20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet pulled the last of its frozen fingers back into the north. The glacier left basins in its wake, and those basins filled, 12,500 years later, with the Nipissing Great Lakes. The waters of Nipissing would become Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, and on Mackinac Island, those waters would […]
Monthly archives for July, 2016
Sleeping Bear
A mother bear and her two cubs, the Ojibwe story goes, were driven by fire or famine—different tellings offer different reasons—to swim the 118 miles from Wisconsin to Michigan. The mother made it across Lake Michigan; her cubs did not. Gitche Manitou (the Great Spirit), seeing the bears’ love for each other, raised up the […]
Good Night
As strong as cold, on earth the only men, Wiesel dies eighty-seven in New York. The terrorists are up to tricks again: Orlando, Kiryat Arba, Atatürk And twenty in a Bangladesh café All hacked to bits while they were drinking tea, But no one cares—they’re brown and far away And Trump is shouting something on […]
Shantih Shantih Shantih
These are the words with which Lucy Kalanithi signs my copy of her late husband’s book. I almost missed her reading. The Cherry Festival has come to Traverse City, and on Thursday my usual parking lot was replaced by carnival grounds. Rollercoasters and a ferris wheel, booths for fixed games and fried dough—it looks like […]