Young family walkabout

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

The family that walks together, talks together and sometimes even finds “cool floaty things” in Lake Michigan. Together.

Such is the experience of the Young Family — Tim, Kathy and their kids, Stella, 15, and Connor, 10. The aforementioned “cool floaty things” — Kathy’s phrase — turned out to be leg bones, the remains of a white-tailed deer they found during a spring walk in their own backyard, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

“Because we live on a small organic farm that abuts the Sleeping Bear Dunes, we don’t always think to get out into the wilderness because we are surrounded by it,” Tim said.

Bearing that in mind, the Benzie family set as its summer goal the project of walking the park’s entire mainland shoreline, about 35 miles.

“We’re aware that we have to be intentional about it and often marvel at how well we know places where we travel, but don’t know a stretch of beach, trail system or dune within a few miles of our home,” Tim said. “It was earlier this spring while pondering that irony that we made a decision to set a goal.”

How do the walks get pulled off?

“It’s not rocket science,” Kathy said. “We get online. Tim finds a map of where we want to go that particular day. We figure out where to drop off the car (at the walk’s end point).” And then they walk, about two-to-three miles on a different stretch of the lakeshore. They bring drinking water and provision themselves with “cheese and sandwiches — ham, turkey, ham and turkey sandwiches and PBJ,” said Connor.

But no electronic devices.

It’s an unspoken rule,” Stella said. “I bring my phone, but for pictures, and so does my dad; but other than that, they don’t leave our pockets.”

The idea is to be a family together, engaged in one another, and no better place to do it than in the “most beautiful place in the stratosphere,” Sleeping Bear Dunes.

“While it might seem ideal that we work at home in a rural setting and see our kids almost every hour they are not in school, there’s still a routine that sets in. It often dawns on us how little we talk outside of the confines of daily sound bites that don’t stray far beyond ‘How was school? Did you get your homework done? Should we take Grandma and Grandpa out to brunch next week?’ ” Tim said. “We watch our share of movies and have all the modern distractions of any family. Our hikes assure us that at least once a week we’ll have some hours free of those distractions that allow us to have intentional free-flowing conversations.”

Parents are notorious for dreaming up enrichment experiences for their kids — to whom these activities might seem more like infringement experiences. Stella and Connor’s enthusiasm for each new beach walk vacillates, Tim said, “reacting as if we’ve violated their human rights, like when we require them to clean their rooms.” But through the magic of process, i.e. getting down to planning a new route, the kids’ worldview transforms and they get on board with the idea.

“Like other kids, they might be ‘Eeeew! I don’t want to do this,’” Kathy said. “But you get them into the car and they’re into it … They stop thinking about what they’d rather be doing.”

Tim and Kathy have lived in Benzie County for 20 years, within spitting distance of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the glory of which is not lost on the Young adults; but maybe not so much — at least at this point — for their children.

“If you were a kid living downstate and your parents said, ‘We’re going to the sand dunes!’ you’d think it was a cool thing,” Kathy said. “(Stella and Connor) don’t have the perception that this is an awesome thing.” The park has been a constant for the entirety of their short lives, familiar, always there. One way Tim and Kathy are working to get more mileage out of these family walkabouts is to have their kids to write a little about each outing.

“We write in our journals about what we saw,” add maps from the different sections of beach they walk and other memorabilia, Stella said.

“I write down what cool things we saw,” Connor added. “What I learned. Stuff like that.”

Under Connor’s “Stuff Like That” rubric is a shipwreck (“Probably the best thing we’ve seen,” he opined). In March, while walking along a stretch of beach between Empire and Bar Lake, the family came across a 40-foot keel section of the Jenny and Annie, a 105-foot ship that sunk off Sleeping Bear Point in 1872 loaded to the gills with corn.” Of the 10 crew aboard the merchant ship, only three survived the wreck. The subsequent research into this wreck that followed back home took an obscure historical event and laid it down at Stella and Connor’s collective feet: real-life lesson in local maritime history right there on the beach in their backyard.

It will be interesting to know, a few decades hence, how Stella and Connor look back on their family’s walking project. Ditto that for their parents. At this moment, however, between sailing, golf, driver’s training, Stella’s summer job, Connor wanting to learn to hunt and, oh, Kathy and Tim running Food For Thought, the family business, home is a place where people are coming and going, saying hello and waving goodbye. The antidote to all this busy-ness, the Young family has found, lies right in their own backyard.

“Being conscious about choosing a hike and setting a longer term goal has given us something to coalesce around as a family,” Tim said. “We always seem to marvel at how little we know about our immediate community and fall into the trap of thinking you have to drive somewhere or go on vacation somewhere to appreciate the sort of resources the park offers us right here. This is our way of pushing back against that mental rut and being more conscious about our place, our park.”

This is the sixth in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is Find Your Park, a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Sun is publishing stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and some of the people in our community who have developed a relationship with it.