May 2023 - Love Our Great Lakes

May 30, 2023

Golf Cart + Glacial Grooves = Kelleys Island

What makes an island special? A couple things come to mind: Given their geographic distinction, islands are sometimes home to rare species or specialized ecosystems and for that reason can be important places of ecological research. They are often rest stops and nesting sites for birds. Islands may, due to their isolation, develop specific cultures among people who live or spend significant time there. And finally, their defining feature – land completely surrounded by water – can provide people with a place of rest and respite.

flock of white birds photo during sunset

There are approximately 35,000 islands in the North American Great Lakes. Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron is the largest freshwater island in the world at 1,068 square miles (it’s 100 miles across!). This past weekend we spent a day on a much smaller one – Kelleys Island in Lake Erie (4 square miles).

It was all the things you want for a day trip – easy drive (90 minutes from our house), easy parking (in Marblehead, OH), and easy ferry ride (22 minutes). The ferry itself was a sensory experience for my girls – wind whipping hair around, the smell of fuel, the sound of the water as the boat cut through it. The famous Cedar Point roller coasters in Sandusky could be seen faintly in the distance, steel curling and arching like ribbon loops.

Upon arrival, we rented a golf cart and puttered north to Kelleys Island State Park. Our first stop was the Glacial Grooves Geological Preserve, the most widely known attraction on the island. In fact, the preserve is home to the most famous glacial grooves in the world and it was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967. They are really quite stunning. Deeply and smoothly carved, the grooves look human-made and not the product of an ice sheet that retreated from the region approximately 14,000 years ago.

After the grooves, we strolled over to the North Shore Loop Hiking Trail and down to the beach where you can rent kayaks and paddleboards. The girls were very excited about the golf cart and so we took a drive, first circling the eastern part of the island. We ended up finding the Kelleys Island Wine Co. and purchased lunch from the KI Cantina there. We settled into a brightly colored picnic table in the shade. The girls enjoyed looking at the cows and goats in adjacent pastures and watching people play horseshoes. We then circled the western part of the island and landed back at the main commercial area where we popped in some shops before heading back to the mainland.

A Great Lake + an island + a golf cart + saltwater taffy from Missy Magoo’s Candy and Gift Shop = a solid start to summer.

May 16, 2023

Walking on Lake Erie

Small Adventures

I shared in one of my first posts that it was a solo retreat in January 2021 that launched a deeper relationship for me with the Great Lakes. I still seek that alone time on Lake Erie as a retreat from this complex and sometimes bewildering world.

Eighteen months after my cottage in Geneva, Ohio, I returned east to Madison in September 2022 to stay at a tiny Airbnb right on the lake (for $95 a night!) called the Lemon Drop Cottage. Cuteness alert: despite being a sour fruit, cottage decor could not have been more sweet and cheerful! During this 36-hour retreat, I started writing content for this blog, read, and walked along the lake at Lake Erie Bluffs and Lakeshore Reservation, both Lake County Metroparks.

I love walking generally – I find it tremendously restorative. While I’ve never been able to truly get into a meditation practice, I find walking to be meditative. The rhythm of the body in movement, feet cycling, and outdoor air flowing through the nose and lungs sets a cadence for my thoughts and emotions as they run their course. This feeling of self in the world – of presence – is especially the case if I can walk along the lake.

In her book 52 Ways to Walk, Annabel Streets references an expansive 2019 study that looked at the well-being effects of spending time by the sea. A dataset that included over 26,000 people living in England concluded that those living within a mile of the sea had better mental health and greater happiness markers than those inland. But from my read, the saltwater doesn’t appear to be the key variable. Things like environments with a sensory rhythm (waves), specific light patterns, and ambient sounds (birds, water) come up in descriptions of why the sea makes people feel good. I would argue that if it’s these things, then our inland seas offer them all (the wave action is real on the Great Lakes, albeit different in kind).

And for me, I personally love the lush forests that you often wind through leading right up to the lake. Walking and then resting in the deep shade of a tree, looking out at the lake = a pure and honest contentment.

On March 25, 2023 the New York Times published a worthwhile opinion article by the actor Andrew McCarthy titled “Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking”. The piece included many of the profound thoughts from the ages about walking including an observation from the great John Muir: “I only went out for a walk… going out, I found, was really going in.”

The precious summer months are here. Water or trees or city sidewalk: Go out. Go out. Go out.

May 2, 2023

The Good Read: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

Great Lakes 101

I love when you find a non-fiction book that weaves multiple engaging storylines together in a readable, cohesive, and impactful way. I found all of these things when I picked journalist Dan Egan’s 2017 book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes off the shelves of my favorite independent bookstore in Cleveland, Loganberry Books.

A twist on Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the book is a testament to both the positive and negative impact humans have had on the ecology of the Great Lakes (mostly negative, to be real). Egan opens the book recounting the incredible ambition and optimism of the late 1950s that propelled one of the most expansive infrastructure projects in history: the digging of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The idea was to dig a nautical expressway through the St. Lawrence river that would open up a shipping channel from the Atlantic Ocean and coast and would drive Great Lakes cities to become dynamic domestic and international commercial ports. Project leaders, politicians and media figures boldly talked about this “Fourth Seacoast” for North America.

But the ships and great port cities never really materialized. And the reason is a real kicker. In a brilliant short vignette, Egan tells the story of a gas station attendant turned truck driver named Malcolm Purcell McLean who one day in 1956 put into action an idea he had dreamed up while sitting in his truck watching stevedores haphazardly and inefficiently load ships at a port. He took an old oil tanker, installed a raised platform on it, and built a structure that could hold 58 trailer trucks whose tires had been removed. The structure could hold 58 containers. It was still a number of years before this invention completely took hold of the shipping industry. But it was also still a number of years before the Seaway was completed. And by the time it was fully operational, the channel and locks built were too narrow for the container ships that came to dominate the shipping industry in the 1960s. Whomp whomp.

Tragically what did materialize from the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 was ecologic disaster. The cargo that was delivered by international ships came via the millions of gallons of ballast waters that kept ships’ weight steady and balanced while sailing and were then released near and in ports when they picked-up cargo. In those millions of gallons of water were millions of living organisms from around the globe – some of which found new life in the freshwaters of the Great Lakes.

Many of the storylines that follow in the book are so good that they are worthy of their own blog posts – a scientist who singlehandedly found a way to rid the Great Lakes of sea lamprey (do not look this creature up unless you want to give yourself quite a fright), the incredible effort to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and the complex root causes of Lake Erie’s toxic algae problem that endanger drinking water. You can wait for my synopses of these storylines, or you can head to your local library or independent bookstore for this very worthwhile book.