Time heals
Storm one of many cataclysmic events that changed Sleeping Bear
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
To bike, or walk, the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail from Day Forest Road toward the Dune Climb, is to re-experience the trauma of the Aug. 2 megastorm and then witness nature seemingly re-populate her canopy and heal her wounds. The open skies and violent, jagged tree shards near Glen Arbor give way, once we pass Glen Haven, to lush forest that envelops us in her arboreal womb.
It’s as though our day trip on the trail is a fast-forward journey into the future, to a day many decades from now when the naked areas along Alligator Hill are protected once again by majestic, tall trees. Trees that shelter us, trees that feed us oxygen, trees that share their stories.
This autumn, as we watch the leaves in our forest change into radiant bright colors, we’ll notice the grounded trees whose leaves are already brown and dying. Our reoccurring nightmare will force us to stare into the void left when the storm toppled thousands of our beloved neighbors.
Amidst the pain, it’s important to remember this lesson: the Aug. 2 megastorm — though it may have been the storm of the century — is one of several cataclysmic events that have changed this land we call Sleeping Bear since the glaciers receded and left behind the great lake and the rolling dunes and forests. And after each event, the land and its animals adapted and tended ahead. Alligator Hill will do the same.
The Ojibwe “legend of sleeping bear” tells us that this land where a National Park now sits was shaped, in the first place, by tragedy and grief. We all know the story: a mother bear and her two cubs escaped a massive forest fire in Wisconsin by swimming across Lake Michigan. Exhausted, but with land in sight, the mother implored her young to keep paddling. The baby bears drowned. The mother reached shore and fell into a deep mournful slumber over her loss. The great god Mishe-Mokwa took pity on them and turned the mother into the Sleeping Bear sand dunes and the babies into the Manitou Islands.
Writer Kathleen Stocking once heard about a great battle that was said to have taken place between two Native American tribes on the dunes. Bodies may still be buried there. The myth among the Ottawas was that the underwater panther and the thunderbird fought a battle between good and evil. The thunderbird shot lightening bolts from his eyes and that’s what burned off the vegetation in the dunes.
Fast forward to the arrival of white men in the 1800s.
Local historian Tom Van Zoeren writes how Alligator Hill once hosted a magnificent virgin forest, but loggers cleared the area for profit. Over the course of 30 years, the forest was stripped of its wealth. The trees that would grow in their place lived until they were claimed by this year’s storm.
Van Zoeren’s book Dottie Lanham of Burdickville remembers how “During (Lanham’s great-grandfather) Samuel Holden’s time, the vast Northern Michigan virgin forest was being stripped from the hills surrounding Glen Lake. The trees were felled during winters, sledded down the valleys, and piled on the “banking grounds” beside the lake. In spring they were rolled into the water and fastened into booms for towing to sawmills in Burdickville or at the far end of Little Glen. (A grove of cedars on South Manitou Island is all that escaped the clear-cutting of this region.)
The daughter of Burdickville’s first storekeeper, writer Nan Helm, remembered the pioneers of the time: ‘They were logging off their land as fast as they could. That wonderful land that was to make them rich when they had conquered it, and had sown it to the money-producing crops it would raise. Surely, it would be the richest of land—land that could produce these tall hardwood trees, whose tops seemed to touch the sky.
Frantically, they slashed at the beautiful virgin timber — maple, pine, oak, etc., hacking it down, selling it when they could, for a mere pittance to the lumber barons, who sat quietly waiting in their offices, as the terrific clearing of the land went on. When they couldn’t sell it fast enough, they burned it — anything to get rid of it. In the summer each homestead would be wrapped in a blue haze that came from the burning giants of the forest.’ ”
Dottie Lanham of Burdickville also offered this recollection from Dottie’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Lanham, who for years ran the Glen Lake Workshop, where Laker Shakes is now: “One of the things that I remember most was that the trees were being cut. They were burning them, and it seemed like there was always smoke in the air. They couldn’t get rid of the tree stumps very good, so they would chop them and start burning them. They would just burn them constantly, trying to get rid of the stumps.”
Stocking’s grandmother, who walked from Newago to Hoxeyville on the Old Indian Trail with her husband in the late 1800s, said the whole state had been clear-cut and the stumps of the pines looked like yellow plates as far as the eye could see.
Cataclysmic weather events marred the 20th century, as well. Barbara Siepker, historian and original owner of the Cottage Book Shop, recalls stories about a large storm — dubbed a cyclone — that hit Glen Lake in 1931.
And landslides occasionally claimed parts of the dunes. As a girl, Kathleen Stocking remembers that Sleeping Bear Point slid into the water, a year or two after she and her older sister Ann picnicked there on a warm day between Christmas and New Years. Strange currents in the Manitou Passage undercut the bank, they were told.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has documented landslides in December 1914, March 1971 and February 1995. Local resident, and longtime political columnist, George Weeks encountered the 1995 slide on an unusually warm winter morning while walking his dog along the shoreline. “Approaching Sleeping Bear Point,” writes the USGS, “he was shocked to find that where there had only recently been a beautiful beach was now a steep 100-foot drop into Lake Michigan. The millions of cubic feet of sand that made up the beach and part of the high bluff above it had disappeared beneath the waters of the lake in a huge coastal landslide. Luckily, no one was on this popular beach when it slid.”
Twenty years ago, as today, violent changes in nature altered our beloved landscape, but spared human lives. We, too, will tend ahead.
