Before the tourism boom of the 1990s, before Cherry Republic and before the crowds engulfed Art’s Tavern, cozy little Glen Arbor had an artist colony that preceded its big bang. The colony began when the late Susanne Wilson, Ananda and Ben Bricker took a risk and bought the old garage on Lake St., turned it into a studio and eventually invited other artists to come to Glen Arbor and practice and exhibit their art in their friendly oasis.
Thirty years later, could the same art revolution happen in Empire?
Sleeping Bear Gallery owner Heather Caverly hopes so. Caverly purchased the Empire Clipper Building across Front Street from the Village Office in January and, together with curator Becky Willis, she aims to turn it into a haven that features artists in residence, demonstrations and lectures and, of course, displays of unique art including metals, wood, glass, fibers, paintings, sculptures, ceramics and photography. Caverly and her husband Mark live in the newly renovated area behind the gallery, and Willis occupies the apartment upstairs.
“I want to provide a space for aspiring artists to have a place to get off the ground,” said Caverly, who works mostly in metals. “This is an environment we love and where we can help other artists demo and sell their work.”
Caverly and Willis worked hard all spring to open the gallery by this weekend’s Empire Asparagus Festival. On Friday, May 18, they’ll feature a demo by three blacksmiths who studied with Caverly at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit. During the Anchor Days festival in July they plan to feature a hot glass-blowing demo. As soon as she has her own forge, Caverly will offer blacksmithing demos herself. Since she loves to play the guitar, visitors might walk in and find her harmonizing to all kinds of music. Willis, meanwhile, taught jewelry classes in Franklin, Mich., for 23 years.
Heather Caverly first visited this area on her honeymoon in 1979, and has wanted to retire here ever since. She and Mark have two children who live today in Denver and South Lyon, Mich. She met Mark when her father, who was converting an old farm into a golf course, hired him to build the course. Her husband creates beautiful landscapes with his heavy equipment. He is an artist whose medium is dirt, she says. Caverly learned woodworking from her father, and she taught herself to paint and use ceramics. Though she’s always loved art, Caverly didn’t matriculate at CCS until “her last baby was off to college”. She received her degree at age 50.
About five years ago, Heather and Mark took an interest in the Clipper Building, then owned by John & Chris Walter (Chris’ wife Ashlea once ran a beautiful printing press in the building, and she started the Empire Asparagus Festival).
“This building lets us satisfy our unstoppable passion to live here,” said Caverly. “We want to give the Walter family credit for creating this palette. The work they did here before us allowed us to make this gallery. It’s an honor to take over a building that had such tender love and care put into it.”
The Sleeping Bear Gallery in the heart of Empire is open May through October, seven days a week. The gallery opens at 10 a.m. and closes at 6 p.m., Monday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 5 p.m. on Sunday. Visit the gallery on Facebook here.
“Beyond the really high dune areas are just miles and miles of lovely lake beach,” says New York City-based travel writer Holly A. Hughes. Towering as high as 200 feet, the dunes of Sleeping Bear offer challenging hikes up—and gleeful slides down. “The top of the dunes is great for ship watching,” adds “Dr. Beach,” Stephen P. Leatherman, who directs the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami. For more than two decades, Leatherman has released his annual list of America’s top 10 beaches.
In addition, Mimi Wheeler of Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate in Empire was recently named the second best chocolatier in America by Complex City Guide. According to writer Victoria Marfan, Grocer’s Daughter “works to create chocolates that use fruits, herbs, and edible flowers grown there to keep her business sustainable. It leads to some offbeat options, sweets like pecans caramelized in maple syrup with a hint of Arbole chile and thyme. Nobody else on this list offers that sort of combination of flavors.”
The accolades and attention continue to bless Leelanau County — and our summer season is still over seven weeks away.
A University of Wisconsin study published today named ours as the third healthiest county in the United States — behind Los Alamos County, N.M., and Colorado’s Douglas County. That means we’re the fittest Americans east of the Mississippi River!
Leelanau leapfrogged Ottawa County in southeast Michigan for the claim to the healthiest county in the state. Ottawa won in 2011. View the statewide results here.
The rankings uses factors including health behavior, clinical care, social and economic factors and physical environment. Measures also include the number of fast food restaurants in a county (Leelanau County has none!) and physical inactivity levels.
The study was conducted by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. To view the rankings, visit www.countyhealthrankings.org.
This GlenArbor.com story was sponsored by the Yarn Shop.
During the night, trees snapped and limbs crashed around my house, but Saturday was characterized by an uncommon quiet. Even the snowmobilers that regularly race the nearby road were nowhere to be heard. I suppose they too were home digging out from the overnight snowfall — 29 inches in some places, I’m told — and attending to basic survival. In my part of the world, all was white and quiet and very lovely, even if I also knew that the area had sustained real damage from the storm, leaving thousands without heat, with damaged roofs, and roads closed due to tree fall and downed electrical lines.
I kindled a fire in the fireplace, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, and pulled closer to the flames while the temperature dropped in every other part of the house. I knew I had until about 6:30 p.m. to do anything that required light, so I stayed in my chair, not needing and unable to go anywhere else, but perfectly content with being snowed in. Undistracted by the phone, email or the ability to Google every single curiosity that passed through my consciousness, I did what I most enjoy when I have time to myself: I read and wrote and didn’t move for hours except to stoke the fire. I used my unabridged Webster’s dictionary when I needed to know more about something, and noted how simply good it felt to do one thing at a time, and really concentrate, rather than to toggle between electronic devices in a way that doesn’t really allow me to meaningfully synthesize information.
In the afternoon, I generated inner heat by shoveling, hauling firewood from a distant shed and dragging branches out of the driveway in case plows ever got to me (when they did, a front end loader and chainsaws came first). Surveying the carnage of white pines on the ground, I reflected on the suddenness and timing of this storm, and couldn’t help but think that something is not right with our increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Indoors again, I dipped a cup into a pot of water I’d drawn in anticipation of the power outage and sipped it appreciatively. I missed hot coffee, but was otherwise fine with eating the cold split pea soup a friend had brought for the previous evening’s poetry workshop. I found a kerosene lantern with a last bit of fuel, and was glad to remember how to use such a thing, having grown up on an off-the-grid homestead where it had served as the primary light source. In general, though, back then family life was organized around the natural cycles of light and darkness and was not as dependent on artificial sources.
During those first couple days of the power outage, there was a rare quality and clarity to my thoughts, which was especially gratifying while I worked on a writing project that in other ways was intellectually demanding enough without having to cope with the divided attention that seems the norm for most of us these days. Snow continued to fall, and being alone as I was, a yet deeper degree of inwardness was stirred in me. It felt like a form of meditation to exist in such quiet, for such a sustained period. It’s not just that I wasn’t having conversations with anyone else, but that the noise in my own head was settling down, too. While others may have panicked, I was relieved by the conditions that were imposed on me — much in the same way I appreciate formal constrictions in the composition of a poem or essay.
Of course, there are things about losing power that did put a kink in my routine. The house was becoming smokey from burning marginal wood, although the atmosphere helped me to pretend I was camping as opposed to stranded without heat, water or light. I knew I should expect it to take a while to have electricity restored (I waited seven days), but I had taken stock of the cupboards and knew there was plenty of food to keep me for a while, even if I began to long for a warm meal and hot coffee. Still, I want to be the kind of person who can endure, and even thrive, without the amenities that I’ve become dependent upon, and this was a chance to contemplate that value.
The truth is, during my many Michigan winters, I have only ever been snowed in with at least one other sturdy adult to assist in the shoveling and to keep me company. Now I was alone for this audit of my winter survival skills and after a few days in the cold and dark I began to miss the camaraderie and help of a loved one. It makes sense to combine energies to accomplish what needs doing in these situations, but I think it wasn’t just a practical matter that caused a little melancholy to arise while I was buried. At some primal level, I am vulnerable — we all are — and extreme weather is a reminder of our smallness in the face of real dangers.
With climate change very much on the way, it’s also an incentive to bone up on what will be required of us as fossil energy goes from being temporarily off-line, to more expensive, to scarce or unavailable altogether. Those snow days made me think about having a very small, energy efficient home — one with better systems in place to endure blackouts, and designed to be less dependent on the grid in the first place.
The fact that so many of us went without power for so long, and really did depend on one another for basic things — water, warmth, food, transportation — also made me think about the elegance of families and the generosity of neighbors who begin to take care of one another in new ways when given the opportunity. The other truth is that life is better this way, and as much as I want to be independent, and not burden anyone else with my needs, I don’t really want to live in an “every man for himself” society, either. We are interconnected and it’s nice to be prompted to act like it from time to time.
Northern Michiganders, and residents of Leelanau and Benzie counties in particular, faced the worst snowstorm in decades the first weekend of March. Old Man Winter threw one of his last tantrums of the season Friday night, March 2, and by 8 p.m. much of the area had lost electricity. Power returned to Glen Arbor on Sunday, Empire on Monday, but some far-flung rural outposts — like my parents house, on Echo Valley Rd. — didn’t return to the 21st century until Tuesday evening.
The mighty storm dumped over two feet of heavy wet snow, knocked out electricity in nearly 100 percent of homes in Leelanau County, snapped tree limbs, lay branches onto power lines, made roads impassible and prompted Empire to open the Township Hall as an emergency shelter (here’s a TV 7&4 video report from the Suttons Bay Fire Department, which was also became a makeshift shelter). As the Leelanau Enterprise reported this week, “the storm dropped 12-16 inches across much of the traditional snowbelt of northwest Michigan except for an area found within an ominous white oval that appears to begin at Good Harbor and extend southward to take part of Benzie and Grand Traverse counties. The oval signifies 20 inches of snow; most of the oval is in Leelanau County.”
The storm nailed Manistee County too. David and Christine Flaugher, who own Verdant Farm near Copemish, couldn’t make it home from a meal on the town in Traverse City the night the storm hit. One of their lambs gave birth that night in the middle of the blizzard, and their boys Enoch, 14, and Nathanael, 12, acted quickly and moved the mother and healthy newborn into the barn the following morning.
And the storm reminded us all of what life was like before the convenience of electricity, easy heat, television and Internet. Through the anguish, many rediscovered what matters most in our daily lives — namely, family and community intimacy that doesn’t depend on a wireless router or reality television.
Here are a few perspectives from your northern Michigan neighbors on how they weathered the great winter storm of 2012 (with more words to come in the days ahead):
Anne-Marie Oomen, writer, Empire
I was attending a writing conference in Chicago, so I missed most of the big storm. But coming home Saturday night we got stranded in Grand Rapids. The hotel where we finally found rooms was also housing people who were attending pool, bowling and cheerleading conferences in the vicinity, plus travellers who finally pulled out of the maze of accidents and spinning vehicles on the expressways. Needless to say, the bar scene was more than rogue with a variety of folks and a live band from the seventies.
Once we did make it home, we went into resourceful mode. Because we have a woodstove, we can keep the home fires burning and the pipes from bursting. Like many, we thawed snow for washing and flushing, and warmed food by hand-lighting the propane stove. We made a sauna to bathe and took advantage of friends in Empire who had a generator (Gerry Shiffman was especially generous).
We moved our food outside into coolers, cleared the freezer, and I actually cleaned the refrigerator — first time since it was empty. Eventually, our resident flock of wild turkeys came to the back porch and the big boy tapped the window, so we fed them too from the greens that didn’t make it. We lit a lot of candles so we could read a little, and the house filled with the scent of melted wax to mix with the smoke of the stove.
What was most delightful and strange was the silence. A house without power is a house that holds the quiet of the old world. We curled around the fire and found ourselves listening to the wind in a different way — without the swish of energy underpinning it. We fell asleep listening to the hollow spaces that are usually full of the various musics of living. Though we live quiet lives, the hum of electricity is power (literally and figuratively) that runs through the walls of our buildings and the walls of our being. Without it, we were listening more deeply to breath. For those nights, our sleep was both more still and more alert — listening beyond the illusions of power.
At first, we were trying to hear something that over time, we had forgotten we were hearing. It had filled us and we didn’t know it. When it was no longer there, I was both more attentive and move vulnerable, listening … for what? More quiet? I liked that. Listening for more quiet. It grows if you listen deeply, becomes more, or we become more present to it, hearing the language of the silence as our authentic power. I expected it to tell me secrets — it would have, if I had been allowed to listen longer.
By the time Wednesday came, I was eager for the light (oh, the blessing of light) to return, but still, I’m thinking about when the power left, I was entranced with the richness and fullness of the unsound it gave in its passing.
Nancy Krcek Allen, chef and writer, Maple City:
“Our power went out Friday night while we were watching television. It was as if my mother had said, ‘Time to go to bed.’ And turned off the lights and television. So we went to bed at 8.30 p.m. I awoke at 4 a.m. with a bit of anxiety that we were the only ones who had no power so I got up and called Consumer’s Power. The recording said power wouldn’t be on until Tuesday evening. I still was in denial.
The next morning our phone was out. I had a large cooking class with 16 out on Old Mission Peninsula and wanted to make sure Chateau Chantal knew I wasn’t coming. When I insisted upon trudging a half mile down the road just to see if I could get cell service and ‘make sure,’ my husband looked at me as if to say I was nuts and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere today.’ Hmm. Still in denial. No cell service. And I couldn’t slog through the two feet of wet snow any further. Went home. A little frantic. No power, no heat, no music, radio or television, no work on computer and no iPhone or email. Thank the gods for my big black gas six burner stove. It kept the house tolerably warm. Husband went out to his studio to weld. Kept him warm and happy. Did I say I was a little frantic?
When the power finally came on after 75 hours I went to bed and lay there thinking of how much goes into the simple thing we call electricity. And I wondered if it will be sustainable in the future. (I was impressed with the people who hiked through snow to fix the power lines. And how many friends who had power suggested we come to stay with them or take showers or eat and so on. And how many people it took to get it all going again.)
The last crippling storm that I experienced was in 1979. It was a three-day affair and no one went anywhere because for three days the roads were impassable — there was just too much snow. I don’t remember the power going out. This storm was of shorter duration, but more severe because of the spring snow’s texture. Last year we were stuck for a day with the same kind of implacable, wet spring snow. It seems to be a pattern.
I loved how this storm disconnected me (and friends) from our ‘normal’ busy life and connected us to each other. It’s been a long time since I was forced to sit and be quiet with no distractions. It should happen once every year …”
“We have extensive roofs on our octagonal house, and snow slid off the roof and blocked any sunlight on eight of the 16 window panes that connect us with outdoor natural light.
Forest, our 28-year-old foster daughter, arrived mid-evening on Friday night and barely made it down the gravel Echo Valley in her four-wheel-drive Subaru through the drifting snow. My husband Norm was playing with Jazz North in Traverse City, and we called to warn him not to attempt a trip back to Leelanau County with the fast growing accumulations of snow.
The electricity went off at around 9 p.m. that evening, and we lit a dozen candles to illuminate our cozy wooden house. By mid-morning on Saturday Forest shoveled a pathway to our driveway, where my car was hidden by a foot and a half of heavy snow. By that time, the path near the roof-line of our home was surrounding by six-foot walls, and the landscape was dramatic and looked like Narnia when the snow queen reigned.
Norm parked his car out on County Road 677 and walked three quarters of a mile home. I headed to Empire, primarily to check on the temperature inside my chocolate shop and whether any water pipes had burst. The county plow had declared most of our road was passable.
A sign posted outside the Empire Township Hall welcoming the community caught my eye, and my curiosity drove me inside. Three or four volunteers from the Red Cross welcome me with hot coffee, fresh water and snacks. Around two tables sat six or eight people who were chatting and sharing stories over the morning’s Record Eagle, whose headline read “Stay Home!”
Several residents from the apartments near the Methodist Church were assembled. Others at the township hall included residents who depended on electricity for heat and who had left their cold homes to be warm and take advantage of the generator there, which providing warmth and fresh water. I was not the only one there charging my dead cell phone and my iPad. Warm meals arrived shortly thereafter. A card game kept a few people busy. The atmosphere was positive and jovial. A few used the cots made available by the friendly Red Cross volunteers for a mid-morning nap, and a few had stayed overnight and would stay until electricity returned to their own homes.
An old friend, an elderly woman was among the community at the town hall. Her son told me later that he and his wife had stopped to encourage her to come home with them to their wood stove and warm house nearby, but the woman replied: “why would I leave while we are having a party here?”
“I think my dad, John Owsley, put it well. ‘Getting the drive plowed after 23-inch overnight snow — $50. Kerosene for the heater — $18.49. Four days snowed in with no power, Internet, or cell phones, and my family gathered about — friction priceless!’”
Tom Ulrich, Deputy Superintendent, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore:
“The high was building a baby luge in the front yard and watching Zoe giggle her way down.”
Holly Hughes Reay, owner, Funistrada in Burdickville:
The high was kids learning to play and enjoy poker. The low was the tree bomb that went off in our front yard!”
Traci Apsey, Lighthouse Insurance, Empire
“I learned to love my snowmobile suit, but brothers inside for too long together creates a migraine for Mom.”
Much of Leelanau County is still without electricity following Friday night’s massive late-winter snowstorm that snapped trees and left roads impassible all over northern Michigan. Empire turned its Township Hall into a shelter, Art’s Tavern in Glen Arbor fired up its generator and became the only place in town to get a hot meal this weekend. Hearty locals are digging themselves out, and waiting patiently for their light switches, heaters and Internet modems to turn back on. Expect a story later this week about how Leelanau County residents fared during this 2012 “Snowpocalypse” — one of the worst storms to hit the region in decades.
Are you nuts if you jump through frozen ice into a frigid lake in February? Perhaps. But if you jump, take a victory lap, and then jump again, you’re definitely nuts! Check out this video of Empire resident Gerry Shiffman (with Jack Gyr and others) taking part in the annual Polar Dip as part of Empire’s Winterfest this past weekend. And here’s Gyr making the case for the dip.
The girls shoot the ski; Tim relaxes. Photo by Margaret Michael
From staff reports
Art’s Tavern owner Tim Barr turned 60 years young on Feb. 14. Nearly 100 Glen Arbor locals came out to the tavern last night to celebrate him. Riverfront Deli owner Sue Nichols baked these cupcakes in Tim’s likeness (photo below), and Beach Bard Norm Wheeler recited the following poem for Tim (adapted from Stone Circle founder Max Ellison’s poem “50″):
“When you’re gettin’ up to 60, then I think you’d better stop
And recollect a little why you’ve never reached the top,
Before your time down here is over, and they chuck you ‘neath the sod
With a sure and solemn promise that you’re headed back to God.
Well, you never raised a fortune, least ways not the kind you bank,
But you did a lotta hellin’, and you stood above the rank
When it come to flirtin’ with women, you was johnny-on-the-spot,
And you flirted with a million, now you’re 60, you gotta stop!
‘Cause your back is gettin’ achy and your beard is turnin’ gray,
And you’ve surely raced your motor too damned much along the way,
And now you hear your hormones shuffling slowly down the line
Sayin’ “Brother, you’ve had it, now you’re 60 – TAKE YOUR TIME!”
Ninety-nine percent of sane humans wouldn’t consider jumping into ice water. Yet every February, 50 or more people scream and laugh and jump through a hole in the ice of South Bar Lake in Empire. Sanity tests are not a required for participation. Typically there are 50 to 60 dippers and 80 onlookers watching and cheering. A few years ago a Venezuelan exchange student at Glen Lake Schools ventured to the polar dip. I don’t think he had ever seen snow before, let alone an iced-over lake. He jumped in and, back on the ice, gave a huge smile and victory fist-pump. There was so much applause that he smiled and jumped in again.
So what does it feel like to jump into 33-degree icy water? Actually, the moment of submersion is so brief that the cold feeling is quickly replaced with one of warmth; of standing on the ice afterwards and feeling flushed, warm and laughing at those still jumping in. There’s certainly a sense of celebration, jubilation and “Wow, I did it!” that goes along with doing something that most people consider craziness.
I was one of the 99 percent confirmed non-dippers for a long time. But sanity is sometimes overbearingly insane and one must test the edges in the spirit of exploration. The moment of conversion for me came on a hot July day on the Empire beach. Several friends and I were lolling on the sand when one posed the question; “Have you ever jumped through the ice during the Winter Fest?” The image was much less chilling in the heat of summer than it would have been a week before the actual event. I returned “No, but I’ll do it if you do!” This typical teenage dialogue was being exchanged by 50-year-olds, an obvious red flag to sanity. As is often the case, a foolish challenge gets born and multiplies. Within two minutes there were four of us beating our chests (on a hot July day) and high-fiving it that we’d jump through a hole in the ice six months later. There must have been someone listening that resisted calling 911.
Contrary to most crowd-attended events, there’s no coaching needed for this one. No swan dive with sustained grace or judges scribbling hastily on notepads. It is, literally, a plunge and then scramble out of the hole as if an arctic alligator were chasing you. There are some important lessons though. First of all, get real warm beforehand. We put on layers of sweats and go for a jog ahead of this swim. In 15 minutes we’re sweating and our core temperatures are boiling. Brief contact with ice water is virtually a pleasure with a nuclear core temperature like this. There are some who dress up for the dip as if it was Halloween. That’s fun but there’s a frigid downside. It’s like wearing a refrigerator when you get out: heavy and frozen. I recommend the opposite. Wear speedo-like shorts so that a quick towel swipe when you’re out lets that boiling core temperature restore the sense of warmth (even when posing nearly-nude for victory photos in the snow). If you want to look like a lion on Halloween, use face paints. Another important tip: wear neoprene booties for the event or have flip-flops waiting when you exit the water. Otherwise you’re standing on snow and ice with bare feet and not in the mood or patient about those fun photos. Also, pre-select good antifreeze to have in a flask. We like Drambuie.
There are some polar dippers who do not immediately exit the hole. They paddle about as if genetic engineers pumped them with penguin DNA. They quietly reject offers for help from onlookers. You might think they are a breed of blubber-bellies, but I’ve seen tooth-pick-type forms relaxing in ice water. These are the ones I think need brain scans.
Okay, I lied in the second paragraph of this article. The feeling underwater is intense and memorable. There is a lighting-bolt sense of freezing cold. I think what scares most people is thinking they would panic. There’s no time for that. Your brain is the slow-poke here. By the time you consciously think about the situation your adrenalin engines have already fired up and your muscles have jetted you out of the hole. It is then that your brain’s function returns and you consciously feel warm and thankful for life. It is a physical epiphany that opens ones eyes and all of your senses, a great feeling. Plus, everyone is now laughing, including you.
Join Jack Gyr and other crazies on Saturday in Empire for the Winter Fest Polar Dip.
Residents express concerns over marina expansion: Township Board writes letter of concern to DEQ
By Michael Buhler and Jacob Wheeler
Sun editors
The Glen Arbor Township Board held a special meeting today to respond to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) regarding an application for a marina expansion on Big Glen Lake. On the Narrows Marina owner Conor McCahill seeks to add an additional 39 boat slips on a new dock, bringing the total to 46, as well as increase the moorings to 16. On the Narrows Marina is located on the M-22 state highway, just north of the Carl Oleson Memorial Bridge, which divides Big and Little Glen Lake.
Over 100 residents and interested neighbors listened in the gymnasium as the Board met to discuss the issue. Since this was a meeting and not a hearing, public comment was limited to the end of the session. Township Zoning Administrator Bob Hawley reviewed the requirements of the Resort zone, and noted that the marina and its structures are a non-conforming use of the property, grandfathered into the original 1975 zoning plan. He questioned whether an expansion would then make this a “more non-conforming use,” and necessitate the entire project to come into zoning compliance, which it then could not do.
After deliberation and audience input, the Board voted 4-0 to write a letter to the DEQ noting its concerns over parking, pedestrians, road safety, navigation at the bridge, water safety, and the potential for pollution. The Board also asked the DEQ to conduct a public hearing on the matter.
Andy DuPont, President of the Glen Lake Association (GLA), reported that he was assured by Robin Schmidt of the DEQ that the department plans to hold a public hearing, and that online links where citizens can comment on the application, and a PDF of the application itself, are available on the GLA website, www.GlenLakeAssociation.org. You can also comment on the DEQ’s website here and view the PDF here NarrowsMarinaExpansionApplication. The GLA and Township Board encourage everyone to make their views known to the DEQ, and the GLA website will share any updates on the application — as well the Glen Arbor Sun via GlenArbor.com.
On the DEQ application last month, McCahill wrote, “Due to high demand, we would like to expand our boat slip and mooring offerings. If permitted we would simply install additional freestanding seasonal docks and move and expand our mooring field. This would take place in Spring 2012. … There is very high demand for slips and moorings on Glen Lake that we currently cannot accommodate. … Following our pre-application meeting we adjusted our layout and design to exclude a boat ramp and any dredging activity. This will require more dock sections to be used, but eliminate dredging in the shallow areas.”
In an open letter to the Glen Lake community posted at On the Narrows Marina’s website today, the McCahill family wrote: “Our objective in seeking expansion is to provide more opportunities for others to have access to the lake. We have a long waiting list from local residents seeking lake access for their boats. Most of our mooring customers are members of the local community and favor having boat slips as opposed to moorings. While we anticipated there would be opposing opinions, some quite legitimate and others self centered, the first step in the process is to comply with state law which we know will inevitably lead to a public hearing where we look forward to answering questions, addressing concerns and hopefully finding solutions that allow further access to a wonderful natural resource for Glen Lake residents, families and visitors.”
On the Narrows Marina’s expansion plans on Big Glen Lake have spread like wildfire through the local media. TV 7&4 news jumped on the story on Tuesday, quoting resident Kathy Schmid, who owns a home on the lake, as saying she’s worried that “peaceful summers on Glen Lake will turn into a crowded party atmosphere with the expansion.” Schmid also worries that the area wouldn’t be able to accommodate extra parking or restrooms that would be needed for the influx of visitors.
On Wednesday, the Traverse City Record-Eagle described On the Narrows as a “sleepy little marina” and quoted Kathy’s brother Greg Schmid as saying, “I think this is the first robber baron taking advantage of us being called the most beautiful place in America. I think by next year we’ll lose that designation.” The Schmids worry that the addition of nearly 40 boat slips will turn the Glen Lakes into “another party spot like Torch Lake.”
“They are valid concerns,” Conor McCahill told the Sun. “From our point of view, we don’t see why we can’t work with the community to address them and get something done. We take the lake very seriously, and we’re not looking to cause any harm. We’re just looking to expand and meet demand on the lake.”
McCahill conceded that parking is an issue in the congested area north of the Narrows Bridge. He suggested that the parking lot in front of “McCahill’s Crossing” — the former Narrows Dairy Bar, which will re-open this summer — is a possible solution.
“Parking is an issue. But it’s an issue throughout Glen Arbor too. There are different options in our plan. We own the property across the bridge. We could perhaps do a shuttle service.”
McCahill sought to address concerns that the expansion will overcrowd the lake with traffic.
“Our goal, as far as the expansion is concerned, is to allow more people to use the lake. It’s a misconception that the lake will all of a sudden become overcrowded with boat traffic. Our clientele are mostly people from the community who are already on the lake. They just want to put their boat somewhere where they don’t have to use the ramp every single day.”
The McCahills contracted the Traverse City-based surveying and engineering firm Gourdie-Fraser to investigate riparian rights and bottomlands where the docks and moorings would go. Conor McCahill believes that On the Narrows owns the riparian rights south of the marina.
“People are under the impression that that is not our land, but we went through the process, and it is,” he said. “All we’re looking for is an opportunity to work with the community to get this accomplished. If the plan goes through and we have a separate pier, that’s just another place where people can park their boats. Another avenue, so the lake is not as congested.”
Tom and Carol McCahill, and their three adult children, Conor, Megan and Neil, originally from Littleton, Colo., purchased the marina from Jack and Marcie Ferris in 2008 and re-opened it in 2009. Read our feature on the McCahills here. They recently acquired the former Dairy Bar on the south side of the Glen Lake narrows and plan to open that soon. Last summer, employees of On the Narrows won the adoration of the community when they saved a tiny fawn from drowning in Big Glen Lake.
By Jacob Wheeler
