Thatcher sisters ride again

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

Who: The Thatcher sisters, Becky and Cookie. What: Rescue a lost girl. Where: Alligator Hill in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, a.k.a. the Park. When: Summer 2013. Why: It was their job. For now, though, suffice it to say there are a million stories in The Park. This is just one of them.

Alligator Hill is one of the few places in the Park where horses are allowed on the hiking trails. The Thatcher sisters, who live in Glen Arbor within spittin’ distance of Alligator Hill, own horses, Himalayan ponies Uggi and Ran. The sisters ride these Park trails, which is what they were doing late last summer when they ran into the Smith family (not their real name).

“We met this man with his family, and a number of children, on the Lake Michigan lookout on Alligator hill,” Becky said. “He introduced himself, told us they were new to town, so I knew where they lived, which came in handy.”

Many people know Becky and Cookie through their businesses—Becky Thatcher Designs and Bay Lavender Trading Company, respectively, both located on Lake Street. Fewer people know them as volunteers with Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes (FSBD), a local nonprofit. On its website, FSBD claim a membership of 700-plus volunteers who work to “heighten the visitor experience in partnership with the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.” For the past seven or so years, the Thatcher sisters have been FSBD volunteers. And, to the best of their knowledge, the only horse-riding volunteers in the program. Becky, a year-round Glen Arborite, estimates she logs up to 300 FSBD volunteer hours between May and October. Cookie, who makes tracks for Key West when the leaves turn, logs not quite that many, she said.

Heightening the visitor experience requires a bit of training. FSBD volunteers learn some basics, Cookie said: wilderness first aid, the rules and regulations of the trails, how to report volunteer hours on-line. They’re told to carry extra water, trail maps, “any little emergency thing you can think of to help out,” she said.

“If I were a really good volunteer, I’d bring chocolate,” Becky said.

“But how do you keep it from melting in the saddle bag? Or blow the horse hair off of it?” Cookie said, raising a series of practical and existential questions that aren’t covered in training class. And then there’s the Park’s suggestions regarding trailside comportment.

“Park instructions (to trail volunteers) are: be friendly, get to know your visitors,” Becky said, which brings us back to the top of Alligator Hill, last summer.

During their short conversation with father Smith, the oldest Smith child—a girl of 10 or so years—got fidgety. Unlike the once-adolescent Becky Thatcher, Philomena Smith (not her real name, either) wasn’t much interested in the horses. She just wanted to git goin’. Father Smith gave the go-ahead and told Philomena “to take the trail to the left. They’d been on that trail before,” Becky said.

“There’s two trails to the left,” Cookie said, telling the tale from the comfort of a cozy kitchen table in the back of her sister’s gallery. One left trail goes back to the Forest Haven Road trailhead. “Or, if you go straight, which is sort of to the left, and you end up at the Glen Lake lookout. It’s like a crazy figure eight with arteries up there. It’s confusing.”

Whichever of these lefts Philomena Smith took, it did not take her in the direction of her family, who’d forged ahead in another direction thinking they’d all meet up at the bottom of the trail, back at the Forest Haven trailhead.

“We were headed down that same trail and saw her. She was in tears,” Becky said.

“Trying to be brave,” Cookie said.

“Trying to be very brave and very independent,” Becky said. “I asked her if she was looking for her dad?”

Yes.

“She just figured she was ahead of him,” Cookie said.

Figured wrong, as humans sometimes do. Becky and Uggi charged ahead to find the rest of the Smith family. Cookie, Ran and Philomena walked together, “and I told her everything was going to be O.K.,” Cookie said.

In the end, it was. The Thatcher sisters restored Philomena to the bosom of her family. Plus, Philomena went back to school with the bones of a rip-snorting good “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essay. They made some memories. Or, in Cookie’s case, stirred them.

“It brought back memories of when my little sister Polly and I got lost on the dunes,” she said. “We sat at the edge of the road waiting for the dune mobile ride to come through.”

As FSBD volunteers the Thatcher sisters have found lost designer sunglasses and returned them to their owner, helped dogs who know nothing about horses expand their world view, and removed downed limbs from the trail. In all those years, Philomena Smith has been their only lost child rescue. Adolescent tears and fears notwithstanding, Philomena Smith’s big adventure, Becky suggests, is all part of life’s rich pageant.

“Getting lost is part of growing up here.”