A Leelanau daughter shaped by chance encounters, heartbreak, and healing
Photo courtesy of Leelanau Conservancy
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Chance encounters have shaped “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent Martha Teichner’s life in profound ways.
There was the chance encounter at Union Square Farmer’s Market in lower Manhattan that connected Martha and her Bull Terrier, Minnie, with Harry, a dog of the same breed, and Harry’s owner, Carol, who was dying of cancer from radiation exposure after 9/11. Girl dog met boy dog, and a deep and meaningful friendship blossomed between the two women.
That’s the story that inspired Martha’s book When Harry Met Minnie: A true story of love and friendship which she’ll discuss at a National Writers Series virtual appearance on February 4. Click here to buy the book and to attend. Martha laments that she won’t travel to Traverse City for the event, but the COVID-19 pandemic has forced all events in this northern Michigan-based literary series to exist online.
There was the chance encounter in August 2005 when she visited her childhood home on Lime Lake near Sugar Loaf, together with friends who owned an old summer camp on Lake Arbutus, south of Traverse City. They happened to make the drive on a Sunday, killed time in Cedar to shop at Pleva’s and buy Mawby sparkling wine at Cedar City Market, and happened to meet the home’s current owners, Janna and Eric Blakely, who would’ve been away at work the following day. “Are you Martha Teichner?” Janna called out when they arrived, unannounced. “I’ve been waiting all these years for you to come.”
Martha hadn’t set foot in the house her family called “Deer Trail Cottage” since 1958 when she was 9 years old. This was soon after the passing of her father, Hans “Peppi” Teichner, a German-Jewish immigrant and teacher at The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor, who popularized downhill skiing in northern Michigan and helped turn Sugar Loaf into a ski hill. Martha and her mother moved away to Augusta, Georgia, to stay with family, then East Grand Rapids.
“For many years, I didn’t come back at all. I think it was too painful,” said Martha. “We loved it so much and missed it so much.”
She didn’t return to the County until 1992, to bury her mother, Miriam, next to her father under a big pine tree in the Leland cemetery—where she’ll rest one day—and again in 1996 when her father was inducted into the Leelanau School Hall of Fame. That was when she made a sentimental drive around Lime Lake, drove by the 20 acres she had inherited, and saw bulldozers clearing the land for a golf course. When she returned to New York City, Martha called the Leelanau Conservancy and donated her family’s 20 acres, which would become the Teichner Nature Preserve.
“My mother’s gift to me of a silver, moonlit memory, I pass on now, along with all I have left on the land that made this memory of hers possible,” wrote Martha in an essay published by the Conservancy. “It occurs to me that memories can end up like so many plowed-under tree stumps when a beautiful piece of woods has been violated. I hope that mine will be the first, not the only donation of land around the lake, because I cannot imagine Lime Lake any way but wild.”
On the subsequent visit in 2005, when she met the Blakelys at Lime Lake and once again observed the whispering trees and wildflowers growing along streams, she noticed the floors of Deer Trail Cottage—“bird’s eye maple in the dining room, oak in the living room, wide pine planks in the den and the hallway, the kind of floors a lumberman would have in his home”—Martha said she dreamed of buying back the land.
It so happened that a real estate speculator had listed 17 neighboring acres for sale, and the forest was weeks away from being bulldozed and replaced by homes. Back in New York City, Martha refinanced her apartment on 22nd Street, and came up with $200,000. The Conservancy matched the donation, another property owner donated 7 acres, and the Teichner Nature Preserve ultimately expanded to more than 40 acres. (Last year the Leelanau Conservancy also acquired 33 acres on the south shore to create the Lime Lake Preserve.)
To celebrate the expansion of the Teichner Preserve, Martha and Conservancy staff took a pontoon boat ride around Lime Lake and embarked on a nature hike. In the forest she noticed pink ribbons wrapped around trees that would have been felled, and she couldn’t resist tearing them off the now preserved trees, one by one.
“Pretty soon other people began doing the same thing,” said Martha. “We all held the broken bands over our heads and laughed.”
“In the summer, when the moon was full, sometimes at night when you were in bed asleep, we would go down to Lime Lake. We would push out the raft and swim in the moonlight,” Martha’s mother had told her not long before she died. “In my mind I could see … the depth of the woods closing in on them as they descended the path from the house to the lake … the sound of their breathing, their footsteps on the soft earth … a full chorus, an orchestra of insects and birds and small animals in the velvet darkness … whippoorwills calling out. And then the water, cool and smooth and silvery in the night stillness … rippling softly, lapping their bodies as they moved through it bathed the moonlight…the sky alive with stars … and the mystery of being there utterly alone filling their hearts.”
Before her father died at age 49, and before she and her mother moved away, Martha enjoyed idyllic childhood days on The Leelanau School campus near the mouth of the Crystal River where it empties into Lake Michigan. During the 1950s the school offered Kindergarten-8th grade, and she and 12 other kids took lessons in a cabin on the river which doubled as a fish house. On many days, a school naturalist would lead them to the beach to sketch Sleeping Bear Bay or freighters passing back and forth on the horizon. Or they’d look for eagles’ nests.
“I had the run of the place,” said Martha. “After school I would just explore. When students would rehearse plays, I would drop in whenever I wanted.”
Hans “Peppi” Teichner taught tennis, and track and downhill skiing at the newly established hill at Sugar Loaf. Being an educated European immigrant, he also spoke several languages, including Spanish from his time living in Spain in the 1930s. Martha joked that any students who learned Spanish from her father came away speaking español with a heavy Bavarian accent.
But he never spoke German. Martha only heard Deutsch when her father was counting, or swearing. Perhaps it was chance encounters, too, that helped him flee fascism in his homeland. Born in 1908 and Jewish, Hans Teichner was in his mid-20s when Hitler seized power in 1933. The avid skier fled to Spain and coached skiers bound for the Olympics. Martha guesses that her father’s upbeat attitude must have earned him the nickname “Peppi” which also resembles the Spanish name “Pepe”.
The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, prevented those skiers from competing in the Winter Olympics in Bavaria (six months before the Summer Olympics in Berlin). Franco’s fascist forces overran Spain with the help of the Nazis, and Teichner risked his life helping political refugees ski over the Pyrenees Mountains to safety. By the time World War II engulfed Europe, Teichner had found his way to Sun Valley, Idaho, with the help of others in the well-connected and wealthy skiing community.
During the war, Teichner joined the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, which fought its way through the Italian Alps and into Austria. He never returned to his native Germany. After the war, army friends introduced him to northern Michigan, where he moved to establish the Sugar Loaf Ski Club. Martha was born in 1948 in Traverse City.
Today, largely confined to her Manhattan apartment as the pandemic runs rampant through American cities, Martha Teichner misses Leelanau County terribly. She values those chance encounters that changed her life even more.
“In the context of COVID, I’m thinking about how important human contact and friendship and community can be. About saying ‘yes’ to friendship and opportunity, and even heartache. Saying ‘yes’ to experiences. What I learned is that these chance encounters are a hundred times more important because right now we’re all deprived of the opportunity to have encounters that enriches our lives.”
Martha counts herself lucky. She lives in a comfortable apartment with a backyard garden, and she can walk several blocks to the Hudson River and the Chelsea Piers. But she misses seeing long distances.
“I realized that during COVID more than anything I needed to see nature and distance. Water and distance and forest and trees.”
And dipping her toes in Lime Lake.
Update: An earlier version of this story stated that, during the 1950s, the Leelanau School offered Kindergarten-8th grade. In fact, the school offered K-8, as well as high school, which it offers today. We apologize for the lack of clarity.
