On Friday, May 6 at the Glen Arbor Township Hall, the Empire Area Heritage Group will present “The Boizard Letters” at 7 p.m.
A half-hour video presentation will feature recollections of Julia Dickinson and Joan Bolton, who found over 100 letters written before, during and after the Civil War between a husband in the service, and his wife who stayed behind in Glen Arbor to fare for herself and her small child.
The letters between them and other relatives offer fascinating portraits of what life was like in Glen Arbor and in the military during the war. The program will also include a discussion of fate, luck and perseverance, and discussions about a second book by Jodie Sewall, titled “Long Distance Love”, which includes over 150 additional Boizard letters.
The names of local Civil War veterans will also be recognized. Please join us for an educational and enjoyable evening.
Local television personality Vic McCarty reports on The Ticker that the Dunegrass Festival is growing big once again — just three years after the popular Empire music festival outgrew its training wheels and all but careened off a cliff under the misdirection of Stephen Volas. Since then, Ryan Lake has downsized the August folk festival, which will enjoy its third consecutive year at the Empire Eagles field on M-72 east of Empire. But the creation of the late Mike Vanderberg appears to be rising again. Donna the Buffalo will headline the Aug. 5-7 festival.
McCarty, by the way, is working on a documentary about the Dunegrass Festival. Here’s his story:
Dunegrass: Big Lineup, Big Move
By Vic McCarty
Dunegrass lives! Left for dead little more than two years ago when the multi-day music festival nearly collapsed under its massive size and troubled finances, Dunegrass is set to rock northern Michigan once again – and maybe better than ever.
The festival has announced its biggest lineup in years – 42 confirmed acts, with tickets sales 30 percent ahead of last year’s pace. Headlining: Donna the Buffalo, the two-decade chart-topping Americana band behind the famed Finger Lakes Grass Roots Festival in Trumansburg, NY.
“I think last year we reestablished ourselves,” says promoter Ryan Lake. “The bad taste from 2008 is fading.”
The bad taste Lake refers to stems from a series of hard knocks for Dunegrass, which some might say began in 2007, when Empire folk hero and original Dunegrass founder Mike Vanderberg died suddenly while working on site preparations for the summer show.
The death of Vanderberg – who was so passionate about his festival that each summer he went by the name Mike VanDuneberg – was an ominous indication of what was to come.
In 2008, just days before the ever-growing festival was to open, festival-site neighbors brought a lawsuit in hopes of stopping it. The show went on, albeit farther inland (disappointing to many concertgoers because its proximity to Lake Michigan had always been a part of its pull), but it was still beset by power outages, rainstorms and cost overruns that left dozens of vendors and musicians unpaid.
But in 2009, just three months before the beleagured festival’s opening date, promoter Ryan Lake took the helm to help the once-legendary festival change course. Key among the changes he’s made was the festival’s move from the Village of Empire to a plot of land owned by the Empire Eagles just down the road off of M-72.
This year, he’s looking to move once again, this time to a bigger site in Almira Township, near the Lake Ann Airport. “The Eagles’ [land] was always a temporary location,” he says.
If approved by the township board at its May meeting, Lake says the new location would give fans more room to spread out and plenty of wooded camping sites for overnight attendees. “It’s a hundred acres of land on a 320-acre plot, and a lot of trees.”
“A lot of people are excited,” he says. “I’m really positive … music is an integral part of all our lives.”
The 2011 Dunegrass Music Festival is slated to run August 5 through 7. For more information on ticket sales, performance lineup and news, click here: dunegrassmusicfestival.org.
Renowned local author Anne-Marie Oomen (American Map, Uncoded Woman) and theatrical dance director Gretchen Eichberger (American Document) will team up to develop a theatrical dance production with text inspired by late Benzie County naturalist Gwen Frostic’s meditations — in honor of the tenth anniversary of her death, (and in celebration of her life).
“Remember Gwen Frostic and those beautiful art books?” asks Oomen. “Remember that nature-based studio in Benzonia? Remember how her vision of nature was something you wanted to pick up and touch?”
An open call for dancers will be held for an original multimedia theatrical dance work on Saturday, April 23 from 12-4 p.m. at Eastern Michigan University’s Parsons Center in Lake Ann, approximately 12 miles southeast of Traverse City. The work, entitled “Chaotic Harmony,” is inspired by the legacy of iconic Michigan woman, Gwen Frostic.
Eichberger will conduct artistic direction with the script written and adapted by Oomen. An original musical score has been composed by nationally acclaimed Michigan-based trio, Breathe Owl Breathe. All artists will be paid for rehearsal time and performances. Each artist must commit to twice weekly rehearsals from May-August 2011 in the Traverse City area. Spot rehearsals will continue from September to December. Performance dates are August 28 and 29 and December 15 with two additional pending performance dates.
To schedule your audition, please contact Eichberger at (231) 871-0215 or email gretchen (AT) michiganfolklife DOT org
Local history author Tom Van Zoeren has released a new book titled Boudewijn & Kate DeKorne: An Oral and Photographic History of a Dutch Immigrant Family. The book tells the story of a wood carver who came to America when he was 14, and settled in Grand Rapids. There he met and married a fellow Dutch immigrant. The couple eventually produced twelve children. Around 1920 they purchased an old farmhouse in Burdickville, near Glen Lake in Leelanau County.
The book is mainly based on oral history interviews that Van Zoeren conducted with family members during the past five years, and on family photographs that were collected. Through stories and pictures, the reader is transported to a rather different time. Kate DeKorne, who became generally known around Burdickville as “Grandma DeKorne”, is an interesting character. After raising 11 children, sewing most of their clothes, and growing much of their food, she retained a fun-loving approach til the end of her life. A fanatical and fearless fisherman who grew her own bait in her “worm garden” and always caught the most fish, she enjoyed teaching her grandchildren tricks such as snagging a cousin’s clothes from his bedroom with a fish hook while the owner slept. Then there’s Kate’s son Casey, who teaches a nephew to chew tobacco while caulking the boat, and to smoke a pipe upside-down in the rain.
Van Zoeren is the author of three books in his Images & Recollections from Port Oneida series (relating to an area of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore), and of a piece of local history called Dottie Lanham of Burdickville.
Deadline extended to Friday for first phase of comments; Park will eventually draft Cultural Landscape Management Plan
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
The Port Oneida Rural Historic District — the picturesque tapestry of late 19th century farms, fields and rolling hills, just east of Glen Arbor on M-22 — will soon have a Cultural Landscape Management Plan, which Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (the local branch of the National Park Service, or NPS) will develop together with an Environmental Assessment.
“The purpose of the Plan,” according to a Park press release, “is to explore the various ways in which the NPS might preserve cultural landscapes in the District in order to protect cultural resources and provide for visitor interpretive and recreational opportunities.”
But first, the Park wants public comments on how to best to preserve and celebrate Port Oneida. The National Lakeshore is especially interested in how you envision the landscape looking many years from now. Will some fields be allowed to return to mature forest? Will some fields be cultivated or planted with cover crops? Due to technical difficulties, the public comment period for the “scoping” phase was extended from last Friday to this Friday, Dec. 17. You can submit comments on the Park’s website, or write to them via snail mail at “Superintendent, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 9922 Front Street, Empire, MI 49630”.
Representative of the late 19th and early 20th century farms of the Midwest, the District boasts 18 farms, 113 structures and 3,400 acres — all told one of the largest intact agricultural districts in the nationwide National Park system. Port Oneida is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places at the state level, and today the entire District is classified as an “Experience History” zone, according to the 2009 National Lakeshore General Management Plan.
According to the Park press release, the District provides an excellent opportunity to preserve a rapidly disappearing landscape associated with an important time period in the heartland of America. The Cultural Landscape Management Plan is needed to determine the best way to halt deterioration of the cultural landscape, and preserve it in the future.
“Since the end of agricultural activity in Port Oneida, historic spatial patterns have deteriorated somewhat. The physical and visual connections between landscape features, agricultural buildings, and community landmarks have diminished, and much of the historic plant materials have been lost. Landscape features such as windbreaks, orchards, and garden areas are deteriorated and overgrown. Invasive vegetation, such as black locust and spotted knapweed, has encroached on the landscape and threatens native plant and animal communities. Although National Lakeshore staff and volunteers have accomplished much to halt and reverse this deterioration, there is a need to decide the desired future conditions for the District, and how best to achieve them.”
Sleeping Bear Dunes Deputy Superintendent Tom Ulrich says that the Park typically sees a higher volume of comments once the “scoping phase” yields to a more advanced phase when specific alternatives are presented to the public. To date, the Park has received some comments that advocate for horse-riding trails in Port Oneida. Other comments have spoken up in favor of letting the District grow back to nature. But, Ulrich points out, Port Oneida is an “Experience History” zone, which means that the Park is committed to preserving the man-made history too.
Ulrich expects that the first round of public comments will be published as early as late January 2011. Landscape architects and assistants from the Lakeshore’s regional office will then become involved for the purpose of completing an Environmental Assessment. Phase two — unveiling specific alternatives — could happen in May, when much of the local population has returned to the area following winter hibernation.
Why this focus now on Port Oneida?
“We’ve been pretty successful in recent years in obtaining internal park service grant money for field clearing,” says Ulrich. “Take a drive to Port Oneida and see examples of tree clearing where the trees encroached on fields. We’d like to do that in a more comprehensive way.”
And therein may be one of the central questions at the heart of this coming discussion over how to preserve Port Oneida. Should certain farmsteads reflect the way they looked in the late 1800s, when the fields weren’t all cleared of trees? Or should they resemble the aerial photographs from 1938 that are featured in Tom Van Zoeren’s oral history books — the time period that may have featured the maximum extent of clearing? And should onetime boundaries in the fields, or between farmsteads, be redefined?
“Part of the difficulty is that we don’t want to choose an exact moment in time for the entire district,” explains Ulrich. “That’s a big area to cover. … Some of the farms have buildings with more modern additions. Other farms never really changed around the turn of the century.”
Perhaps someday a tour through Port Oneida will resemble a travel through time, from Civil War days to the Great Depression, and back again.
Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear
To get a feel for how some local organizations are weighing into this discussion, read a portion of Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear’s letter to the Park, which PHSB director Susan Pocklington graciously shared with the Glen Arbor Sun:
To further develop the plan for Port Oneida, we offer the following comments:
1. Determining the management plan for the cultural landscape would necessarily involve taking into consideration the many components that define a landscape. We support addressing these components – land, vegetation and structures – as a whole, as they go hand-in-hand in determining the desired future conditions. This cultural landscape plan needs to include structures as well as land and vegetation. It would be difficult to plan one without the other.
2. Several factors would influence the recommendations for management related to the Park’s goals of visitor experience and access, recreational and interpretive opportunities and preservation treatment of, and impact on, cultural and natural resources. Some of these factors to be considered include:
Defining characteristics of the cultural resources – including windbreaks, fence rows, orchards, historic plantings, open fields and structures Historic integrity – condition and collection of resources on site Viewscapes – that reflect the period of significance and/or that offer spectacular views of the cultural and natural resources in the District Visibility – location on a major thoroughfare; location within the District Stories to be told – quantity of resources and unique history related to the family, structures, community, or ways of life; the variety of stories inherent within the District; a farmstead’s place in the overall history of Port Oneida. Determined period of significance Visitor access – type of road (gravel, paved, two-track,etc), distance from major artery Open space – selection of which should be maintained as historic agricultural fields with no invasive, nonnative vegetation; and which will allow these. Flexibility – allow a range of uses within parameters of park goals Visitor experience Circulation and parking – the location, visibility, ingress and egress, size and surface of the parking lots is a significant issue. Limiting the amount of vehicular traffic and encouraging walking, biking and skiing is most preferable in maintaining the uncluttered, quiet, pastoral setting which is a significant factor in the appeal of Port Oneida. Adaptive-use partnerships – how many partnerships and what types of activities would preserve the historic integrity, and at the same time offer enhanced visitor experiences and services. For example, there is great interest in activities such as leasing fields for haying and pasture. Trails – considering the number, location, type, and network of trails to promote the desired circulation and minimal impact on the landscape and viewscape of the district. Minimizing the impact of use on natural resources Signage – consider the size, design and location of exhibits and signage to improve the visitor experience, but which would not pose such distractions from the historic landscape that would negatively impact either their experience or the landscape.
We would encourage the park to include Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear and other potential partners relative to the future of Port Oneida, in developing alternatives, through brainstorming sessions with the park. Points of discussion might include identifying and evaluating farmsteads for rehabilitation, stabilization and restoration, as well as ideas for desired uses; and the development of trails and exhibits.
Overview:
The plan/EA should include a combination of farmsteads/landscapes (including vegetation, structures, and fields):
1. Stabilized as part of the landscape and left to the visitor’s imagination or that offer excellent interpretive opportunities (without restoration or rehabilitation)
2. Restored for adaptive-use and/or interpretation
3. Rehabilitated for adaptive-use and/or interpretation
Leelanau County’s “elephant in the room”, the long-shuttered Sugar Loaf ski resort, is back in the news following a quiet autumn season after the eccentric Las Vegas boxer-turned-businessman Liko Smith returned to the West Coast empty-handed.
Resort owner Kate Wickstrom has been courted in recent months by at least two suitors, Chuck Weiler — to whom Liko Smith alluded this summer as a possible partner, but is now reportedly acting alone — and David Skjaerlund, from Owosso, near Lansing. In a feature story for this month’s edition of Traverse Magazine, editor Jeff Smith reports that Skjaerlund has “spent the past several months getting options on several Sugar Loaf town houses and nearby properties.”
A rural developer with a Ph.D. in Animal Science, Skjaerlund unsuccessfully attempted to build a $100 million ethanol plant near Ithaca, Mich., but the plan failed when the ethanol market collapsed three years ago. Unlike Liko Smith, Skjaerlund has maintained a low profile and has not returned phone calls from reporters.
Here’s a video of Skjaerlund discussing agricultural zoning:
“Word on the street is that a Dave Skjaerlund of Grand Rapids is interested in buying Sugar Loaf. His company Liberty receives 15 million from an auction sale, plans to put towards Sugar Loaf, however, nobody has heard from him, no due diligence has been performed, claims from several sources that he is immensely interested. Attempted to create Chemical Plant earlier in the decade, lost funding but very smart cat.”
As proceedings drag on between potential buyers and her lawyer Joe Quandt, Wickstrom has seen no signs that a deal is imminent. “Things just keep dragging out,” she told the Glen Arbor Sun this week.
Wickstrom would not disclose any details, but confirmed that she knew of Skjaerlund, though she said that a deal is no further ahead than it was three months ago. Calls to Skjaerlund have not been returned.
Wickstrom doesn’t believe that Skjaerlund has any interest in using Sugar Loaf for ethanol. Rumors have circulated on the Leelanau.com blog that Skjaerlund is interested in a wine operation.
Jeff Smith’s narrative historical feature in the December edition of Traverse Magazine (it’s not yet online) is an excellent read. The story chronicles the rise and fall of Sugar Loaf, once Leelanau County’s largest employer.
Here are the story’s chronological highlights:
• Dan Matthies moving to the area in 1970 to teach French skiing techniques at what was heralded as “the best ski school in the state”. Smith writes that he became enthralled with the area, began selling real estate at the resort, and never left.
• Sugar Loaf declaring bankruptcy in 1981 after “borrowing money at too high an interest rate” when expanding the hotel in the ’70s.
• Attorney John Sills and a group of investors from Detroit bought the resort, including one golf course, the airstrip, the hotel, the ski hill, a wastewater treatment plant and nearly 1,600 acres, for $7.5 million.
• Under-marketed, and perhaps hurt by disappointing snow levels, the resort fell on harder times by the ’90s. Sills added another, Arnold Palmer-designed golf course. Matthies moved out in 1998.
• In 1997 Remo Polselli from Southfield, near Detroit, entered the picture, spruced up the lodge, but failed to secure a liquor license. Sugar Loaf closed in 2000.
• As reported by Eric Carlson of the Leelanau Enterprise, a family including a (pregnant) mother, father, grandparents and seven children moved into the shuttered resort (which lacked running water) to start a religious-based family camp. They were booted by the health department after a few weeks.
• In 2003 Polselli pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges unrelated to Sugar Loaf, and spent two years in prison.
• Wickstrom, a Leelanau County local who operated a Narconon addiction treatment center downstate, purchased the resort in 2005 for $5.7 million. She held a party at nearby Sugarfoot Saloon in anticipation of re-opening the resort soon. But nothing happened, save for Wickstrom replacing some windows in the hotel and picking weeds from a flowerbed.
• Reports of suitors have come and gone in recent years, and speculation ran high when the Enterprise reported that Polselli’s wife Hanna Karcho was listed as the sole owner of the bank that held Wickstrom’s mortgage.
The brash and confident Liko Smith who arrived here in the spring with his model-like, 19-year-old wife limped back to Vegas with his tail between his legs by late summer with bills unpaid at Red Ginger and other area restaurants, and his name no good at area hotels. Suffice to say, “Liko-polooza” was the big story of the summer of 2010.
Liko-polooza’s last act
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
“Coyote sleeps with everyone and, in the morning, it turns out that he was a she …” — folksinger Greg Brown
Problem was, no one in these parts was actually seduced by the coyote. Not by his lofty words, not by his cliched view of the “meat and potatoes” Midwest, not by his shiny Jaguar with Nevada plates, not by the singing teenage vixen at his side, and certainly not by his promises that the cobweb-laden resort would re-open within months. The backwater, podunk-ville that he envisioned never opened its doors to the mysterious foreigner.
Instead, the Liko Smith that northern Michigan will remember was one who boastfully rented out a posh Traverse City restaurant for a fundraiser and then tried to avoid paying his tab; held business meetings in Leelanau County restaurants during the dinnertime rush hour and ordered only toast, or tried to sneak his own food in with him; and found himself locked out of his hotel rooms in Traverse City when his maxed-out credit card couldn’t pay the room rate.
Curious about this eccentric character — perhaps the antithesis of the Midwestern commonman — I drove up to Sugar Loaf mountain early on a spring evening in the first week of May, to get a visual image of the story that had splashed all over the local media. It was a beautiful picture: the mountain awash in green, the sun sinking into the western sky and casting a pretty glow over Leelanau County, the roads and forests not yet crowded, as tourism season wouldn’t arrive until Memorial Day.
I didn’t expect to see Liko Smith — you don’t walk the forest expecting to see the coyote. The Vegas man had recently commandeered the front page of the Leelanau Enterprise, appeared on local AM radio, given an exclusive interview to the Glen Arbor Sun, and given the impression that he had all but named his son after the Manitou Islands. But he’d checked out of his hotel in Traverse City, wasn’t answering his cell phone, and everyone I talked to suspected he had returned to Sin City.
As I drove by the old golf course adjacent to the ski hill, something caught my eye and made me pull the car to the side of the road. Did I just see a girl in a black cocktail dress, shoeless, hiding under a tree? I got out of the car and walked back. Sure enough, there was Liko’s 19-year-old newlywed, crouched under the foliage, like an actor in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — her hair frazzled and her hands covered in dirt. “What on earth …?” I asked after introducing myself. “My wedding ring,” she replied in her New Zealand kiwi accent. “We were playing here under the tree, and I lost it in the brush … Liko will be so angry if I can’t find it. He spent a lot of money on that ring. … But I found the pennies that I threw into the brush pile, just not the ring.”
Bewildered, but curious, I offered to help look for the ring. Just then, we heard the sound of a powerful car engine approaching us. There was the Jaguar with Nevada plates, and out of it stepped Liko Smith. The wife playfully introduced me to Liko as “her new boyfriend,” and I methodically backtracked, with my feet and my words, for fear of antagonizing the unpredictable, onetime Samoan boxer. Pleasantries were exchanged. Based on his tone, Liko clearly adored the local media and was confident that he had local public opinion in the palm of his hand.
“The papers will be signed, and the deal will be done, within a couple weeks,” Liko boasted, “and we’ll have Sugar Loaf open again by July 4.”
Looming behind him, I saw the mountain’s one-time signature run, “Awful-Awful”, awash in early evening orange. I remembered the first time I skied down that death-defying steep hill without wiping out. I must have been 11 years old. At the time, “Awful-Awful” was the biggest challenge in the world. If I could master that, I could master anything.
I snapped out of the reminiscent daydream to listen to Liko’s lofty promises. But they just didn’t click with the reality before me. A ski hill and resort legally parceled off from the golf course, the townhouses, the lucrative real estate and the drainage field. A building full of cobwebs and mold that probably needed to be replaced. Chairlifts that wouldn’t satisfy anyone’s safety standard. The need for $15 million in fresh capital, and yet this guy before me wouldn’t order anything more than toast at local restaurants. His words didn’t fit. He didn’t fit.
As I drove back down Sugar Loaf Mountain Road, toward M-22, the sun set once again, leaving the mountain in darkness.
The Michigan Land Use Institute works on bold solutions for Michigan’s people and places. This documentary calls on the people touched by the work the Institute does in the areas of thriving communities, local food & farming, energy & environment. The MLUI is a model for any community striving toward sustainability and a prosperous new economy.
This fall marks the 30th anniversary of what has been called “the most widely watched PBS series in the world.”
According to one of the show’s co-writers, almost a billion people worldwide have watched “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” and gained an understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, and the paths taken by early astronomers to achieve that knowledge.
For 26 of those years, Norm Wheeler has shown all 13 television episodes of “Cosmos” to his high school science students at The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor.
“It’s the cornerstone of this astronomy course,” says Wheeler, who also operates The Leelanau School’s Lanphier Observatory, overlooking the skies above Lake Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Bay.
“It makes difficult ideas in astronomy accessible to high school kids who haven’t had calculus and higher math.”
First broadcast on public television in 1980, “Cosmos” won Emmy and Peabody awards for its educational content and entertaining presentation. But what engaged viewers of all ages was the straightforward way the show’s host, Dr. Carl Sagan — a charismatic Cornell University astronomy professor and planetary scientist — conveyed science concepts. Sagan used practical, real-world examples enhanced by the show’s graphics, special effects and music, with ethereal scores by composer Vangelis.
“I saw it when it first came out on PBS,” recalls Wheeler, a physics major who has “played with telescopes” since the early ’70s, including as former manager of the observatory at his alma mater, Olivet College. “I watched every episode.”
Into the classroom
Besides Wheeler’s favorite “Cosmos” episode, which recounts the history of early astronomy and its researchers, (Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton), the series also touches on biology and chemistry, in addition to astronomy. As Sagan notes, “Cosmos” is a Greek word that means, “order of the universe,” one he says “implies the deep interconnectedness of all things.”
“You get a great survey of natural and life sciences,” Wheelers explains. “It’s really a comprehensive science course all made verbal, not in the classical classroom way.”
That is part of the show’s appeal for Wheeler, who has created a multi-step approach to learning astronomy.
“It (‘Cosmos’) also works well because it helps me to teach note-taking,” he said, explaining that the school specializes in teaching those with learning differences.
Students are asked to read a chapter of the bestselling “Cosmos” book by Sagan, watch the corresponding video episode, take notes on the material and, finally, quiz one another.
“We go through the material three different times, in three different ways.”
On clear nights, the school’s beachfront observatory serves as the “lab” part of the course, and Wheeler said they look at planets, galaxies, star clusters and nebulae.
When asked if he uses Sagan’s analogy that there are more stars than grains of sand on the earth, he responds, “Yeah, we’re in a perfect spot for all of the ‘billions and billions.’ It’s ironic that Johnny Carson said that on his show (when Sagan was a guest). He (Sagan) does say ‘billions’ quite a bit.”
At Traverse City Central High School, physics’ teacher Keith Forton echoes Wheeler’s sentiment about “Cosmos” episode three, “The Harmony of Worlds,” which he shows students for its instructive segment about early astronomers, particularly Johannes Kepler.
The episode highlights the hardships astronomers faced as they made early attempts to prove their ideas about the universe to a skeptical public.
“For most of his life, Kepler chased after something that was wrong,” Forton said, explaining that the astronomer struggled to use shapes to try to explain distances between the known planets and the sun. Much later in his life, Kepler finally used observations and measurements to “embrace the model that was the ellipse.”
“‘Cosmos’ teaches us that it’s okay to dream, to take a chance and take on a challenge that has a high risk of failure,” Forton stated. “That series, itself, could have been a tremendous flop if it had been laden with numbers and scientific equations.
“Only one or two times did he (Sagan) interject mathematics. He was very personable and friendly and wasn’t trying to throw up a bunch of equations. He could have done that very easily, but didn’t.”
In the fall of 1980, Forton was a student teacher for astronomy classes at a high school with a planetarium. He remembers his teachers talking about the episodes after each one aired.
“I think it influenced a lot of people. It was one of the first attempts to make a documentary and bring it into the realm of the everyday … It brought the science of astronomy not only into the living room but into the kitchen, where people could talk of and dream of astronomy with their neighbors. It wasn’t just reserved for the science community.”
Creative inspiration
Bob Moler, host and creator of Interlochen Public Radio’s weekday stargazer program, “Ephemeris,” recalls watching the series for the first time.
“I remember well Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos,’ and we avidly tuned in to PBS to view it,” Moler, a member of the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society, relates via e-mail. “Though most of the topics weren’t new to me, I thought the visualizations were quite spectacular … It seems that many current astronomers and scientists were inspired by Cosmos to enter their chosen fields.”
In 1980 Moler was teaching astronomy at Northwestern Michigan College, and said he used some “Cosmos” episodes in the classroom, “especially the one on Mars.”
Today, NMC’s astronomy professor is Jerry Dobek, a research astrophysicist whose most recent area of study involves re-mapping and measuring dark material, such as dust as gas, referred to as Dark Nebulae.
Dobek also teaches mathematics, curates Rogers Observatory, directs one of the country’s 13 Project Astro programs for K-12 students, and serves as a NASA Ambassador for the Year of the Solar System program. He was still in school, however, when “Cosmos” debuted.
“It’s amazing to realize that was 30 years ago,” Dobek said. “It was fun seeing how he (Sagan) continuously related facts on earth to the solar system, like using simple rock formations to explain cratering. I use Carl’s ‘more stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth’ with my students and they suddenly realize, wow, infinite is incomprehensible.
“Some of the things he tried to bring home, using models and mathematics, I’m not sure there’s been anyone since Carl who’s done that.”
Keeping ‘Cosmos’ current
The 13 original episodes of “Cosmos” were remastered and updated in 2000 with images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The DVDs include footage of Carl Sagan’s 1990 science updates.
Moler, of Interlochen, shares these latest observations from 2010.
“Things we’ve learned since ‘Cosmos,’ (things we’re pretty sure about):
• The age of the universe is 13.7 billion years.
• The universe is accelerating in its expansion. We thought it should be decelerating. An anti gravitational force called Dark Energy has been hypothesized. We have no idea what it is.
• The many landers and orbiters of Mars have changed our view of this world. I think there’s more water there than suspected in 1980.
• We’ve sent spacecraft past all the outer planets and have orbited Jupiter and Saturn, plus landed a probe on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
• We’ve had all the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray telescope and the Spitzer Infrared telescope.
• We have discovered over 400 planets orbiting around other stars. (One of them was recently discovered to have a ‘habitable zone.’)
• A new generation of huge, ground-based telescopes have been developed and deployed around the world. These have made more discoveries than I even know.”
This list is not exhaustive. For a weekday star almanac, visit www.ephemeris.bjmoler.org “Ephemeris” can be heard daily on 91.5 FM at 6:19 and 88.7 FM at 6:59.
The long walk down the Dune Climb trail to Lake Michigan has blessed hikers with an added gift this fall. Not just the azure waters at the conclusion of the 2.5-mile hike in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — but a shipwreck. The historic windstorm two weeks ago probably pushed the wreck up onto the beach, where chairman of Friends of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Kerry Kelly and others have gazed at and photographed the 16 feet by 40 feet remnants of a wooden ship. Follow Kelly’s blog here.
“It is huge, and it is heavy, and it is out of the water,” Kelly said. “Those winds must have been blowing out there.” According to Kelly, the wreck now rests about a quarter mile north of where the Dune Trail meets the beach.
The most recent shipwreck appears to be a propeller-driven steamer, not a schooner, said Laura Quackenbush, museum technician with Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
The ship piece offers evidence it was constructed to accommodate the weight of a boiler and steam system, Quackenbush said.
She contacted Steve Harold, director of the Manistee County Historical Museum, who said the shipwreck could be that of the St. Nicholas or the General Taylor — both lost during fall months in the mid-19th century.
The St. Nicholas carried wheat when it started to leak and became stranded in Sleeping Bear Bay in November 1857. The General Taylor was stranded in October 1862 near Sleeping Bear Point.
Both ships were wrecked near where the wooden hull washed ashore, said Harold, author of “Shipwrecks of the Sleeping Bear.” Determining its identity will be harder, since wood can float for miles and no name or serial numbers were recovered.
We survived the strongest storm ever to hit the continental United States!
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
“Hell hath’ no fury like a Great Lakes fall storm” — Weather historian William R. Deedler, on the Great Lakes white hurricane of November 1913.
What to make of the vicious wind storm this week that knocked trees through houses and garages, relieved the forests of their autumn leaves, and sent folks without electricity scurrying to the Leelanau Coffee Roasters and Art’s Tavern in Glen Arbor, for wireless Internet and food?
A lesson from Mother Nature that man, if he stands alone, is doomed? (When Glen Arbor’s power returned Tuesday evening, the town opened doors to its neighbors in Empire, which remained in the dark for another 24 hours.) Foreshadowing of another storm on Tuesday, when Americans vote in the midterm elections and — if the mainstream media has it right — will rush the kitchen, fire the chefs, dump out the giant vat of slow-cooking soup, and start over again? Or was this storm just a natural, if noisy, step in the transition from autumn to winter?
Better find your hats and gloves, folks. The Old Man may arrive early this year.
The windstorm that hit Leelanau County on Tuesday, Oct. 26, rivaled the pressure of tropical storms, according to Dave Lawrence, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Gaylord. The storm’s intensity rivaled, and may have surpassed, the winds that doomed the famed Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975 in Lake Superior. In fact, “Chiclone of 2010” (named for the beating it dealt the Windy City) boasted the lowest atmospheric pressure readings ever measured anywhere in the continental United States, according to Weather Underground — making the storm more intense than the Great Blizzard of 1978, the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940, the November storm of 1998, the White Hurricane of 1913 which inspired Deedler’s above quote, and the Edmund Fitzgerald storm of 1975.
And through it all, Keenan May, Lindsay Simmons, and Elias Ridley went surfing at Sleeping Bear Point!
“I’ve been surfing all week,” bragged Ridley, the buff Ann Arbor native who now calls Empire home. “So while everyone I know is complaining about the cold, awful weather, I’ve been stoked out of my head … People who see us going out either wish us luck and to be safe, or exclaim that ‘I’m crazy’ … probably both, on one level or another.”
Does extreme weather turn people mad? Perhaps it’s worth considering author Joan Didion’s words about the fabled Santa Ana wind off the Pacific Ocean every fall that brings wildfires to Southern California and makes people in Los Angeles do crazy things. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion called this “the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” She tells how “the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the wind blew.” On nights of a Santa Ana wind, Didion writes, “every booze party ends in a fight” and “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”
We Midwesterners may not be driven to such impulses, but the storm proved murderous for the wildlife. A dead seagull and a dead duck were seen lying near each other on the beach in Leland, apparently after nosediving into the sand. Meanwhile, the Record-Eagle reported that rescue crews in nearby Northport helped a woman who was trapped in her trailer by downed power lines.
Norm Wheeler, English and astronomy teacher at The Leelanau School, knew the storm was coming. Looking out from the school’s Observatory on the beach, Wheeler saw a flat, nervous Sleeping Bear Bay Tuesday morning with the wind picking up out of the south. By the afternoon it was coming from the southwest, and the whole bay had become whitecaps and froth. Mini-waterspouts formed between Glen Arbor and North Manitou Island, even as the sun began to shine. “When the sun shines and there’s that much spray above the water, you get sundogs, or rainbow patches at right angles from sun. I saw a sundog out toward Sleeping Bear Point and a sundog toward North Manitou.” By Tuesday evening the wind was howling and rocking the Observatory.
Both Glen Arbor and Empire lost electricity in the afternoon, and so many people gathered for dinner at Art’s, which has a generator, that there was half-hour wait to be seated. At 6 p.m. on Tuesday the power returned in Glen Arbor, and the Western Avenue Grill opened across the street — a relief to the hungry crowd.
In Frankfort, crowds gathered Tuesday and Wednesday to watch giant wind-whipped waves smash into the lighthouses on the town’s piers. In nearby Elberta, a house reportedly crumbled in two. Benzie County lost power, but Maggie Lonero’s lights stayed on because she has solar power (there must be a lesson there).
Check out this video by Ken Scott of the wind and waves bashing into the Frankfort pier:
In Traverse City, Cheyenne Dutcher was relieved that the Tall Ship Manitou had been moved to its winter dock the day before the storm hit. “She is now crushing the dock, but there’s nothing I can do,” lamented Dutcher, one of the Tall Ship’s captains. “At least she won’t go anywhere.” Trees and branches lay strewn over photographer John Robert Williams’ yard. He estimated he’d need an entire day just to clear the yard. Meanwhile, high school Spanish teacher Andy Baumann sat on his couch, reading a Bill Bryson book, by firelight.
Here in Glen Arbor, a tree busted out webpage designer Molly Melin’s window while she was on the couch reading to her daughter, Ada. Melin can tell the story with varying degrees of drama. Glen Arbor Bed & Breakfast innkeepers Jeff and Katie Rabidoux worried about a big dead tree that stood dangerously close to their home, but the storm miraculously dropped it down safer than any chainsaw could have — parallel to the house and facing the driveway. The Budingers weren’t so lucky. Dick and Gay heard something hit their garage the other night. They went outside and saw two holes in the roof, and an opening in the tree canopy with a view clear to the sky. Over at Glen Lake School, fourth grade teacher Cynthia Hollenbeck’s students were distracted, looking wild-eyed out the window at every gust of wind, she said, “instead of concentrating on my fascinating tricks to learn their times-tables.”
On Tuesday night a fire truck parked at the Narrow’s Deli south of the Glen Lakes indicated that the stretch of M-22 south of Little Glen Lake was closed. A tree had fallen and taken down power lines. An electricity poll near the Manor on Glen Lake was reportedly being replaced as well.
The storm knocked out power at The Leelanau School on Tuesday, and it wasn’t restored until Thursday afternoon. As they may have done in the olden days, the boarding school’s students took buckets of water from the Crystal River to flush their toilets Tuesday night. They used porta-potties Wednesday and Thursday. In the evenings they studied in the dining hall under halogen light bulbs that were hooked up to a generator. Leelanau School President Matt Ralston came to the Leelanau Coffee Roasters — which was swarming with laptop-toters — to email parents of students and let them know to communicate via cellular phone. Ironically, Glen Arbor’s cell tower wasn’t functioning either Tuesday.
Those in Empire without power stayed with friends or family in Glen Arbor whose electricity returned Tuesday evening: Dan and Anne Shoup brought their kids to stay with “Uncle Mike” Buhler, co-owner of the Leelanau Coffee Roasters and co-editor of the Glen Arbor Sun; Colleen Macaddino hosted her daughter Kelly and grandkids. Meanwhile, Erik Peterson borrowed his landlord’s chainsaw early Wednesday morning so that he could remove a tree that had fallen on Echo Valley Road and get to work.
On his drive home from Traverse City late Wednesday night, Norm Wheeler saw 14 Consumers Power bucket trucks driving east on M-72 after restoring power here in the county. They were back on Thursday, parked by the dozen behind Boone Docks in Glen Arbor.
The power returned to Empire at 9 p.m. on Wednesday night. Mimi Wheeler had lost two days of production at Grocers Daughter Chocolate, and she had plenty of orders to fill. So her work day began at 10 p.m. and lasted until 3:30 a.m. Meanwhile, once the storm was over, Norm assessed that the forests had almost completely lost their leaves, except for some oak trees down by the lakeshore. Winter, it seemed, was now imminent.
But every great storm brings a time for reflection. Writer Anne-Marie Oomen lost her father this summer, and this week she heard John’s footsteps in the forest outside of Empire. Here are her words:
“This is the preamble for the storm: On Sunday I woke to find the understory had turned golden, a phenomenon I love more than the big treetop show for both subtlety and metaphor. An understory is often the golden story, don’t you think? The canopy had fallen, and the glow from the ground was dappled with these last bright snips. The low trees were still freckled with light, but close to the earth. It was warm and humid and still that day, a sure sign the weather would change. But Sunday, those leaves were damp, so rather than the crackling chorus, the sounds were muted. I remembered then: these were my father’s favorite autumn days; these days of golden understory when he could walk in the woods without alerting the creatures. In his last years, he rarely hunted but went out anyway into that singular light, to walk and watch and wait in the understory. Perhaps he became part of the understory.
For the next two days, as the storm approached from the Midwest, I heard his footsteps in our woods, the almost sound on wet leaves. Then Tuesday, the bottom dropped out of the barometer, and then the wind drowned out everything but its own sound, and then the power gone and the nights dark with howling. Now even the golden understory is gone. I loved the preamble to the storm, and then the storm itself — for the metaphor of course.”
From staff reports
