Memories of the Storm

It was several weeks after last year’s Aug. 2 storm crashed through Glen Arbor that Gary Decoker and his wife, Pamela, were able to take in the aftermath. The Ohio residents came north to vacation in Empire. Even though the storm stories had migrated south, surveying the situation offered the couple a much different tale. Gary, now retired from a 30-year teaching career Ohio Wesleyan University and Earlham College, considers personal essays an opportunity to “think on the page.” He writes in the hope of becoming more observant and reflective. “Memories of the Storm,” accepted into the Glen Arbor Art Association’s “New Views: A Storm of Art” exhibition, is an observation of the devastation, which prompted him to reflect on a long relationship with the Sleeping Bear Dunes area. — Sarah Bearup-Neal

By Gary DeCoker
Sun contributor

I found out about the storm from the owners of the cabin that my wife and I had reserved for the end of August. Our Central Ohio media hadn’t picked up on this news, so I went to the Internet to see what was up. The photos were dramatic, but I figured that it was limited to a small area, nothing that would keep us from making the trip.

A few weeks later, as Pamela and I drove along M-22 traveling north through Empire, the enormity of the storm became clear. We crossed the Narrows and a few minutes later saw trees strewn like pick-up sticks on the west side of the road leading into Glen Arbor. Still, we didn’t see all that much evidence of property damage, and we knew no one had been killed or seriously injured. “Could have been worse,” I concluded. “The clean up will be good for the local economy.”

A couple days later the devastation hit us. Pamela and I parked our car in the Christian Science Church lot, unstrapped our bikes, and headed for the bike path. Turning from Forest Haven Drive onto the path toward the Dunes, we caught our first glimpse of the forest. Up close, the pick-up stick analogy didn’t seem right. The trees lay tangled on the ground like battlefield corpses. The few left standing, mostly stripped of their branches, leaned at odd angles as if looking down in an attempt at comprehension or perhaps in exhaustion, about to collapse into the pile.

Instead of breezing along the path to Glen Haven in our usual exhilaration, we strained to peddle, shoulders slumped into submission as if the force that brought down the trees was now bringing us down. But we stayed upright, eventually moving along at our usual pace, wind whistling through our helmets. We returned to Glen Arbor, the ride complete and the sky above the devastated forest bright with the evening glow of the sunset — the first few stars visible from what had been the darkest section of the path.

***

I first came to Glen Arbor with my parents in the late 1950s to climb and take a dune buggy ride on the Sleeping Bear Dunes, then returned a few times while teaching in Central Lake two decades later. When Pamela and I married, we started coming up every summer, camping in the park and later staying in a nearby cabin.

Over the years I have accrued many memories of Leelanau. Although you won’t see them pictured in the windows of Fisher’s Real Estate or listed among the deeds in the County Register, the images that I carry around seem no less tangible than the buildings and land of these properties. My memories weren’t damaged by the 100-mile-an-hour winds that howled through the county that summer day. If anything, my Leelanau images have become more vivid.

Before the storm, the bike path for me was a composite memory. Sitting at home in Ohio in mid-winter, I would recall the feeling of the lake air, sandy forests, filtered sun, and the joy of riding on a carefree summer day. Now, my mind takes me to a more specific image. The stretch of the bike path from Glen Arbor is — or was — my favorite part, but I didn’t know that until I turned onto the path that day, subconsciously expecting the comfort of the dense forest only to be jarred into the realization that it was gone for good — or at least for my lifetime. Suddenly, I knew how treasured my memory of the wooded path had become.

***

The appeal of the National Park is its constancy. The weather, the seasons, the passing of each day, of course these bring changes, but the park’s essence — and the feelings it evokes — somehow remains the same. We accept, often begrudgingly, the manmade alterations to our physical landscape. A band playing on Boone Dock’s deck brings back memories of a quiet walk to The Pine Cone for ice cream and a longing for the days when Art’s Tavern was still contained within its four walls.

I wish the traffic moved more slowly through town, and parked cars didn’t line Lake Street, and I was 30 years younger, and on and on. But despite what is gone, what has come to replace it, and what will happen in the future, the park and the lake will always be there. Or so I thought. Now, everywhere you look, the trees lying in tangled masses bewail their Buddhist message of impermanence.

Years ago, on walks through the Northern woods, I remember noticing humps, oddly formed among the trees. Later, I learned that these moguls of sandy soil came from uprooted trees. The depressions, called “cradles,” were holes where the tree roots had once reached into the earth, and the rises, “pillows,” were a decaying mixture of roots, plants, and soil that had been pulled from the ground when the tree fell. Decades in the making, these formations speak to the forest’s ceaseless transformation.

***

Soon after the storm, stacks of wood began to line Glen Arbor’s streets, each tidy pile a tribute to the efforts of man and machine. A few stacks remain, but soon they will be gone and the battered homes and cottages repaired. Without this evidence, the storm will live on mostly as a memory for those who witnessed it. And finally the holders of these memories, too, will fall like the trees, taking with them their stories.

The forests around Glen Arbor are the true keepers of the storm. Centuries from now, the jagged lumber piles of Alligator Hill and other favorite places will have softened and become the soil that nurtures the trees of the future. Perhaps a hiker, creating memories along the trail, will notice the odd, rolling topography, and his curiosity will take him back to the storm of 2015.

Gary DeCoker recently retired after a 30-year teaching career at Ohio Wesleyan University and Earlham College. He attended Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Bennington College. He and his wife Pamela live in Dublin, Ohio. They look forward to spending more time in Leelanau during their retirement.