My daughter Jocelyn is temporarily home from college so we squeezed in a hiking trip at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. It’s located in the upper peninsula of “The Great Lakes State.”
Day One
Halfway into our seven-hour drive from northern Illinois (Rockford) to the central upper peninsula (Munising, Michigan), I realized I forgot to print my park pass. That’s the one-page “proof of purchase” you buy online, print at home and place on your dashboard whenever you park in a Painted Rocks parking lot. If you don’t display your ticket in the national park, you could get fined or, I dunno, towed or fed to the mosquitoes.
Knowing we wanted to legally hike, I texted our motel to see if I could print the pass in their office but she said they didn’t have a printer. She suggested the local visitor’s bureau located a block from the motel.
I called the bureau and a bureaucrat answered. I told her I was looking for a business center to print my park pass.
“You kinda can’t print anywhere in town except here,” she said, “so it’ll cost $5.00.”
“I don’t mind paying,” I told her, “but it’s only one page.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You kinda can’t print anywhere else in town.” She said something about throwing in a map, which we didn’t need or want.
I generally don’t believe in time-travel, but when the bureaucrat told me I was going to have to pay up, I was instantly transported to Cornell College in the year 1991. I could suddenly my college roommate’s 20-year-old voice angry-whispering the following three words into my ear:
bamboozling bureaucratic bullshit!
I don’t know if she still does, but back in the day, Patty had a knack for alliteration. If she felt someone was trying to rip her off — like a tuition hike or an ATM fee — she’d mutter the triple-b with a disgusted look on her otherwise innocent face. Now, 33 years later and with more than 2000 miles separating us, I heard her glorious poetry ringing in my ears.
***
I know five dollars isn’t a lot of money but charging that much for a lousy piece of paper is a crappy way to welcome a visitor. I wondered how many other junk fees awaited us in Munising, Michigan.
***
As I drove, Jocelyn looked up the local library’s website on her phone and learned it would cost 15 cents to print one piece of paper. When we got there, we had the pass printed and tried to pay, but the librarian shooed away the five-dollar bill like it was a pesky fly.
“It would be silly to charge for a single piece of paper,” she said, proving once again that libraries are the cornerstone of humanity and librarians are the best people on the planet.
***
After we procured our park pass, we checked into our motel. It had two beds, a small bathroom and a Keurig for morning coffee. It offered air conditioning but, even better, the windows opened! It was the perfect place to clean up and rest after long, muddy hikes. After we unpacked, we hit the trails.
It was lightly raining and getting late but Munising is on the western “side” of the Eastern Time Zone so we had until 9:22 p.m. to safely hike! In Rockford, we would have only had until 8:18 p.m. This scientific shit blows my mind and if you told me the government has something to do with it, well, I’d probably die.
Anyway, first we hiked an easy half-mile through the Sand Point Marsh Trail, then up and into the North Country Scenic Trail and back. Because it was lightly raining, everything seemed to appear in grayscale (see unfiltered photo above) but once the rain let up, the colors came out in full.
A rainbow appeared and soon after we saw a Sandhill Crane family (the parents and their two colts) cruising through the woods. Zoom in to see the colts!
Not long after we saw the crane family, we encountered this lovely little waterfall.
The “tiny” waterfall on the North Country Scenic Trail whetted our
appetite for a “destination” waterfall so we ventured to Munising Falls next and hiked a short distance to this dramatic 50-foot waterfall. Even though this picture (below) was taken at 8:53 p.m., there was still plenty of daylight. Amazing.
Day One — Beary the Lede
We saw a black bear! Honestly, this part of Day One deserves to be at the tippy-top of this blog post, but sometimes ya just gotta bury — or in this case beary — the lede.
After we hiked a couple miles from Sand Point Beach, we drove to Munising Falls. That’s when we saw a bear on the forest side (the left side) of the road. I saw its massive black side and some branches moving up and down. Jocelyn saw its face! We instinctively and collectively held our breath as I stopped and backed up our Bronco (our vehicle, not an actual horse) so we could continue to admire it. This lasted several seconds before it realized it was being watched, turned away and “disappeared” into the woods. We exhaled (dramatically, because we’re dramatic people) and continued driving.
The movement of the bear and the surrounding bushes instantly reminded me of the bell hooks (she did not capitalize her name) poem
Appalachian Elegy.
We recite this beautiful poem at every Winter Solstice Poetry Caroling Festival so when I saw the bear “stamping down plants and pushing back brush” I instantly “saw” the poem at the same time I saw the bear. I love when poetry lights the way.
And I love that the bear let us see him, if only for a few seconds. Our hearts were pounding and full.
Thanks for reading about Day One. Have you been to Pictured Rocks? -Connie
Poetry Lovers,
Here's the excerpt I remembered from the bell hooks "Appalachian Elegy" poem:
night moves
through the thick dark
a heavy silence outside
near the front window
a black bear
stamps down plants
pushing back brush
fleeing manmade
confinement
roaming unfettered
confident
any place can become home
strutting down
a steep hill
as though freedom
is all
in the now
no past
no present
P.S. It’s worth mentioning that Jocelyn works at her college’s music library and occasionally prints a page or two — for free — for students and professors. And I occasionally print multiple pages for fellow writers, also for free. Haven’t we all been in a printer crisis? If you are able, just print the damn pages!
Constance Kuntz 