Wildsam publishes Northern Michigan field guide
From staff reports
For more than 10 years, Wildsam has published books about great American places. The series delves into big cities, small towns, iconic American regions and cozier places better known to locals. They’re books for travelers, definitely. But Wildsam also hopes their field guides light up culture and history in ways that ring true in the places they cover. The series aims to celebrate landscapes that might surprise a few people with their cultural vitality and depth of heritage.
Northern Michigan is Wildsam’s newest field guide. (Contributors to this book include Glen Arbor Sun editor Jacob Wheeler and frequent writers, Anne-Marie Oomen and Mae Stier.) The Wildsam team’s affection for Michigan goes back to one of their very first books, about Detroit. Over the last couple years, Wildsam started making more new friends in the state’s northern arc. The editorial crew got more and more excited about what folks have going on there. They’re not alone, obviously. A rising reputation as a place to be can become a mixed blessing, for sure. That’s one reason Wildsam tries to dig back into deeper, longer-running stories of place—as you’ll see in their Northern Michigan “Welcome” note, below. These first moments of writing in Wildsam’s books are always a team effort. Together, they try to set a tone; with places like Northern Michigan, the subject matter does the rest.
Hemingway arrived in Paris not long after spending nearly every boyhood summer at his family’s cottage on Walloon Lake. In an apartment on rue du Cardinal Lemoine, they say he tacked a map of Michigan to the wall before getting to work. “The best sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern Michigan in the fall,” he later wrote.
The horizons and landscape from those summers–glimmerglass lakes, pink-streaked skies and shaded woods–inspired a love of the natural world that threaded through his life and work, just as the wild beauty and water of Northern Michigan continue to call so many to its shores.
The Hemingway family first came up from Chicago via steamer in 1899, a time of change at the end of a logging boom. They were among many tourists seeking respite from hot, crowded cities, eager to row inland lakes and bays, to fish for trout in crisp streams, to marvel at big waters and skies. This was the promise of Northern Michigan then, and it abides.
Long before, the region’s Anishinaabek tribes, the Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi, migrated from the Atlantic seaboard. They followed water to find manoomin–wild rice–and fish. Learning the country by boat, they told the enduring, sacred stories of navigational points: the Waganakising, or Crooked Tree, the space between Harbor Springs and Cross Village, and Mother Bear at Sleeping Bear Dunes and her cubs at Manitou islands.
Water is everything here, even ashore. Glaciers that hollowed out the Great Lakes and pocked the land with inland waters also sculpted the land. High dunes look out over turquoise blues, and plots where cherry and apple orchards bloom and divvy the rolling hills–each form expressing a memory of water, just as Hemingway remembered the sky.
The mix of wildland, forests, swamps and postage-stamp vegetables fields now nurtures an exceptional food scene. The specific qualities of place encourage young folks who grew up here to stay or return to protect the waters, to start sailing or surfing businesses or bring their creativity to the picturesque towns on the water’s edge. Traveling these shorelines–whether by kayak or by road under the Tunnel of Trees–the stories of this place show us that Northern Michigan remains a realm for reverent exploration– where connections to nature, culture, past and future keep calling. Pin up that map.
Wildsam Field Guides: Northern Michigan will hold a release party later this summer in Leelanau County. Stay tuned for details. And follow Wildsam on Instagram at @wildsam.
