Why Tourists Get Hurt on Lake Michigan

Silver Lake — The dune buggy careening over sloping hills of Silver Lake Sand Dunes is a symbol, for good and ill. The dune buggy represents human advancement and mastering nature. To climb up the dunes on your two feet is difficult; to march all the way to Lake Michigan is excruciating. To drive over the sand nearly all the way to the lake on a juiced-up side-by-side is exhilarating and easy.

The desire to rent a dune buggy, hop in the driver’s seat, press the pedal to the metal, and fly over golden sand is understandable in our era of stultifying concrete, strip malls, and central planning.

And, of course, people die while doing these things. They break their arms and legs and everything else you might imagine, because they are driving too fast with too little experience, too much hubris, and too little time.

These kinds of accidents can happen to all sorts of people on the dunes, but more often than not it’s not the locals being evacuated to the nearest hospital. They have all the time in the world and generally aren’t quite as stupid on the dunes as the tourists are.

That’s not just my opinion. Statistically, crashes on the dunes skyrocket during peak weeks in the summer season. For years, residents have complained that the dunes gobble up all the ambulances in the summer, and it can end up being a life threatening problem for residents of the area who might actually need one due to an unforeseen accident. The visitors, jacked up on buggies and reckless abandon with only eight hours of vacation left, end up drawing more of the medical help, and it’s not exactly appreciated by locals.

While it’s basically impossible to track the names and home addresses of who exactly is hurting themselves on the dunes, every local knows who’s ending up in the hospital—and they aren’t people with addresses in Oceana County.

This phenomenon of tourists hurting themselves isn’t unique to the dunes. It can be observed up and down the West Michigan coast during the summer. Every summer, you read about people drowning in the Big Lake, and they are almost always on vacation. It’s tragic stuff. Every time I read about it I hate it.

I should add that I don’t write any of this to denigrate tourists predisposed to getting harmed on vacation. The point of all this is to draw attention to this fact and explore why exactly it is a fact in the first place in hopes of preventing more injury and death in the future.

There are explanations: lack of swimming competency, hiking, and camping, lack of familiarity with the terrain, flora or fauna, all of which help explain part of this phenomenon. The kind of foolishness we all suffer when on vacation is another one. Lack of time plays a role too. When you only have three days for fun you try to pack in maybe more than you should.

But really, at bottom, it’s something more fundamental. It all comes down to hubris and a lack of respect for nature. Tourists generally don’t know how how rough the lake is or how quickly it can change. They don’t know why you shouldn’t jump off the pier or don’t believe it’s actually dangerous when signs tell them. They don’t realize if you hike somewhere you have to hike back or if you paddle somewhere you have to paddle back. They don’t think about what the implications are if you don’t have service, battery, a compass, map, and aren’t by a road. They are weekend warriors who think they are stronger than they are doing things they really shouldn’t be doing.

Earlier this summer, a charter boat captain told me he dropped a few guys on an uninhabited island. They told him they were going to camp for the night. Instead, they tried to hike across the swampy, poison ivy-infested land with a heavy cooler in tow. The next day, they called him and asked if he could pick them up on the north side. When he finally located them they told him they “lost the trail” (there was no trail), and that there was still ice in the cooler when he loaded it on the boat. I asked where they were from. He said Ohio.

The most cautious people Up North and on the lake are the people who live here all the time. If you live here you learn to respect nature because you more acutely realize just how serious it actually is. The weekend warrior from the suburbs does not.

This is true up and down the lake, but Silver Lake Sand Dunes is perhaps a most perfect example of this modern problem. Man sits at home and toils all winter, and once the ice thaws, he longs to be free and so he goes out thinking he is stronger or more capable than he is and he does dumb things in his vacation-induced stupor. The gasoline at Silver Lake just exacerbates the impulse.

The dunes are beautiful and the desire to sail over them in a buggy is natural, but the hubris is unwise.

If you’re on your way to go hiking Up North or putting the pedal to the medal on the dunes, stop and pause for a minute and think about what you are really capable of, realize that you are not in the suburbs, and that nature is great and terrible, and perhaps just be a little more careful for God’s sake.

We only have so many ambulances.