The Passage of Time at The Homestead
At the mouth of the Platte River a young Odawa girl carries her paddles to shore. Photo by Minnie Wabanimkee
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
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.
The Homestead has a history that I love, that tells the history of the Leelanau Peninsula in miniature. Imagine The Homestead first the way it is today: a 500-unit condominium resort on Lake Michigan where the Crystal River comes into Sleeping Bear Bay. It is a chichi and comfortable place with four restaurants, several elegant shops, five clay tennis courts, four pools, a cabana, and several miles of nature trails.
Imagine that you arrive from Detroit on a hot summer night that is merely balmy by the time you reach the Glen Arbor pines. You pull in past the liveried guards at The Homestead gate, up the sweeping driveway and slowly through the trees, down to where the Crystal River runs into the bay.
You step from your car and hear the faint sound of Chopin coming across the parking lot from the bar at the racquet club. The air has the sweet smell of balm of Gilead. You are with a favorite friend. You move down toward the tennis courts and dance the pas de deux before moving inside to the Balcony Bar for a nightcap. You retire to your condominium aerie in Ridge Top, or you find your way down the dunes to the Sandpiper condo, a little place that opens onto the water.
You wake the next morning, find your refrigerator stocked as requested, make a light breakfast of eggs benedict and fresh melon on the sun-dappled deck, and are entertained by a mother deer and a fawn who make their way down to the water on the other side of the river to drink from the bank.
Move back 50 years in time to the ’30s—imagine rattan, painted wicker, bouquets of orange lilies in carnival glass. You and your husband have motored up from Grosse Pointe to visit the kids: John Jr. enrolled in Camp Leelanau for the summer, Adelia in Camp Kohana. You and John Sr. will stay at “the Inn”—the big, brown, rambling, splendidly rustic building set against the steep, wooded hill where the Crystal River flows out into Sleeping Bear Bay.
You find yourself humming the tune to “Nothing Could be Finer Than to be in Carolina in the Morning” as you unpack your tennis whites, golfing clothes, sailing shoes. These two weeks in June will be “rustic”—delicious, home-cooked meals at the inn, golf and horseback riding in the D.H. Day Estate, daily swimming and sunbathing at the mouth of the Crystal River, and Chinese checkers with the other visitors at the inn when it rains. After that, it’s Mackinac Island and the height of the summer social season. But for now, it’s time out of time at The Homestead.
Close your eyes and let time collapse around you again; open your eyes to 1854 on the Crystal River. You are a young boy visiting the Indian camp to see if anyone knows where your cows are. The Indians are fishing for sturgeon and whitefish here before moving on to Harbor Springs for the remainder of the summer.
The camp is ideally situated in the clearing by the mouth of the river. Indian children swim in Lake Michigan and play on the shore while their dark-eyed mothers weave marsh grass into mats. The women laugh and talk in light, lilting voices.
Islands the Indians call man-ee-dow, or spirit, loom in the bay they call mishemokwa, or sleeping bear. Their words for these things hint at ancient myths and give an added mystery to this already mysterious land. A young girl, your age, helps you find your cows and then, giggling, begins to teach you the word for corn—dominick quashegan—and kerosene—washe conge conombo.
On the way home, over the hill toward your cabin, you see an enormous black mother bear and her cub a hundred yards ahead on the trail. You wait for them to amble off into the brush before herding your slow, cud-chewing beasts along the way, musing, as you walk, at the vast quantity of game—bear, deer, duck, partridge. The Indians must wonder at the two white families with their chickens and cows dopily slaving away to produce food in a land where it is everywhere available and abundant. Earlier in the spring, there were so many passenger pigeons that their migration darkened the sky; when they came to roost in the fields, they were so tame, they could be caught in two hands.
It is summer, nearly sunset, and yet so far north it will be late evening before the last light fades over the Sleeping Bear Dunes. You go home and fall asleep in ten o’clock twilight, dreaming of a girl teaching you how to say “kerosene” in another language.
