Perspectives

We are home from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and, as always, I am now wondering how I can finagle a summer place up there and winters here in the mid-Atlantic.

Our son, John, and his wife-to-be, Nicole, accompanied Dawn and I for the first several days. They were good company and, I think, enjoyed the opportunity to see a part of the country they’d never visited. Nor had they ever visited such rugged, glacier-carved terrain.

I was educated at Michigan Tech, at the far western end of the Upper Peninsula; the school was founded to produce geologists and engineers to serve industry. When we are in the U.P. and Dawn et. al. are picking-up beach stones, I see building material and they see pretty stones and wonder what that strangely-colored, shiny-stuff is.

The most striking aspect of our visits (to me, at least) is how little things have changed since I left Tech; there’s been very little growth, and the place looks little different than it did when I was a student there. Many of the storefronts have the same name.

Some wise, farseeing legislators designated the southern shore of Lake Superior as a National Lakeshore, with the result that the drive along the shoreline looks little different than it did decades ago. This is a good thing, though doubtless annoying to landowners and merchants. No matter; it’s a beautiful part of the country, and if you’ve never visited you should.

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