The Beauty of Lake Michigan

For more than half of my life I have lived within ten minutes of Lake Michigan. It has been a great source of relaxation, beauty, and awe.

The first summer in Michigan I spent several days at the beach in Grand Haven. Bright sand, rushing waves, and water as far as the eye can see, which is fourteen miles, took my breath away as an eleven year old boy. I had never seen anything like it before. I had just moved from Iowa, where I saw only small lakes.

The fall brought cooler temperatures and dangerous waves to Grand Haven State Park. One fall, when I was in middle school, several young men were swept off the pier and drowned. In response to the drowning, a mother of one of the sons and her concerned family petitioned to have a buoy station installed. The family also petitioned Grand Haven to institute a safety program. Both measures were adopted by the city. Though deadly dangerous, the fall scenery of Lake Michigan is beautiful, with dark, low clouds and high waves.

Winter brought the waves to a halt. Wave formations froze in place. You could climb solid blocks of water and walk over Lake Michigan before it got too deep and the ice began to loosen up. The ice formations were spectacular, but I felt a little bit of fear of it breaking and my plunging into the icy waters below.

As I was learning to drive at sixteen, I passed Lake Michigan many times. It brought some relaxation to a stressful situation. I did not catch on to driving easily. The lake and sky above it, rolling peacefully in summer sunlight, calmed my frazzled nerves. Whatever I was doing, the lake was always there, just how I left it.

I changed, but the lake remained the same. The lake has been there since the last ice age. Glaciers melted over what is now Lake Michigan 130,000 years ago. In geological time, a human life is like a second. It is awesome to consider what the lake has endured. Seven hundred ships have floundered and sunk in Lake Michigan since the 1600s. In Muskegon’s history, native forest lumber was taken across the unpredictable waters in ships to build Chicago’s skyscrapers. Now there are modern machines, such as motor boats and jet skis, skimming across the lake. It is the same lake, but a new population with more advanced technology dominates the surface, the ecological life, and resources within and about the lake.

The new technology poisons the lake with petroleum and other chemicals. These chemicals threaten to change the balanced ecosystem within the span of one geological second. This great lake and all of its benefits, for its own sake and the sake of all life on the planet, must be protected. The lake supports our shared existence on this planet by regulating temperature and providing rain. It also provides beauty and inspiration to generation after generation of lake watchers like me.