Goodbye Winter. Hello Spring!

@rickblumenberg 

When I visit with friends and family from Southeast Missouri where I grew up, or with other "Southerners" who live in milder winters, they often ask, with some trepidation, about all the snow we get in Michigan. I then let them know that if you don't love, (or at least tolerate) snow you shouldn't live in Michigan.

The nice thing about my adopted Michigan home is that we have four marvelous seasons and each season is beautiful in its own right. The picture below is one of my favorite winter scenes. It is taken from a trail in Warren Dunes State park, which is only about a mile from our home on Tanner Creek. 

I took the picture a year or two ago as we were hiking up to a dune we call "High Point". I'm not sure if it has an actual name, but I thus named it and in our family when we say let's go to High Point we all know what it means.

We were about halfway up the trail to High Point and as usual I stopped for a moment at my favorite spot to look out over Lake Michigan. From this vantage point it is beautiful in every season. The ice mountains you see are from the waves washing up in the shallow water and freezing. When it is really cold the water quickly freezes and begins to pile up into ice mountains running up and down the beach. After a while, it becomes the way you see here and there is an awesome silence--no birds singing, no waves to be heard because the water is now frozen for about a quarter mile or more away from the shore. On a wind-still day the silence is beautiful and you feel like you're in another world. We don't make this hike often in winter because of the cold, but when we do it is always worth the effort.

This view isn't literally from Tanner Creek. Here, I am high above Tanner Creek and about a quarter-mile south. But it is my view and a favorite photograph from the many I've taken.

But this posting is really my "goodbye to Winter!" I'm ready for Spring. Recently I've seen Robin Redbreast, and I've heard the coo of turtle doves around our home.

As it is every year in the Springtime when I first hear the doves I am reminded of the Song of Solomon 2:12 and the words from the King James Version of the Bible float through my mind. "The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle [dove] is heard in our land."

Goodbye beautiful Winter! Hello marvelous Springtime. Welcome to our wonderful world!

I'm Rick Blumenberg and that's "My View from Tanner Creek".
    

Birthday on Tower Hill

by Rick Blumenberg / @rickblumenberg

Last month we celebrated Carol’s birthday.

If I told you which one, Carol would not divorce me, because we don’t believe in divorce, but she would definitely kill me. Let’s just say, we’ve been around a while but we try to keep in shape with regular walks through the woods of Lake Michigan sand dunes and along the shore from Weko Beach near our Bridgman home south to the Warren Dunes Beach or sometimes north toward the Cook Nuclear Plant.

One of the great fun challenges of Carol’s life is climbing Tower Hill, the highest dune in Warren Dunes State Park. The challenge isn’t to do it—we’ve been doing it for years, sometimes several times a year—but she is determined to keep on doing it for many years to come.

The dune reaches 240 feet above Lake Michigan and it is pure sand, so climbing it isn’t easy, but the view is absolutely marvelous. A few years ago we climbed it on our anniversary and at our fiftieth anniversary celebration held last year there at the park, some of our more adventuresome family members climbed it that day, so they know what a challenge it is.

Local legend has it that the Wright Brothers wanted to use Tower Hill to get their first plane in the air, but the powers that be wouldn’t allow it so they went to the Atlantic Seaboard instead and Southwest Michigan lost a heritage of aviation history. According to Wikipedia, Octave Chanute did gliding experiments from Lake Michigan dunes in 1896 and he advised the Wright Brothers to go elsewhere because too many reporters who had followed him had turned the area into a circus like atmosphere that would interfere with their work.

Anyway, this year on her birthday Carol wanted to take our annual walk to Warren Dunes beach to climb Tower Hill. When we do this we prepare a picnic lunch to eat on top of the dune and plan for it to take about five hours because it includes walking five miles and climbing this monster dune that overlooks Lake Michigan, eating a picnic lunch under the shade of a scrubby tree at the top and then walking back home again. If the sun is hot and the lake water isn’t too cold, we sometimes take a swim or two on the way down and back.

After we climbed the dune, we came down a few feet from the top and sat under a shade tree where we ate our picnic lunch as we looked out over the lake and felt superior to all those who were struggling to make it to the top. One baby-boomerish gentleman who passed our picnic spot on his way up stopped a moment when we offered words of encouragement. He commented that he was impressed we could climb it and when Carol told him we lived five miles away and at least once a year we walk to Warren Dunes and climb to the top of the dune he was more than a little amazed. At first I thought he was thinking we looked too old to do it—and then I realized he was amazed that anybody would walk five miles!

I'm Rick Blumenberg, and that's My View from Tanner Creek.
    

Living in Paradise…

A few years ago, Carol and I moved to the sand dunes here in Bridgman and as near the lake as we could afford. Some of our most enjoyable times are spent hiking through Weko Beach and the Warren Dunes State Park.

Fall brings an absolutely awesome variety of color, and in the winter we enjoy the broad expanse of the dunes through the barren trees, with an occasional green splash of a hemlock. In the Spring we see wild flowers coming out of the ground to cover the woodlands with a beautiful green carpet interspersed with various blossoms such as Trillium, Dutchmen’s Britches and Columbine. In Summer we limit our hikes in the woods partly because we enjoy the mixture of sunshine and water on the beach, but also to avoid being eaten alive by man-eating mosquitoes.

I’m a native of Southeast Missouri along the Mississippi river. Aside from the theological implications which I don't accept, I grew up thinking that under the skin I was really a reincarnation of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. I still love that river with its raw power at flood stage and its slow, languid power in the hot summer sun. I try to visit it every time I go home.

As a child we lived for a while in Southern California with snow-capped mountains always within view of our home in the warm foothills. On our return to the Midwest I remember visiting the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest of Arizona. Carol and I visited there again a year or so ago.

When we were in Tanzania we lived in the Rift Valley, just east of the Rift Wall near Vilima Vitatu, (literally the “three hills”). These were three small mountains grouped together in such a way that as you approached them from a distance they looked exactly like the Pyramids of Northern Africa. Someday I may tell you of our trip up the mountain road in early spring when a washout on one of the switchbacks seemed perilously close to ending our story before it could be told.

I say all of that to say this: we live in a world of amazing variety and incredible beauty! I've studied some geography and a little geology, and I know many educators can explain every form of terrain by "the Ice Age" or some other geological phenomena. As for me, however, I enjoy thinking about what it must have been like when God created the world. I believe He made every part with loving care. I think when the Bible says that God "saw that it was good" that was probably putting it mildly.

I can imagine when God placed our great lakes here in North America he must have smiled and thought of us—countless generations of people and other living creatures that he knew would enjoy the beauty, variety, and immense wealth of this part of His creation.

I can see Him taking his powerful hands and forming the Andes Mountains in South America, then running his finger down through the continent of Africa and creating the rift valley and the mountains of the wall. I think when he finished one of those big projects he may very well have leaned back and laughed right out loud because He enjoyed it so very much. I can imagine the angels stopped a moment to ooh and aahh every time something new came into existence.

I have traveled more than some and much less than many, but I have seen enough of earth to know that the beauty and variety we see, and the wealth our earth holds must have been put there by God— a person of infinite variety and creativity. He must love us very much to provide such a beautiful home in which to live.

As you can see, I really am convinced God enjoyed creation, but I can’t imagine why he created mosquitoes! Oh yes— bat and bird food. I grouch and complain when they eat me, but my neighbors the bats, say "Thank you Lord for this food."

Rick Blumenberg . . .
And that's my view from Tanner Creek.