About a block up the road from the old Cannery down on the shore in Glen Haven, Henry “Hank” Bailey gets out of a white Lexus in front of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century building that looks like it used to be a store. The whole village is deserted and sad. Glen Haven today is a bleak little shore-side ghost town in the bright sunlight. It’s the off-season, middle of May, the leaves on the trees are in delicate shades, fuzzy-looking and babyish in their newness.
I am an aficionado of naturalists and field biologists. In a world preoccupied by all manner of human mischief and melodrama, the natural scientist’s wholehearted attention to the lifeways of other organisms, their primal human immersion in wild lives under open skies is a rare and wonderful thing. Their devotion yields knowledge of place, and realer than that it does not get.
This essay originally appeared in Stocking’s book Letters from the Leelanau, University of Michigan Press, 1990. We’re reprinting it to launch a year-long series in the Glen Arbor Sun about the living and present-day legacy of Native Americans in Leelanau—one that survives beyond history books and museums.
Neither local historian David Taghon nor I realize the surprise in store for us as we sit down inside the Empire Area Museum to talk about the old Empire schoolhouse—its history and what is to become of it.
What it was like for this diehard baseball fan to watch the seventh and deciding game of the 2016 World Series last Nov. 2, between my beloved Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, and the literary armageddon that followed.
Here in Northern Michigan, we suffer (no, enjoy!) many bone-chilling months, but those of us who speak the language of the sauna fear not the onset of temperatures that plummet to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, or below. Here are a few avid sauna lovers in our community who heat their hot rooms with Nippa stoves.
This is Sugar Loaf, once the region’s premier ski resort and Leelanau County’s largest employer. Three hundred once worked here. Located off M-22, the artery of the peninsula, Sugar Loaf pulsed with traffic and commerce during these cold, quiet winter months until it closed in 2000. This isn’t the story of those who ran Sugar Loaf into the ground. This is the story of her characters and personalities, how they reflect on the resort, and what they’re up to now.
On January 21, the day after the presidential inauguration, I will attend the Women’s March in Washington D.C. to spend the day walking Independence Avenue with people from all over the country. Simultaneously, marches will occur in major cities all over the country. Why am I going? I’m compelled for a myriad of reasons I have been asked to voice here.
They met in the summer of 2012. Still in college, she had come north from a suburb of Detroit to take a job as a waitress at the Cove in Leland. He was managing The Cyclery in Glen Arbor and beginning to think about ways to create a high-density apple orchard in the hills above Lake Michigan, land his family has farmed since they came from Bohemia in the 1870s. They had friends in common. Her best friend, Bradi Pasch, from college, was the sister of one of his best friends, Dave Pasch, a young man who was his partner in the orchard enterprise. He is Brad Houdek. She is Gina Wymore.
With the 2016 presidential election just weeks away, and with the possibility of a woman winning the nation’s highest office, the Glen Arbor Sun asked several of our regular contributors to share their thoughts on feminism, women’s achievements during their lifetimes, and the prospect of Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. Despite nearly a century of gains, sexism and misogyny continue to rear their shameful heads, particularly in this presidential election.