow whipping up into mini-tornadoes as the wind comes, a tiny jet high in the sky heading over Lake Michigan, and only the sound of your breathing close in your ears as it always is in the winter when you wear a scarf and a trapper hat.
Finally, you get up, grab the sled that you hauled from the back of your car and up the dune, sit it down on the snow, get yourself stable and situated, and begin to push yourself forward with mitten-clad hands. Your speed picks up, the wind gets harder, you balance and steer by way of pressure from either hand on either side of the plastic sled that’s a little too small, you squint your eyes as the snow flies up and the sled waivers, and eventually you lose control nearly at the bottom, spinning around and flipping over, landing on your back, your sled trapped under one of your boots, your head resting flatly on a mound of hard snow, your eyes facing the empty winter sky above.
Life on high contrast.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @NecktieSalvage.
