Reflections on 50 years of Sleeping Bear
Pierce Stocking in 1975.
Sun contributor
I am old. Old enough to reflect on something that began more than 50 years ago. Old enough to remember the running boards on my father’s 1940s Ford that he drove from Cadillac to Glen Lake on M-115 when parts of M-115 were still under construction.
We would get up at 4 a.m., eat breakfast, and arrive at the Mill Pond at the south end of Glen Lake about 6:30 where, almost without fail, I’d wake up and need to “up-chuck” because of the two hours breathing exhaust fumes in the old car. My father (Pierce Stocking, for whom the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive is named) would get out, come around, wipe my mouth, and we’d get back in and go on. This happened every day for years. He never complained, never commented.
That was his way.
My father was at first just a lumberman and eventually, as the timbered-off parcels accumulated, a land speculator. He bought up the whole south side of Little Glen Lake in 1948 when there was nothing there but wildflowers.
We spent hours every day in the woods. When he was supervising the men cutting trees, he would put his wool over-shirt on the ground, place me on it and tell me to stay there. I’d wait for the shout, “Timber!” followed by a huge earth-shaking thud, and then feel myself being lifted up into his arms again. He carried me when there were too many tree falls for short legs but in places where they weren’t cutting, it was clear enough for me to walk.
Author Kathleen Stocking.
His time in the backwoods buying timber from farmers and his time in the courthouse filing quit claim deeds made him aware in the mid-1950s, before anyone else, that federal surveyors were in the Glen Lake area. He saw their stakes. He would’ve seen their crews and asked what they were doing and, as just another guy in the woods, he would have been told. Quietly, little by little, he began buying up land in the dunes — cheap, worthless land, just sand — even some from the State of Michigan.
In 1962 when Senator Phillip Hart first introduced a bill in Congress for the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park, my father owned more land in the area than any other individual, an estimated 10,000 acres or more, gambling on a big pay out from Uncle Sam. What a good, slow joke on the government bureaucrats. Where else would he find a single buyer for so much real estate? Some of it previously considered worthless?
He’d figured a lot of angles but what he hadn’t figured was it taking 20 years from surveyor stakes to Congressional approval in 1970. He understood land values, he understood gambling on land values, but he didn’t understand dealing with Uncle. You don’t want to do business with the government, as a rule, because they will always outlive you. He hadn’t figured that out, but of course he would.
Mortgage payments on all that land regularly came due, as mortgage payments always do. As the years rolled inexorably by, he had to try to generate cash-flow — beyond cutting trees and selling lake lots — doing things he hadn’t done since he was a young man, like being a hunting and fishing guide at his cabin in Kalkaska.
Finally, running out of ways to create ready cash, he built a park where the national park was slated to be. He already had the work crews and heavy equipment because of his lumbering. He put in 15 miles of roads through the dunes, installed picnic areas and overlooks, created an entranceway with a replica of the Great Lakes surrounded by rose gardens. He did it in six months and then charged $2 admission. People with taste were offended by the crass materialism.
Meanwhile, his other cash enterprises were not going well. People had changed since he’d first started guiding. By the 1970s, everyone had pretty much grown up in cities and, unlike their fathers and grandfathers, didn’t actually know anything about hunting and fishing. A gang of Hell’s Angels came to his trout ponds in Kalkaska.
They began to fish, and pretty soon they began to drink, and after a while they began to vandalize. The young man working the fish ponds quietly slipped away to call a friend at the sheriff’s department. My father asked the motorcycle men to leave. This was a large group and they were angry. Some began quietly to leave, but others, when they jumped on their Harleys, threw their beer cans at my father’s head, wanting to see him try to duck. One clipped him, causing a nasty bruise.
That fall a party of wealthy Ohio hunters came for deer season. Some of them behaved badly in the woods, drinking while hunting and killing for fun; my father called them to task. Even in the era before video games, they had lost all notion of the seriousness of destroying a life. My father thought you could choose to believe that life is sacred everywhere, or not at all; he chose the first and thought anyone who didn’t was less than a man. These were educated men, Harvard men some of them, but that part of their education was missing.
The next morning as my father made one of his famous lumberjack breakfasts for them — pancakes, bacon and sausage, fruit and sour cream, maple syrup, three kinds of eggs, coffee and orange juice — one of the hunters regaled the others with an account of how he had seen my father in his deer blind the day before, describing everything in detail. My father interrupted the story and asked, “How did you see all that?” The man answered, “Through my [rifle] scope.”
My father waited until the hunting party had finished breakfast and had gathered, waiting for him to take them out in the woods. As they stood, he refunded their money one by one, peeling the cash from the wad he always carried. He told them to pack and go back to Cincinnati. And that was the end of his late-life guide work.
He’d bet the house and he was losing.
“I’m slowing down,” he admitted to his workers one day when I was running the park for him in 1975. He’d had prostate surgery the year before and his eyesight was going, something he never mentioned. His log rolling days on the Manistee River were over. His years traipsing up and down hills over tree falls, estimating board feet of hardwoods by the acre, were mostly over. But he had discovered what he loved to do. He loved to design parks. He had no engineering or landscaping background. He was a dyslexic with a backwoods education. An autodidact, his approach was seat-of-the pants intuitive.
After the first hoots of derision about my father’s effrontery in putting a private park where the public one should have been, people started changing their tune. He knew a lot about how to handle people in the woods. He himself loved the most remote, hard-to-get-to swamp, but he knew most people didn’t want to get out of their cars — which was good in this instance: the roads kept the people corralled so they couldn’t wreak havoc with the dunes which were not as indestructible as they looked, plus rescuing people from places they shouldn’t have gone anyway was a headache. People loved the rose garden and the drive through the dunes, and the views over Lake Michigan.
All summer long in 1975, and again in 1976, I went to court hearings down in Grand Rapids before Federal Judge Noel Fox where my father was fighting for fair value for his land. If you were playing craps at the casino Judge Fox would be the Pit Boss, the one everyone has to bow to after the deal has been called, and disputed.
Judge Fox was a wise and kind man whom I would later arrange to interview about Indian fishing rights when I was a reporter for the Traverse City Record-Eagle in the late 1970s. I was 33 and Fox was 68 (the age I am now), which seemed ancient to me at the time and, as these things go, no longer seems so. He was guileless, genuine, with an easy, loping mind, the natural sweetness you sometimes find in geniuses, the kind of person where, if they like you, if you can make them laugh, it’s a good and memorable thing that’ll last the rest of your life.
Fox knew, I think, that although we were ostensibly talking about Indian rights but we were also talking in a kind of code about my father’s recent case before him, about basic fairness. And he said, “There are many miscarriages of justice, but not a multitude of them.”
He also told me that when his daughter, a single parent, was dying of cancer, he adopted her children so they wouldn’t be orphans. He knew we were talking about justice in a much larger sense than the cases that came before him. We were talking about justice as an outgrowth of our compassion for others. We were talking about our humanity and how one should live in this world.
I was reminded of this the other day when I came across something written in 1857 by New England minister Theodore Parker, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but a little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience and from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”
That summer of 1976, before I moved to Traverse City and started working for the Record-Eagle, my father’s legal dispute with the government was finally coming to a close. My father planned, once he got his money, to build another park over at Jaxson Creek near Kingsley, where there were two lakes, a stream, a large log lodge, and many rare wildflowers and birds.
He’d set it up with his lawyers to put his money in trust with Michigan State University so the money wouldn’t go for taxes and so there would be educational programs about the flora and fauna. People said the woods near Kingsley weren’t as dramatically beautiful as the dunes. “Each is beautiful in a different way,” he said. “You just have to stay long enough to see it.”
My father died September 3, 1976, the day after he got his money from the federal government and the day after his 68th birthday. His wife cashed the check and left for Sun City, Ariz. She’d never shared his passion for parks and didn’t care much for winter, either. All I ever knew about her, because it was public information, were her large contributions to the Reagan and Bush campaigns. She died in 2011.
Did my father lose his bet?
After all the hard years cutting trees and all the crass years buying up whole sides of lakes — like sides of beef — and carving delicate beauty up into “lots” with roads throughout, he had discovered he liked to make parks. Worse things can happen to someone than discovering their heart’s desire in their last decade.
Watching the arc of his transformation makes one realize that change is slow. We evolve in our awareness as individuals, over a lifetime, if we’re lucky. And we evolve in our awareness as nations, and as a species, as the individual members do, and that can take several, accumulated lifetimes.
The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is but a metaphor for how we should value all land, not only the dramatically beautiful but also the softer, sometimes more gentle and obscure beauty that is all around us; not just the Grand Canyon, but the small pine in our backyard and the robin’s nest; not just the Boardman River when it wasn’t polluted, but the Boardman River as our responsibility to make sure that it’s clean again.
We’re all of a piece with our human and natural environment, and whatever happens to the smallest part, happens to us all. It’s been said before but it can be said again: the land belongs not just to us now, but to future generations; not just to private property owners, but to itself, as an intrinsic entity that subsumes and transcends anyone’s possession of it. It’s our honorable obligation to take care of it all, whether rivers, or people, or baby snakes. We can’t let anything bad happen to “the them” beneath our feet.
Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on her next book, The Long Arc of the Universe, which you can support via a Kickstarter campaign.
