Glen Lake Association anoints watershed guardians

Photo by Chris Pina

By Linda Alice Dewey
Sun contributor

“How beautiful is Glen Lake and Sleeping Bear Bay and the Sleeping Bear Dunes?” asks Rob Karner, water biologist for the Glen Lake Association (GLA). “Who’s going to protect it?”

It’s a concern to GLA president Dennis Becker as well. Like many others in recent years, Becker and his wife, Carole, moved into the area unaware of how to care for the lake. Becker will be the first to admit that, when they replaced their smaller home with a larger one, he did not realize that with the larger footprint comes “a larger responsibility.” Since moving here and joining the GLA, receiving their literature and attending meetings, he has learned a lot.

The danger now, cautions Becker, is that, with the influx of tourists and fulltime residents moving into the area, the water quality may deteriorate, because many people are as unaware of the risks as the Beckers were. “I think, if you come from an urban area,” he explains, “you’re kind of sensitive somewhat to environmental issues, obviously.” But that doesn’t usually extend to lake issues. “In terms of being careful of runoff or watching the shoreline: it’s just kind of foreign to you because you haven’t had experience.” In addition, there’s more that current residents could be doing that isn’t happening.

To remedy the situation, the GLA has launched a new guardian program. Residents living in the watershed area should receive a large packet in the mail that contains a 20-page booklet listing good practices. Each landowner is being asked to sign a pledge that they will adopt at least one new practice that they haven’t been doing up until now, then do it. Next year, they’ll ask residents to add another, and so on. As they follow these practices, they will become guardians of the lake, and protect its pristine quality, as exemplified by Becker and Karner.

Karner, a Crystal River resident since 1978 who has worked for the GLA since 2004, is excited about this new guardian project. “We’re trying to get everybody to do one more thing, two more things, five more things, whatever can be accomplished—which means pumping out your septic system regularly, having a protective greenbelt, maintaining it, making sure it works.” He describes having a “greenbelt”—a term synonymous with “vegetative buffer” or “natural shoreline”—as making sure that you have filtration near the shore line, i.e. vegetation with deep roots that will pull out the phosphorous and nitrogen before it gets to the water. “Then,” he says, “all the junk that should never go into the water is trapped by the plant life that lives on the land.”

The GLA is also signing up businesses, such as Northwoods Hardware and Anderson’s Market, to sell clean-water friendly products, such as detergents with low phosphates.

“We really believe that, if more people understand what’s necessary,” says Becker, “a lot of people will do it.”

A Passion for this place, these kids

Rob Karner has two passions. One is his work for the past 11 years as water biologist at the Glen Lake Association (GLA). “I’m really passionate about that work, because we have a precious resource here, right?” What drives his passion is a sense of cause. His concern is that, if the community is not proactive, the water quality here will deteriorate as have other lakes in Michigan. “So will the quality of life,” he concludes. “So, if we can keep the water quality pristine, then we have the maximum quality of life for this area.”

So Karner took this position with GLA, where he acts as consultant to the board, monitors the Glen Lake water quality and depth, advises watershed riparians on the best ecological practice for their property, is a public speaker and serves on the Leelanau County Clean Water board. He is respected as an ecology expert in this region and at the state level, where other lake communities look to GLA as a model.

But Karner has another passion in his professional career. “The biggest part of my life, next to my wife,” he says, “is the Leelanau School.” His roots go deeper there, he says, because he’s been there the longest. After 38 years of teaching, he retired last year and now heads alumni and community relations and currently stands as the staff member with the longest history at the school.

A dream job

The first time Karner ever saw this area was when he drove up for his first job interview at the Leelanau School. “When I saw the river and the dunes and the bay and the islands,” he says, “I just shook my head and said, ‘How much do I have to pay you to work here?’” He demonstrates his continuing love for this area by posting his latest (gorgeous) photos under the “Leelanau School” moniker on Facebook.

As he began his new job, he explains that, “it just kept sinking in more and more that this was the best job I could have ever gotten … because here you can teach the way I think biology should be taught, which is to take kids on field trips all the time … get out and see biology, do biology and make it real, so that when they open the text book as a followup and see what moss looks like … they know what it looks like, what it smells like, feels like. You get them totally immersed in the subject, and it becomes alive for them. They can learn so much easier.” He even takes a group to study marine biology at ocean spots every spring break. They’ve gone to Florida, Bonair and the Virgin Islands.

Karner believes that school should be experiential, “getting them to do things, rather than me just talking all day long.” He says that public school necessarily is limited in terms of experiential field trips because of the large class sizes and bureaucratic red tape. “You have to get a bus, permission trips, expense, a bus driver.” In contrast, at the Leelanau School, he says, he has “seven or eight in a class, [and] a van waiting all the time … you can do field trips every day on the fly … If I know the steel head or the smelt are running, or warblers are migrating, or something’s blooming, we just get in the van and go. It’s a freedom that’s just incredible. And kids will end up taking biology in college, and they’ll say it was a disappointment compared. Because it’s a lecture, textbook, multiple choice tests … There’s just no comparison.”

Karner and his wife, Barb, who works at the school as well, moved to the Leelanau School as a young married couple. Soon they had two children. “It takes a village to raise a child, right?” he asks. “This was the perfect village to raise a child. My two boys rubbed elbows with some of the best people in the world, because nobody teaches at a boarding school that doesn’t love kids. At a boarding school, it’s 24/7. It’s not like you teach and go home.”

At the time he met Barb, Karner was working at a large Ann Arbor company. “But,” he says, “she wasn’t going to marry me unless I quit the job — which was actually a pretty good paying job — because she knew I wasn’t happy … That’s when I decided to go back to get a teaching certificate.

“I found out soon after … that you start getting in front of kids, and bingo! This is what I’m meant to do.”

Overcoming by adapting

Karner believes that the Leelanau School, which serves students with learning issues, has improved since he’s been there. “Medicine has taken a new twist on how to help kids with Attention Deficit Disorder and ADHD, and so, with proper medication and the right instruction, kids who never could have … [otherwise] completed high school successfully .. have been saved by coming here.”

He explains that these kids may not have understood in the public school setting why they couldn’t learn as easily as others and notes that having learning problems is the “perfect model for getting … on a wrong path in high school.” Students who have had little success, he says, come here and learn that “they’re not stupid.” Then they learn how to turn it around, and make something of themselves. “[E]veryone’s got a gift,” he says, and students at the Leelanau School gain confidence “through learning what their gifts are.”

“A lot of it has to do with just discovering about your own learning stuff,” he says, finding other ways to learn. “You learn how to do the same things everything else does but you do it differently.”

Karner had to learn this lesson himself and openly describes his own process. “I was born with a leg that wasn’t a normal right leg. Like, if you and I were going to go jogging or walk the beach from here [at the Leelanau School] to Pyramid Point — I can’t walk that far without my crutches. So I would use crutches, and I would keep up with you, and if you didn’t know I was using crutches, you would assume everything was fine.” With skiing, he says, “I got two poles in my hands, so that helps. If I’m riding a bike — I can’t ride with two legs, I can ride with one. “I’m pretty sure I keep up with anybody my age,” the 61-year-old finishes with confidence.

“You just learn how to adapt; and I think that’s what helps kids here realize that, if they adapt to a new way of learning, they can push through barriers that they never could push through before, because of this self-discovery.”

This is why Rob Karner is perfect for the school and the school for him. He daily demonstrates adaptation, using his own disability as a teaching asset. He doesn’t hesitate to ask the kids for help, such as when they’re walking through a bog with his arms over their shoulders because his knee won’t bend. “For a student to feel my arm on their shoulders … Do you think they’re more engaged because they’re helping their teacher? I need you — you need me. We’re in the learning process together. That’s one of my key themes.”

And discipline problems? “I could probably count on one hand the kids that really tested me discipline-wise,” he states.

Now in his new job as alumni liaison, Karner gets feedback on the way Leelanau affected those students once they have graduated. A common theme is, “‘Leelanau saved my life.” Other typical feedback includes statements like, “I hated school until I came to Leelanau.” “The faculty here were second to none.” “It really made me love to learn.” “You guys really cared about us.” “I knew I came in with some issues but you guys were patient with me. Thanks for being patient. It paid off.”