Walking on the Lake Michigan beach, as my sisters and I continued our stay on Beaver Island, we had a chat with Erin Binney Gergler.\u00a0 Binney is a professor of biology at Kalamazoo College, one of whose research interests is pitcher\u2019s thistle.\u00a0 This is an endangered plant that takes years to flower, blooms once, and dies.\u00a0 It\u2019s native to the shoreline dunes of the upper Great Lakes, so Binney was in the right place to look for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was looking for seedlings, an inch or so tall, in the stretch of beach in front of her house. When she found a thistle start, she noted its location on the clipboard she was carrying, and marked the spot in the sand with an unobtrusive little numbered flag. She\u2019d designed the markers to blend in with and not detract from the beauty of the habitat. She\u2019s watching the seedlings with an eye toward identifying factors that contribute to their survival. Carol invited her to flag starts on her beach as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, we visited the Print Shop Museum, one of two historical museums on this island. The Northern Islander<\/em> was printed in this building when the newspaper began when it started up in 1850, and the paper is printed there now. Although the museum displays many aspects of island history, my favorite part was the small press on which the paper was printed all those years ago. What made the press so interesting was seeing it with my sister Marilyn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marilyn has a degree in printing management and knew how this antique press worked. She explained it and, had she been given ink, paper, and enough time, could have turned out a creditable publication. After all, there was a type chest right next to the press. Maybe not, though: the spaces seemed to be missing when she searched for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beaver Island has two lighthouses, and the three of us climbed up one of them. As keepers\u2019 quarters were attached to it, the tower itself is basically a spiral staircase surrounded by bricks. Those who climb the stairs to the top then duck through an awkwardly placed trap door to access the glassed-in area that housed the actual light. The ten-sided space up there is intimate\u2014it\u2019s good that the three of us are comfortable with each other\u2014and the views are lovely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we came back down, Carol spied the steps down to the lake and suggested we go down there next. \u201cNot me,\u201d I said. \u201cMy thigh muscles are cramping.\u201d \u201cMine are, too,\u201d Carol said a moment later, with Marilyn echoing, \u201cMine, too.\u201d The rest of the walk to the parking lot was punctuated with sudden gasps, as muscles cramped, and laughter that we were all in the same difficulty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Beaver Island Studio & Gallery showcases the work of island artists and, incidentally, has way fewer steps. We enjoyed it a lot. Carol says she stops there frequently. Lois Stipp, herself one of the artists on display, owns the gallery. Chatting with her, we oohed and aahed over what we saw there, and she said, \u201cWe have a lot of talent here and more artists per capita than anyone would expect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our last full day on the island, it rained all day. Hard. So much water. The moment the deluge stopped, the road commission got to work seeing how the roads had fared. This is important work as, to my knowledge, Beaver Island has only one paved road. All the rest are dirt, and said dirt leans heavily toward sand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Had the road commission not been hard at work since dusk Monday night, we might well not have been able to get to the airport on Tuesday. One area we had to traverse had clearly undergone regrading by heavy equipment and was still in proceed-with-extreme-caution and whatever-you-do-don\u2019t-slow-down condition. Carol called a thank-you to one of the workers as we went by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We made it to Welke Airport on time, but decision makers there might have held the flight for us: the three of us made up three-quarters of the passengers. While we waited to fly out, the woman at the desk got to work processing the cartloads of packages that had arrived on the last flight. She sighed something about its being a busy Monday. A coworker walking through the lobby when she said it answered, \u201cIt\u2019s not actually Monday, you know. It\u2019s Tuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereupon the lady dealing with the packages retorted, \u201cWell, it\u2019s the Monday-est Tuesday ever!\u201d I\u2019ve smiled at her language play several times since. It was a charming end to our sojourn on an island in upper Lake Michigan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walking on the Lake Michigan beach, as my sisters and I continued our stay on Beaver Island, we had a chat with Erin Binney Gergler.\u00a0 Binney is a professor of biology at Kalamazoo College, one of whose research interests is pitcher\u2019s thistle.\u00a0 This is an endangered plant that takes years to flower, blooms once, and… Continue reading Island Lights<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661,"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions\/661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moncrieff-in-michigan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
31 May 2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"