The Indian River runs beneath Interstate 75 just south of Mackinac, and summertime boat traffic looks like it did in the 1970s when we cruised that no-wake zone in my grandfather’s runabout, the Ripple Skipper.
But the river is more crowded today – a busier parade of pleasure boats plying lily pad waters, shirtless guys at the wheel, bikini girls in the bow, as are the Lake Life traditions of Kid Rock’s Northern Michigan.
We now speed by to the U.P. but my introduction to woods and waters was here in a cottage that Norman McNeil outfitted with motorboats and a Piper Cub on floats and where we hauled a lot of gas in cans.
Our family of three hit the Mac on a Saturday, the Straits a little hazy, and I pressed record over the center grates as the bridge sang a kind of whale song. Undulating and melancholic.
A week earlier, the spires and span were hidden in smoke from another summer of runaway fires in deep Ontario.
Before we left, my neighbor told me, “We’ve really got to do something about these Canadians.” He spoke of improper forest management.
Three adults live in my neighbor’s house. There are six vehicles and two boats parked outside.
I said, “You know, it’s global warming.”
He made an unfortunate face and his body visibly vibrated as it rejected like a virus the words, the idea, the god damned fact, its implications and imperatives, its arrived and accelerating realities.
“Yeah, well,” he said.
North of the bridge, M-134 runs east along the shore to De Tour, a gray ribbon through evergreen woods and white dolomite, Lake Huron right there out the window.
We join a caravan of fifth-wheels, motorhomes, tow-behinds, Jeepers, bikers, dune buggy- and boat-towers to the diesel ferry and on to Drummond Island, then drive some more to Potagannissing Bay.
Its immensity and quietude the reason we’re here – a giant, noise-eating expanse of ever-changing color and light. An inland sea of wooded islands and protected waters – chrome, cobalt, silver and sable – at the rugged edge of ragged America.
We rent a fishing boat and steer it to the inner harbor of Harbor Island, a perfect lake-within-a-Great Lake, where we drop the anchor and swim off the bow in seven feet of clear, cool freshwater – totally alone.
The harbor shoreline is a bank of fir and birch, the kind of boreal woods burned over in Canada. The kind elsewhere on the U.P., not yet burned over. The kind no one is raking anywhere.
I was going to write about the fragility of traditions and futures: Will my son do these things when he is 53?
But that’s the wrong question. The wrong timeline.
Out West, there are 75 large wildfires burning now. Indianapolis is flooding now. LaPorte is dark now.
We are still guzzling and gurgling gas. We are building data centers.
The question is how fast this all disappears, in floods and walls of flame, while our kids are still kids, and whether we want to face that, which we do not.
That we did this, like our parents did this, and their parents did this, and we aren’t going to stop.
Making memories.
