The Great Lakes State, Take 2

The next day, Amanda and I ventured to the Sleeping Bear Dunes. We had all kinds of confusion about which towns were where, and how close said towns really were to the Dunes. So we decided to set out with a fresh perspective, an adventurous spirit, and no map. We figured we had all day; what could go wrong? Well, several things could’ve gone wrong. We could’ve headed south too far, expecting to find one of the towns from yesterday’s trip. We could’ve discovered that the Dunes really weren’t that far from Traverse City, as we were led to believe from a poorly scaled map. We could’ve left that map, or any other we had, at home. We could’ve gone in search of that first town we were looking for, now believing (oh, how naive) it was closer than we originally believed. We could’ve tried to then find our way home from this town with convoluted directions and (again) no map.

So. All in all, not an uneventful day. To the day’s credit, we did find the Dunes, Benzonia, and our way home after several stops and one map purchase. The Sleeping Bear Dunes are an interesting geographical feature. According to Native American legend, their formation is ascribed to a bear and her two cubs that were swimming away from a fire. The mother landed on the shore across Lake Michigan, but the cubs were not strong enough. In distress, she lay on a hill looking out over the lake waiting for her cubs to arrive. After years had passed and her body was covered with sand, the Great Spirit took pity on her and raised her cubs out of the lake in the forms of North and South Manitou Islands. What actually happened was the glacial deposits that were left at the lake’s formation have been flowing from wind erosion back inland, increasing the lake’s area and decreasing the breadth of the shoreline; the dunes flow backwards at a rate of four feet a year. We took a scenic drive around the Sleeping Bear Dunes State Park, stopping at several overlooks and running into old people at every turn. We also hiked a loop around one set of dunes at the tip of the shore, just in sight of the Manitou Islands.

Our next trip was to the Southfield Library, back near Detroit. Now that was something else. It was analogous in my mind to the great library at Alexandria. And for all it’s vastness and ridiculous décor, it embodied everything I think a public library should be. Its collection was huge! It had at least three floors, with a reference section that took up half a gallery. There were many public computer stations, and a children’s section that was divided by age group, and further subdivided by interest. The library had in circulation several weekly newspapers and several rows of magazines. Amanda was very impressed by this library, but also noticed some of its shortcomings, such as the difficulty for non-residents of the town to get a card. Also, many of the programs that the library hosted were only open to card-carriers. It seemed to be part of a system to keep the social service the library provided within that particularly affluent community. I guess the taxpayers feel they should have that right. But do they? The library and a talk we had later got me to thinking about my interest in community revitalization. How does one do that? Can you get a degree in that? Can you get paid doing it? Do you need to be independently wealthy to build a healthy community in a place that doesn’t have one? Just what does it take to get people interested and mobilized in building up a social and economic center in their own neighborhood? Can a single business or service, such as a café or library, attract people to a place? Or do other incentives need to be provided by the town itself, such as lower-cost building options for small business owners? And what kind of people can build community? Does it take people who have money already to start the pump? Or can people from a poorer socio-economic background strike out and make a success for themselves and the town?
Wow, I ask a lot of questions.