Glen Lake

It has been a couple of weeks, but the awesomeness of that place and that time has not worn off yet.

We got there at dusk:

Our house was about 200 yards from a small park on the lake. 

View from Old Settler

 

Glen Lake

The second day, I took a 15 mile bike ride around Big Glen and Little Glen lake–nice rolling terrain with a couple of good hills.  To me, as a former (slow, Category 5, no USCF credentials) racer, it’s still not really a bike ride unless you get to the point where your heart is beating outside your chest and you’re gasping for breath for prolonged periods.   Another day I rode up Pierce Stocking Drive, which is the scenic route to the Lake Michigan overlook at the Sleeping Bear Dune. 

My kids

Jillian and Ian

Late Monday night a few of us took sleeping bags to a rugged little beach on Lake Michigan and watched the Perseids meteor shower.  If you live in Columbus and it is night right now, go outside and look up.  You will see about 10 stars.  Multiply that by a million, and that is what we had as the backdrop for the meteor shower.  Breathtaking and unbelievably clear.

Tuesday we had another lake day.  We rented a boat and jet ski again.  The really fun part about tubing was having the boat go full throttle and seeing how high me and the tube could go after hitting a small wave.  The the not so fun part was–have I mentioned that I am 6′4″, and 215 (at least so says my scale upstairs, which I like much better than the scale at the doctors office which seems to think that my shoes weigh 7 pounds)?–was the bruised rib from hitting the water at 50 or so mph.  And then there was the wave runner, again.  That was about 10 minutes of gas squandering bliss, followed by a half hour of sitting stalled in the lake waiting for a tow boat, after it started billowing plumes of black smoke from the motor. 

Change of pace the next day… we rented kayaks and paddled on Crystal River, a creek that winds from Glen Lake, through some beautiful and peaceful wetlands, and empties out into Lake Michigan.  We covered about 3 miles of it, at a restful pace.  Nice.

This part of Sleeping Bear Dune is a 450 foot vertical drop to Lake Michigan.  It only takes a few minutes to get to the bottom; less than that if you’re Jillian

We ignored the warnings...

The problem is that what goes down must come up.  It took my wife and I about a 35 minutes to make the ascent.  It took Jillian about 1/2 hour.  Climbing a steep sand hill is the kind of workout you can get from a stair stepper machine at the gym, if you are waist deep in molasses.  Ian, who runs on the track and cross country teams, made it in 8 1/2 minutes.  Li’l bastard.

It is bigger than it looks in the picture

This doesn’t do justice to the view you can get.  To the north, you can see the Manitou Islands, and on the distant horizon, you can just make out Wisconsin on the other side of Lake Michigan.  

Up and down the shore are several miles of rugged and undeveloped lake shore.  There is a “ghost forest” just to the north, which was several acres of dead dried trees, where over the centuries, sand buried a forest and then blew or eroded away, to reveal the dried and bleached remains of the trees.

I want to go back…

Driving day

Friday August 8
My wife and her girls left Thursday night to spend the night with her cousin, who has a farm outside of Toledo. So that meant my kids and I were on the road again…we planned to leave by 8:30 for what Mapquest said was a 7 hour 25 minute drive.  When we plan to leave by 8:30, that usually means we are going to leave at some point during that same calendar day. It was closer to 10:30 by the time we hit the city limits outbound. But we did manage to cram a 7 1/2 hour drive into a 10 1/2 hour ordeal.  We ended up with a bastardized hybrid of Mapquest, AAA (A.A., eh?) and directions some retired truck driver gave my wife when she was at her cousin’s.

The first highlight was that we met up with my wife and her girls at a bead store near Toledo.  I don’t know why.  It was just off the freeway, and one of them had a burning need to lay in some supplies for bead-related crafts.  Jillian set off to look at the goods, and when Ian and I walked in, a nice birdlike lady approached us and chirped “Are you beaders?”  First of all, I didn’t even know that was a verb, and second of all, my default setting is sarcasm.  But fortunately, before I responded “Holy shit, do you really think that when people see me walking down the street, one of the first things that they think of is ‘I’ll bet that guy beads’?  Because if so, I am going down the street to my wife’s cousin’s barn and hang myself from the effin’ rafters…”, my internal editor kicked in and I gestured over to where the girls were poring over the goods, and said “I’m with them” instead.  Whew, close call. 

I think that Ian sensed the testosterone depletion inherent in those types of stores; he came up to me and said in all deadpan seriousness, “Can we please go?  I’m getting an urge to go to Pottery Barn next for decorating ideas”.  I told him that if we needed to, we could go to a Tractor Supply and buy some chainsaw oil, or a trailer hitch, if that would help.

Eventually headed north, through the western part of lower Michigan.  Passed through some beautiful and rugged terrain in the Manistee National Forest, and the Pere Marquette River watershed.

Back! From a vacation rental with no internet connectivity…

Got back late yesterday…8 day trip to Glen Lake, MI. with my wife and four of our kids, my brother and one of his sons, my sister and her husband and the cutest pair of twin 3 year olds anyone has ever seen in the history of the entire world, and my parents.  That’s right, 14 people (15 the night my brother’s gf stayed over) in a house designed for about half that many.  It looked bigger in the pictures. 

We had a great time, the highlights of which I plan to completely bore the shit out of you with, for a couple of posts.

On the road again…

I have another vacation to look forward to next week.  It is a real one, the kind that you plan for and make reservations and formulate intentions to be specific places at agreed-upon times.  There is even a AAA Trip Tik involved.  (There is a stubborn and stupid habit in my brain that requires it to silently blurt out a lame recurring mental punchline or play on words whenever, and that means EVERY SINGLE F*&%*@ING TIME!, it encounters certain trigger words or phrases.  One of those triggers is AAA.  And what my STUPID brain does in this case, is to think of a Canadian guy working at a detox, making a referral to a patient to attend a 12-step meeting:  “A.A., eh?”  And then because this attendant guy is a little impatient, and the detox client is sort of a recidivist with a short attention span, sometimes he has to say something to get the guy’s attention:  “Hey! A.A., eh?”, only he says it kind of like Fonzie would, dropping the H.  I know. Just fucking pathetic.  Another one of those triggers is the local hockey team, the Columbus Blue Jackets; and the result is that someone in this scenario approaches the kiosk at the arena that sells Blue Jackets logo garments saying shit like “Got any blue Blue Jackets jackets?  Gimme a blue Blue Jackets jacket!”, talking real fast and repeating himself. Sometimes with that one, the proprietor of the kiosk is named Jack.  There are also orders for “red Blue Jackets pants” on the bad days. <Sigh>).

This trip is in contrast to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along road trip I took with my kids earlier this summer.  I keep saying kids like they are a herd of goats or something; even though they are 20 and 16, I don’t know what else to call them.  My wife and two of her ki-, uh, youngsters are going too (She has 5 altogether, but only two still living at home).  There were several years, right after we got married, where 8 of us (her oldest was out of the house by the time we got married) would load up into two cars and drive down to the beach at Pawley’s Island, S.C. for a week.  We had some incredibly fun and rewarding times, but usually by the end of the week I would be way ready to get back to work, so I could get some rest. 

This will be the first time in way too long that my wife and I have been on the same vacation at the same time, so we are both really looking forward to it.  It will be at a lake–Glenn Lake, or maybe Lake Glenn–near Traverse City, MI.  The big unkown about this trip is that we are going to be inhabiting a gigantic house that will also contain my parents, my brother and one or two of his family, my sister and her husband and their 3 year old twins.  If I counted right, that is possibly 15 people, related by blood and marriage, under the same roof.  By my further calculations, that is 4 heads of households, plus 3 people who think they are, in one house.  I don’t say that with dread. On the contrary, I think it will be fun.  But I will say this:  if anyone does that sneaky trick where they use all but about 2 tablespoons of Corn Chex and then return the box to the pantry, just so they can avoid going to the trouble of pitching the liner bag and flattening the cardboard for recycling, there will be some serious passive-aggressive consequences to pay…

Down the shore

I had in mind a trip to Ohiopyle, PA., to the Youghiougheny River for whitewater rafting, a ride on the beautiful rails to trails bike path to Connellsville, and maybe tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses at Kentuck Knob and Fallingwater.  That just sounded like a cool way to spend a few days, and I have the chance to hit the road with my two semi-grown kids (Jillian, 20 and Ian, 16).  I have made that trip a couple of times, and it is just unbelievably cool and enriching and energizing.  I asked them if they would be interested in that, and they both allowed as how yeah, that would be cool and all, but if given a choice they would rather go to the ocean, at the Jersey Shore.  So I says to myself I says, Huh.  Neither of them has ever been to New Jersey, so where the hell did that come from?

Well, I moved to Columbus from NJ long before either of them were born, and I may have told them a story or two about my old stomping grounds.  I must have made it sound really interesting or something, because that is where we are going.  As the natives used to say, we are going “down the shore”.

The plan is to not really plan, and we are all really into keeping it that way.  I want to show them where I spent my formative years, up in Allendale and Midland Park in Bergen County; and then head south on the Garden State Parkway and the N.J. Turnpike until we hit the shore.  Maybe Tom’s River or Seaside Heights or Point Pleasant, or farther south to Long Beach Island, to see how things have changed in Ship Bottom, Beach Haven and Barnegat.

My kids are excited and so am I.  But there is one thing.  There is sort of an un-anchored and indefinable angstiness milling around inside me at the prospect of returning.  There is a ghost or two, if you will.

I left N.J. in 1984 (Here is where to visually cue the flashback sequence with dreamy montage of spinning calendars denoting the backward passage of time.  Maybe some mysterious harp music or something, and everything goes to sort of a soft focus black and white with sepia tones.  Whatever.)

May 22, 1984, 11:00 pm:  I am at the Newark Airport, sitting in a concourse across from a duty-free shop.  Not to get too bogged down in grisly details, but at this point in my life I am pretty much bankrupt–morally, mentally, emotionally, physically, fiscally, spiritually–as an ongoing human concern.  Total burned-out mess.  Lot of drinking, felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance, a worker’s comp injury that would eventually require 3 surgeries to address a shattered ankle, a whole bunch of other shit, and a lot more drinking.  There has been a long-distance intervention of sorts, and I am on my way to Columbus to become my family’s problem for a while, while I pull my shit together.  I am just beat to hell in many ways, but for the first time in a long time I am open to suggestion.  With my rebellious and defiant little world ‘tude of “hey you, why me” and the false pride that thinks  ”I got myself into this mess, I can get myself out”, all I have proven is that me trying to run my life is about as effective as steering a car by honking the horn.   All my worldly goods are stuffed in the trunk of my ‘72 Bonneville back at my apartment parking lot, and I am sitting with a cardboard box of clothes and my guitar.  I have exactly enough money in my pocket for plane fare to Columbus, and so I sit all night, waiting for the 7:00 am flight, contemplating the tax-free booze at the duty-free shop.  The budget-conscious traveler’s airline of choice is People’s Express, which employs the unusual practice of collecting your fare after you board the plane, like old fashioned train conductors. 
May 23, 1984, 7:15 am:  To my grim joy, I find that the attendant pushing the drink trolley down the aisle of the plane precedes the ticket collector by a few minutes.  Now, I have exactly enough money to pay the fare–about $65.–but the plane is in the air, so I buy two Bloody Marys from the attendant anyway.  My reasoning is, “what the hell are they going to do, kick me off if I can’t pay the fare?  And if they do, so the fuck what?”  Some more of that lucid thinking.  As it turns out, the ticket taker accepts what cash I have left and they hold my cardboard clothes box and guitar ransom at the other end until I can settle up.   As it also turns out, those two Bloody Marys mark the last time I will take a drink of alcohol.  What I eventually find out is, there is a connection between prolonged excessive drinking and drug abuse, and one’s life going completely off the rails and into the shitter.  Who knew??

Cue the dreamy montage denoting forward passage of time…no, wait, screw it.  This time, cue Emmet “Doc” Brown saying “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” to denote forward passage of time…

It has been a long time since that day, and I have long since processed and made peace with and made amends for and found closure with that former life.  But still…I can’t help but wonder whether any ghosts will show themselves.  (And if they do, I hope they are chipper little fucks like Caspar, and not some shadowy demonic visitation).

All that, up there?  That is encapsulated in a tiny little angst bubble putting a little pressure in my chest.  I think maybe I wrote it down because I am still acquiring and fine tuning the habit of writing often, and from what I understand there tends to be some gratuitous autobiographical spillage in a lot of the early efforts.  For the most part, I am really really looking forward to spending a few days with my kids, and seeing what the old places are like this many years later.

Leaving tonight, after my daughter gets off work.  Or maybe tomorrow morning, early.  Like I said, a trip without a real plan…