Blue Highways: Mount Pleasant, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Sometimes we need guidance - a little helping hand to get us where we need to go.  Often we seek guidance or signs but cannot find them.  Sometimes we don't recognize or even ignore signs we perceive and guidance we receive.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) asks for guidance and gets it from a deaf woman in Mount Pleasant.  It will determine his next destination - the Thumb of Michigan.  To place Mount Pleasant on the mitten, put your fingers on the map.

Book Quote

"Across her T-shirt was SKI.  She leafed through Stalking the Wild Asparagus in the college bookstore.  I was in the middle of Michigan and looking for a place to go next, so I asked whether she lived in Mount Pleasant, but she didn't look up.  I tapped her arm.

"'I'm from Missouri.  Traveling.  I'd like to find a good place to visit in Michigan.'  She watched but said nothing.  'Maybe you know a nice spot.'  She just stared.  Northerners really carry taciturnity too far, I thought.

A clerk came up and said, 'She's deaf.  Probably having trouble reading your lips.'  He repeated what I'd asked.

"She said, 'Oh,' and put the book down.  Holding up her right hand as if to say 'How' in Hollywood Indian fashion, she said, 'Dumb.'

"'Dumb?' the clerk repeated.  I didn't know whether she meant me or herself.

"'Dumb Miss Ginn,' she said and wagged her right thumb.

"'Thumb of Michigan?' the clerk asked.

"The girl smiled, wagged her thumb again, and nodded.  'Berry bootful.'

''It's very beautiful,' the clerk translated.

"Looking at her SKI T-shirt, I said, 'Do you ski on the Thumb?'

"'Dumbs due plat.  By dames car water ski.'

"'Thumb's too flat to ski,' the clerk said.  'Her name's Karworski.'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Reflections of Mount Pleasant. Photo by Tom Kimball and hoted on the MtPleasant.com website. Click on photo to go to host site.

Mount Pleasant, Michigan

Sometimes, we need a guide, and we can't find one.  We cast about, looking for the right way or the right path, and no matter what we do, we can't distinguish which way to go.  We even ask those we see around us what way might be the right way.  Sometimes they are just as lost as we are, and we are frustrated because we want the answer.  Sometimes they appear to know exactly where they are going and what they are doing, and we are frustrated because we feel we should know.

For example, my wife has been looking for a sign or a guidepost or an actual guide to give her some indication as to what path her life should take in her middle age.   It has been very hard for her.  No stroke of inspiration, no accidental dropping of words that gives her a great idea, no light shining out of the grayness of the clouds that illuminates the forest path down which she should tread.  She often feels on her own.

In a way, waiting for a sign or a guide to step forward is like waiting for lottery ticket numbers to come up with the multi-million dollar winner.  Lightning will strike very few of us, and flashes of inspiration and insight will come infrequently.  A guide will step out of the trees only once in awhile.  Mostly we are on our own and have to make our own way through the world, relying on our own senses to get us where we need to go.

That's small consolation when you're waiting for that guiding hand.  Humans have created religion to provide us with direction, and over the millenia we've prayed to a myriad of gods to provide us with what we need, and we wait.  And wait.  And wait.  We go to psychotherapy in search of the answers, and are frustrated when the therapist asks us a simple question:  "What do you think you ought to do?"  If you're like me, your first response is often just as direct:  "Aren't I paying you to tell me?"

There's a joke I heard once about a man stuck on a roof as flood waters rise about him.  He is a deeply religious man, and he begins to pray.  After a while, a man comes by in a rowboat, and asks if he needs help.  The man on the roof says "Don't worry about me, God will provide."  Later, as the water is rising higher, another boat comes by the praying man, and the rower asks him if he wants to get in.  "God will provide," says the man.  As the man continues to pray, the water rises until it is almost covering the roof.  Another boat comes by, and they really want to pull the man in but he resists, strongly saying "God will provide!"  They go away and by and by the man drowns.  As he is being conducted by St. Peter through the pearly gates, he exclaims "I don't understand.  I'm a pious man.  I pray every day.  I prayed throughout the flood knowing that God will provide.  Why didn't he save me."  St. Peter turns and says, "Well, God sent you three boats.  What else were you looking for?"

I'm learning that inspiration and guideposts must come from within as well as without.  Here's my theory.  Inspiration and guidance consist of two things: action and recognition.

Nothing will happen if the person seeking guidance doesn't take action.  This could be choosing a path or asking for help.  Robert Frost provides an example in his great poem The Road Not Taken.  He chooses the road less traveled, which has made all the difference, knowing that he may lament not taking the other road.  However, this involves action.  If we come to a crossroads, and there are no signs, we have to choose or we will remain stuck.  Who knows - the signs may be over the next hill, but we have to keep traveling down the road.

We also have to recognize signs and guidance when it is being offered.  How many times have I blown off somebody's advice, because I knew better, only to learn later that the advice was correct?  How many times have I ignored what my conscience or gut feeling was telling me, only to pay later for ignoring my instincts?  Sometimes guidance comes from people or things we don't expect.  Literature is rife with people ignoring advice or signs at their peril.  Shakespeare made the fool an important part of many plays, and his heroes that didn't pay attention to their seemingly foolish but challenging and wise words often suffered.  I think that in most cases, we instinctively know what is true and right but we don't trust ourselves enough to follow our senses and ultimately be our own guides.

In the end, signs can point us to things, but we move past them.  Guides usually are with us a short way along our journeys, but not throughout life.  They may point out a path or a place we should go, or they may accompany us a short way.  Virgil served as Dante's guide through The Inferno, but after the tour was over, Dante had to move on.  Our lives are our own, and ultimately, we are responsible for our paths.

LHM ends up on the Thumb of Michigan because he takes action and asks for some advice from a young woman.  She was his guide for a short moment in time, and he followed her advice.  Occasionally, guidance comes, sometimes even in the form of a young but friendly deaf woman in a bookstore in Mount Pleasant.  We just have to recognize the signs.

Musical Interlude

This Ace of Base song, The Sign, is probably one of the last true pop songs to which I paid some attention.  It wasn't long after this came out that I stopped listening to pop music entirely.  I know I've probably missed a few signs, but I believe I've gained in understanding by broadening my musical knowledge base.  That being said, this catchy tune is about recognizing signs and going with it.  The best line, if a little grammatically awkward, is "No one's gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong."

If you want to know more about Mount Pleasant

Central Michigan Life (student newspaper)
Central Michigan University
City of Mount Pleasant
Downtown Mount Pleasant (blog)
Isabella County
The Morning Sun (newspaper)
Mount Pleasant Convention and Visitors Bureau
Wikipedia: Mount Pleasant

Next up: Midland, Michigan

Blue Highways: Elberta, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Big sand dunes can be found at the shoreline of northeastern Lake Michigan.  I will relate my own experiences there, and my impressions of sand dunes in general.  Sounds like a rockin' time, doesn't it?  Perhaps you'll find it interesting, perhaps not, but in any event it's our first Blue Highways stop in Michigan.  To see where William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) disembarks, take some steps to the map.

Book Quote

"The sandy dunes of Michigan glowed pink in the late sun, and at the mouth of the Elberta Harbor, there was a marvelous sight: little slivers of silver jigged on their tails over the blue water.  They were alewives looking for all the world like dancing spoons.  These were the fish that had washed ashore to foul beaches in the days of high pollution.

"The Viking let loose with her horns, the crew tied up and sprinted across the dock and into cars and roared off to supper, and I wished the Viking were sailing all the way to the Atlantic."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 13

Lakeshore beach at Elberta, Michigan. Photo by mr56k and hosted at Flickriver. Click on photo to go to host site.Elberta, Michigan

Sand dunes, or rather one big sand dune, is a big memory of the times I spent in Michigan.

When I was just out of college, I joined an organization called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.  While I was placed as a volunteer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin we had an opening retreat in Benton Harbor, Michigan so that we could meet the other volunteers in the region - some of whom would be my housemates for a year - and get into the mission of the volunteer organization.  At the end of the year, the organization hosted a final retreat in Traverse City, Michigan so that we could wind down, say goodbye to our housemates and the other volunteers, and move on into the rest of our lives.

The thing I loved about the eastern side of Lake Michigan is that, of all the other places I've visited in the U.S., it most reminded me of my oceanside hometown in Northern California.  Of course, in the summer the weather was much warmer, and the lake waves were much smaller compared to the roaring surf of the Pacific Ocean.  In other respects, however, they were very similar.  The shore along Lake Michigan has the same feel, the sun set over the lake waters, and the sand dunes blown up by the prevailing western winds were very reminiscent of the dunes in places along the Northern California coast.  I would consider living there as a substitute for the west coast of the United States.

It was while at my first retreat in Traverse City that I first visited Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which is a mere half hour away from where LHM disembarked from The Viking in Elberta.  Since he mentions sand dunes in his quote, it is a shame that he didn't visit the place.  This particular set of dunes rises 150 feet high from the lake and has an interesting story.  The Ojibwe believed that a mother bear and her cubs, fleeing from a forest fire on the west side of Lake Michigan, started swimming across the lake.  The mother bear reached the eastern shore and waited for the cubs.  The cubs however, too exhausted, drowned within sight of the shore.  The two islands in sight of the dunes, North and South Manitou Islands, are believed to be the cubs.  The mother bear, who continued to wait for the cubs, fell asleep and eventually was covered by the sands.  Under the Sleeping Bear Dunes she continues sleep and wait.

When you stand at the top of the dunes, the lake looks very far beneath you.  You start down and gravity just tugs at you.  When I scrambled down, I realized that once you get going, you start taking big leaps and bounds, covering 15 feet per step.  It's almost like being on the moon, except that the slope is about 60-75 degrees.  Of course, sand gets into your shoes, but it's so fun getting down you don't care. 

However, if you go, I must caution you that it can be dangerous to get going too fast.  Gravity, the attraction that two bodies have for each other (in this case you and Earth) and inertia, the property of bodies to remain in either a state of motion or rest, work together to make it very difficult to stop if you get going too fast.  Your loss of balance will make your moving body collide with the sand at a fast rate of speed and if you're lucky you won't be hurt.  I knew a young woman who lost control on her way down and cracked her head on a rock buried under the dune's sands.  She split her head open and had to be accompanied back up by paramedics.  So be careful when you do your moon-bounding thing on Sleeping Bear Dunes!

Coming back up, however, is a real difficulty.  Climbing a 150 foot, 60-75 degree-sloped sand dune really gets your breath going in short gasps, your leg muscles sore, and your heart pumping so hard it feels like it might burst out of your ribcage.  What took you five minutes to get down takes fifteen to get back up, if you add in the stops for rest.  At the top, you almost feel like you've run five miles in that combination of exhiliration that you made it and extreme tiredness.

To me, dunes represent the same type of wave action that governs water except on an infinitely slower pace.  A time lapse photo of the dunes of the Sahara Desert, sped up to normal time, would resemble waves of an ocean in their windswept journey.  The edges of the dunes would lap at, and sometimes inundate and then retreat from, the areas at the edge of the desert borders.  If you stand at the top of a dune, you are really on the crest of a giant sand wave that is slowly, infinitesimally, moving and cresting.  It is a beautiful contrast between the liquid wave motion of water and slow, particulate wave motion of sand or other materials.

I write "other materials" because dunes are not just waves of sand.  The beautiful white dunes of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico are composed of gypsum particles, not sand.  A dune, no matter what it is made of, can cover a lot of ground in its slow movement.  The 600 foot high Sand Mountain in Nevada, a previous subject in the Blue Highways posts, has apparently moved back and forth across the desert floor for some generations, following the whims of the prevailing winds.  It also "sings" due to the shape of its sands.  There are other singing dunes too, as this fascinating video by Stephane Douady demonstrates.

Wherever there is wind and small particles, you'll find dunes.  They have helped create some of the great rock formations that we see in the western United States.  They are also otherworldly.  Giant dunes exist on Mars, and Venus and Saturn's moon Titan also have named dune fields.  I used to see dunes as being iconic symbols of the desert, and we still tend to associate them with desert areas.  They are much more than that, however, and their achingly slow, shifting, and relentless march across all regions of the world, past and present, make them an ever-present part of external and internal landscapes.

Musical Interlude

I know some other good reasons for dunes.  "If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes on the cape," then this song is for you.   Get a little "Escape" with Rupert Holmes.  (By the way, this song has more words on Wikipedia than some Beatles songs).

If you want to know more about Elberta

Benzie County Record Patriot (newspaper)
Frankfort-Elberta Chamber of Commerce
Village of Elberta
Wikipedia: Elberta

Next up: Mount Pleasant, Michigan