The Enchantment of the Familiar
On the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan I see
What is only a lake but an ocean to me.
Lake Michigan and me, 1994.
My sister Rebekah wrote those lines when she was a kid, maybe ten years old, about the place we were more than lucky to spend many weeks each year with our parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins.
My grandparents purchased a little mid century ranch in the lakeside village of Harbert in Chickaming Township when I was young. So young, in fact, that I don’t remember not having that place in southwest Michigan as part of my life. The house was tucked into oak and sycamore and pine forests, an eight minute walk from the beach if we trespassed through Prairie Beach Club, the private community of sleepy cabins across the street from us, which we did regularly.
We had freedom in Michigan that we didn’t have back at home in Springfield, Illinois, four hours south. Harbert was a sleepy community, with potholed dirt roads that discouraged speeding and were therefore exceptionally safe for kids to wander. We did so on foot, on bicycle, on scooter. We befriended other families with kids our age in our little neighborhood. The family that lived across from us–one of the only families that actually lived in their home year round–had five kids; next door to them were two sisters; down the dead end lane were others who were less regular in their visits, but included when they were around. We fell into easy, adventurous company. We formed clubs that mostly involved tree climbing, snack eating, and basketball playing. We’d come home at dinner time, covered in sand, scratches, and mosquito bite welts.
My Opa, my grandfather, spent long days with us on the beach. He taught us new trails and beach accesses as he discovered them. He showed us where wild raspberries grew, and where the streams leading down to the beach were filled with clay, and where the sandbar had shifted each summer. My cousins and sisters and I would collect the clay in our brightly colored plastic buckets, and he would smear it on our backs, and we would smear it across our faces and limbs, and then we would bake in the hot sun until the clay dried and cracked. We would run into the waves to rinse it off, only to repeat the process.
Lake Michigan is connected to Lake Huron via the Straits of Mackinac. The two together are technically a single body of water and the world’s largest lake by area. The Great Lakes seem to rebut all definitions we hold of lakes: they are so large that they have waves and swells, they can create weather systems such as hurricanes, and they have dangerous currents and subtle tides. The beaches are covered in white sand so fine and deep that walking across it, which one had to do quite quickly in the summer sun, created a whirring noise that locals refer to as the singing sands.
For us, Michigan was mostly a summer haunt. But each year after Thanksgiving we would go up as a family to rake the oak leaves off the lawn. And sometimes, over winter break, we’d visit again to experience the peace of the forests and beaches blanketed in snow.
The extreme winter weather created otherworldly landscapes of the beaches. The waves that crashed onto the sand in cold weather would freeze there, creating dangerous ice shelves that extended for feet, sometimes yards, out over and above the lake. When the ice pack was thick enough, we could scoot out over it on our bellies and look down into the churning, slurry water below.
An unseasonably warm winter day on Prairie Beach, Lake Michigan.
If the air was cold enough–and it often was–the waves would freeze in their curled forms, creating ice tunnels into which we could slide and exit at the opposite end. The wind had a nasty bite to it, and forays onto the frozen beaches were always brief, thrilling. We would haul our sleds up to the top of the dunes and ride them down on the snow-sand, careful to bail before we got too close to the ice shelves on the shore. When my cousin Alek took up snowboarding, we took his board down the same snowy dunes–the closest thing we had to ski slopes in an otherwise flat landscape that stretched across state lines in all directions.
Back at the house, we built fires in the flagstone fireplace. From the couch that spanned the west wall of the living room in front of a large picture window opposite the fireplace, we watched the white-tailed deer moving gracefully through the woods in the gently falling snow.
We loved our family home in Michigan. My sisters and I would watch for the state line on our drive north on I-94. It was marked by a massive sign that spanned the four lane interstate. As we approached we’d all read it aloud together in excitement, “Yes! Michigan! Welcome!” We all thrived there in that beautiful setting, living close to nature, spending long hours outside day after day. We knew it well, better than we knew even our neighborhood in Springfield where the preponderance of our lives were spent.
Without the words to put to it, I was deeply attached to Michigan. To the sandy soil and stands of oak, the deer, the beaches, the feeling of being wild and free. It was a feeling I held onto, and looked forward to, when I went home again.
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In December, my husband Alex and I visited my family’s home in Harbert as part of our Midwest holiday travels. Two days after Christmas we drove north with my mom and dad and arrived at nightfall to the little house in the woods near the lake. We had just two full days to spend, the first of which was bright and unseasonably warm. We set out on foot from the house on three separate occasions that day: the first to pay our respects to the lake and walk the shoreline south to our favorite bakery in Lakeside, the last to walk the beach from Harbert north to Warren Dunes State Park.
But on the second walk, which we took with my parents early in the afternoon, we wound through our neighborhood, taking in the changes since we last visited three years ago. We found a trail I had never before seen, and following it, we found ourselves skirting a blueberry farm along a woodland. All of it–the trail, the farm, the woods–was new to me.
The trail entered the Pepperidge Dunes Sanctuary, a twenty acre parcel of sandy, well drained land on which black gum and tupelo trees thrived in acidic soils. We could hear the waves crashing on the beach half a mile from where we walked.
Jens Jensen Preserve, Chickaming Township, Michigan.
Our trail crossed a berm and continued into a different forest typology. This was the Jens Jensen Nature Preserve, signage informed us, another forty-five trail-crossed acres of a different forest composition–oak, sycamore, pine, and shagbark hickory. In nearly forty years of traipsing through the forests near our home, we had never found ourselves in this place. My mom and I were overwhelmed with delight. Just a short walk from home existed this peaceful forest sanctuary entirely unknown to us before that day.
“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity,” writes the poet David Whyte. How close we must have come to this place in our wanderings as children. How fortunate we were to love a place so dearly, to know it so intimately, and yet still find ourselves surprised by it. The magic of this discovery is hard to describe, but we were giddy with it. I’m awake now, again, to the wonder of the very familiar. Enchanted beyond words–a feeling I mean to hold onto and cultivate, as best I can, in all the places I think I know.
When was the last time a place you know well surprised you? When were you last enchanted by the familiar?
