Little Traverse Bay

The sun continues to flood the Northland. I was lazy, and lay abed until nearly quarter of nine. When I emerged from my suite Dad asked if I wished to go to the flea market out in the country, north of Harbor Springs. I told him that sounded fine and when Mom got herself put together, we were in the van, rolling north through Petoskey and then around the foot of Little Traverse Bay. Instead of heading west into The Springs we turned north. There is a crossroads out in the rolling hills called Stutsmansville. It is marked by a splendid brick one-room schoolhouse with a bell in the cupola to call the children to class.

Across the street is the flea market. There is a frame building containing an upscale restaurant at one end of the dirt parking lot. You can tell it is upscale because the sign is hand-painted. It features a picture of a Coho Salmon. But things won�t start happening there until late afternoon. The morning trade is encompassed in a series of metal storage units and spread across the lawns. Sometimes it is wet here, often it is cold. The rules of the game are this: full price Friday, 25% off on Saturday, and 50% off on Sunday. You can leave a bid if you wish. I wasn�t coming back, so I didn�t. I bought two Japanese prints for $6, and a wooden Japanese frame with delicate calligraphy for $10. The discount was deep and I was pleased.

As we drove along we noticed that some of the frailer trees were starting to shed their leaves. There was just a dash of color on the tips of some branches. It was still robustly green, for the most part, but the slow slip into the fall has already begun here. �It is almost September� said my Mom, and I looked out the window and thought of how brief the summer is here, and how long the other three seasons last. Fall might be the longest, since it begins when the tourists leave and lingers so long as there is unobstructed travel. The manager of the stable at Bay Harbor said his season ended when the snow came, since no one wants to haul a horse trailer over ice.

The snow beings its own infusion of energy here. Last year it did not come until after Christmas, but when it came it dumped five feet of snow in a week and stayed entrenched until late March. April is a month of confusion, and the precious time after Memorial Day goes swiftly. To Labor Day, and then the shutters go up on the summer houses at Bayview and school starts downstate.

Increasingly the old rhythm is being disrupted, though, and the retired community is staying year-round. They are digging basements and buying snow-blowers. The ones who can afford something down south for the bad months, the months of darkness and howling winds, they might just have the best of all worlds.

When we were back in the vehicle I was surprised to find we were headed for another destination. You would love where it was. Nestled in the rolling hills is Pond Hill Farm. It is an organic outfit. You can pick things yourself, admire the flowers, talk to the chickens and the geese patrolling the yard around the store. You get to it by a white sand road, soft as sugar as you come up to the parking lot.

You can�t help liking the Pond Hill Farm. Kids run around the parking lot looking at the animals. The vegetables are luscious. The preserves amazing. Hot pepper jelly, good over cream cheese and crackers. Sauerkraut relish. Salsa of all manner and description, all in Mason jars, product of the establishment�s kitchen. Sliced green tomato pickles. A jug of pickled eggs, just like an old-time bar. Rows and rows of them. Upstairs is an African art gallery. Weird. There are twelve-foot carved giraffes and masks and stools. The connection to the Beloved Country came from an internet search for a small-scale harvester for the limited grain crop at Pond Hill. Only South Africa had one, and with it came an art connection. I have the brochure.

I wanted to drop a couple hundred bucks on preserves, but good sense got the better of me. They told me the sweet corn will last for a week, so I will buy just before I leave and bring a bushel back to the nation�s capital.

We weren�t done. Dad drove west and south from Pond Hill and we took the lower bay drive to reach the shore and he pulled into a place called the Thorne Swift Nature Preserve. Thankfully there were no other cars in the lot. We parked and paid the two dollars to a nice blonde woman who was of German-Swedish-Dutch extraction. We came to that conclusion over the spelling of our family name, which took some negotiation as she wrote it down in the log. The Preserve is a deep lot at the very end of the northern shore of Little Traverse Bay, where the Big Lake is right there and the shore curves northeast to the Straits at Mackinac and the Bridge to the Upper Peninsula.

The preserve has narrow paths winding through the second-growth trees. You can see the great stumps of the first growth trees hat fueled the development of northern Michigan, and some of them still have the fire scars from the conflagrations of the �20s and �30s that followed the devastation. There is a cross section of an old growth tree hanging in the Nature Center. It is nicely sanded and varnished, and little pins have been placed on the growth rings to give you a sense for how this tree related to the history of this state. The tree germinated when the Fort at Mackinaw Island was still new. Man-on-the-moon is way out on the periphery and that is now ancient history to the school kids who come on field trips.

We walked down the trail and followed the points on interest from the flyer. There is a thousand feet of beach front, 700 of it for nesting birds and 300 for humans. Visitors have built little cairns of stone at the shoreline. It is very other-worldly, like the designs pressed overnight into a farmer�s field.

We took pictures and then walked the trail to a wooden pathway that led to a deck over the restricted area of the dunes. To the south you can see the water tower at the top of the hill above Dad�s house. This is the point that demarcates the Bay in his view to the north. Looking south from here  you can see the power plant at Charlevoix, the entrance to the inner passage across the rivers and lakes to Alpena. Beyond that the land blurs into a distant blue that holds Grand Traverse and finally the Leelanau Peninsula, the pinkie in Michigan�s mitten.

We were the only ones in the Preserve that morning. I don�t know where all the tourists have gone. Maybe down at the pier in Harbor Springs, dining on planked white fish and potatoes. We drove back along the shore, past the estates of the old Chicago and Detroit families. There is a lot of money up here, at least in the places where there is a water view.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra