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.
