Dear Reader,
John Hiner is on vacation this week. John T. Counts, news manager in Ann Arbor and Jackson, is filling in for him. Please enjoy.
It was July 2020 and I was beat.
The pandemic was upending our lives. My dad had died a year earlier. Then my dog died.
That was it. I needed to escape.
I believe it’s imperative to shed our civilized selves every so often, leave behind our ambitions and our problems, let our minds exist at the normal speed of nature. It’s the only way to remember who we are. Luckily, Michigan offers plenty of refuge for grieving souls – forests and thickets; rivers and lakes; beaches and trails.
MLive reporter Emily Bingham frequently features our state’s great escapes. Perhaps you want to stay in U.P. lighthouse. Or go on a piping plover tour at the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Or hunt for morel mushrooms this spring.
In my case, in the summer of 2020, I sought out Isle Royale, the rugged archipelago located 55 miles from the mainland in Lake Superior, possibly the most remote place you can get in Michigan. The CDC was telling us to avoid crowds, so it seemed like the perfect place. We wouldn’t need to wear a mask. Better yet, we wouldn’t have to listen to the debates on the mainland about whether to mask or get a vaccine.
The island holds deep meaning for my brother Chris and I – it was a rite of passage when Dad brought us there as youngsters. That summer, my brother decided it was time to carry on the family tradition and bring his teenaged daughter -- my niece, Kaia -- for her first trip.
There were logistical concerns, however. We weren’t sure how we’d get there. The boats that usually motored us to the island weren’t running. After a few phone calls, we learned a single-engine seaplane was still available to fly us over. Whether that would still be the case after we drove eight-plus hours to Houghton-Hancock was a mystery. This was back when everything was being canceled or postponed at a moment’s notice.
But thankfully everything went as planned and soon we were leaving the mainland behind. Since the boats weren’t running, we basically had the island to ourselves when we landed. The remote island was even more empty due to the pandemic.
We had our adventure. No phones. No screens. Just us and the earth. We walked with heavy stuff on our backs from one end of the island to the other, 50 miles in five days through the woods and on the rocks. We swam in freezing cold lake water. We scared a moose trying to cool down in a river. A fox wandered up to me on a trail, gave me a most curious look, and booked in the other direction. It was wonderful.
The trip was both physically and spiritually refreshing. It brought all of us closer to the memory of my father. It helped us grieve.
And when we returned to the real world, our ambitions and problems were still there (they always will be).
But getting lost in the thickets in Michigan allowed us to put them into perspective.
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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
