It looks as if the card was written by a salesman dad to his son in Battle Creek. The card is typewritten, which is a little unusual for 1909.  Dad the salesman must have been somewhat successful!

When I first glanced at this card I was looking mainly at the automobile and almost missed the cows pulling the wagon.  I am glad that never caught on. Can you imagine telling your friends you just bought a 75 cowpower engine for your boat?

Dave has already written about this remarkable backwoods wildflower sanctuary in a previous post, but the subject bears revisiting. I’ve known of Loda Lake since I was twelve or thirteen years old, and it is truly a special place. Located in the heart of the Manistee National Forest eight miles north of White Cloud, sixty-one miles north of downtown Grand Rapids, and eighty-eight miles from my hometown of Caledonia, the lake is situated in the transition zone between the hardwoods of southern Michigan and the northern forests that extend from around Newaygo toward the bridge. Between Dave’s post and the Loda Lake website, you can get a good feel for the sanctuary’s history,  a partial list of its flora, and other details. No need for me to repeat what has already been said, but I thought you might enjoy a few personal glimpses from along the trail.

It had been quite a few years since my last visit to Loda Lake. But nothing about the place had changed. The only noticeable human impact has been minimal and positive—some handy, low-key interpretive markers along the trail that identify various native plants such as partridgeberry, trailing arbutus, and starflower. The boardwalk through the wetlands and the lakeside trail were as I’ve always remembered them, as is the tranquility of the place.

Lisa and I began our hike at the boat launch, where pitcher plants were blooming in the boggy shoreline. From there, we followed the trail east around the lake, stopping at different places to take pictures and savor nature’s subtle offerings to the senses: the faint, sweet smell of wetlands…Impressionistic lily pads dotting the water…the taste of fresh wintergreen leaves…the call of a woodpecker from somewhere nearby…the dance of dragonflies by the shoreline.

Loda Lake was the first place where I encountered the painted trillium in Michigan. That was many years ago, back when I was a kid, and the painted trilliums were not endemic, but had been transplanted. I have no idea whether they still grow at Loda Lake. I suspect that they didn’t survive long, as the habitat may not have been quite right. But hundreds of other Michigan wildflowers, ferns, mushrooms, trees, and shrubs find perfect conditions within Loda Lakes’s varied ecological niches—its old farm, fields, pine plantations, northern hardwood forest, bog, and the lake itself. The wildlife, too, enjoys plenty of cover and room to move about, even deep-woods denizens such as the pileated woodpecker. If you’re lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—you may even spot an occasional black bear.

Loda Lake. Named after an Indian princess, it captures and preserves a slice of natural Michigan. Come savor the whisper of the wind through the treetops, the scent of white pines, and the play of sunlight on the waters. It’s an easy and pleasant drive north of Grand Rapids and beyond Newaygo to the place where the northwoods begins.

Where they grow thickest, you can often see broad stretches of rich, open maple and beech woods carpeted with white, as if someone had strewn popcorn through the hardwoods. Of all the spring wildflowers, the great white trillium is the icon of this time in the northwoods when the forest floor comes alive with color.

For the past two weeks I had been laid up with a nasty bug. I finally reemerged from my enforced confinement, where life had been reduced to four walls and many a bowl of homemade chicken soup, to discover that spring had not waited for me. What had a short time before been just the first hints of emerging greenery—wild leeks popping up in the woods, the first Canadian anemones and a few pioneer trout lilies showing their blooms—had become a full-blown explosion of color and life.

My first tentative, post-convalescent hike told me that I was by no means up to snuff yet physically. But by my second outing earlier this week, I had improved greatly, and was in good enough shape to finally enjoy the season’s progression along the Coldwater River.

Stately sycamores grace both sides of the river along the Dolan Trail where I went walking. Their striking olive, beige, and gray mottled bark so much resembles camouflage that you’d swear nature had cloaked the trunks in RealTree. The woods along the trail are marked by large trees of every kind—huge sycamores, big maples, immense old beeches. With large branches spreading high overhead, the understory is thin, and the presiding mood is spacious, ancient, and cathedral-like, the way I have always pictured Sherwood Forest. Pileated woodpeckers nest there, and I once watched an enormous gray owl hopscotch through the treetops. On this day, as I sat by the bluff just below where the fast-flowing river forks into two channels, an otter slipped along the opposite bank and disappeared into a hole.

Virginia bluebells were at their peak, covering large patches of the woodland in an Impressionistic azure wash. Fat bumblebees moved busily among the flowers, poking their heads into the long, bell-like tubes. I’ve never been stung by a bumblebee and I hope never to acquire the experience. Judging from their size, I’m sure the bees pack a wallop. But they seem to be docile, peace-loving creatures that pay little attention to me. We’ve ranged through the same stands of bluebells together for many springs, coexisting, the bees pursuing with single-minded purpose their mission of pollinating the flowers and ensuring that in the few places where this rare Michigan wildflower grows, it spreads and prospers in profusion.

Unlike the Virginia bluebell, the great white trillium is fairly easy to find. Most Michigan residents know it by sight. With its three rich, creamy white petals and three broad leaves, Trillium grandiflorum is a flamboyant plant, commonly growing in colonies too large to overlook. Not that it grows everywhere. I don’t find it in oak woods, which tend to be a bit sterile overall. The trillium is a friend of maples, beeches, and rich, black soils, and it prefers woods edges and settings where light can filter through rather than deep, heavily shaded forest interiors.

From now until late May, this queen of the spring wildflowers holds court. In another week or two, look for some of the older flowers to start turning pink. Another species of trillium has dark red petals, but the two plants are distinctly different. There are in fact a number of trillium species native to Michigan, most being considerably rarer than the great white trillium. The toad trillium’s hallmark is its odd, mottled leaves; the painted trillium has a striking, crimson V on each of its three white petals; the diminutive snow trillium is one of the earliest of the spring wildflowers.

But the great white trillium is the belle of them all–showy,  stately, graceful, an emblem of the Michigan wildwoods in the spring.

The Bridge was in reality an old, living tree that had fallen long ago across the sandy-bottom stream that bordered my parents’ property. Strained by its own weight, the trunk had bent, forming a graceful arch that a child—or, for that matter, an adult—could walk across from our yard into the waiting woods, where the upper half of the old hardwood patriarch rested on the ground, its live branches thrusting skyward among the spicebush and witch hazel. The Rainbow Bridge is a fond memory of my boyhood, and so is the stream.

Ah, the stream! From its headwaters by the airport several miles away, it broadened rapidly as it wound its way through the swampy bottomlands beneath the forested ridge that overlooked my neighborhood, flowing through log tangles and around innumerable bends and sandy points before dispersing into a marshy bayou that emptied, in turn, into the wide, friendly river. There were carp in that creek, which some of the other neighborhood boys used to try to spear, and rumor had it that trout had once dwelt there. I had never seen any, but the creek was certainly deep, cold, and swift enough to have harbored them.

I have walked along many streams since those days, and I have enjoyed every step, even the ones that were wetter and muddier than I anticipated. There is a unique quality about flowing water, a combination of movement and tranquility. Where a creek is, there is life. Fish swim in it. Wildlife drink from it. Water striders skate across its surface. Trillums and trout lilies grace its banks.

Not all streams in Michigan are the same, though. Some thread through the thick interiors of cedar swamps, their waters brown like tea from the soil’s peaty tannins. Others meander through grassy fens that stretch in luxuriant, emerald expanses under the early spring sunshine. Still others wind gently through wooded valleys, as did the stream of my youth, making their bubbling, unhurried journey from their headwaters to some greater river, and ultimately to one of the vast Great Lakes.

Where do streams start? When you look at a map, they seem to simply appear out of nowhere. But each thin blue line that traces its way across the paper has a unique origin. A spring on the side of a wooded hill. Runoff converging from a swamp, its drainage gathering, becoming a current. Or perhaps a no-nonsense opening along a lakeshore, where a stream can waste no time getting about its business.

Northeast of Belding, Michigan, in the Flat River State Game Area, there is just such a lakeshore with just such a stream head. The lake is remote, tucked away amid the backwoods—exactly the way I prefer my lakes—with a gravel road bridging the mouth of the stream where it empties out of the eastern shore and begins its pilgrimage through the forests and wetlands of Montcalm County.

One night early last autumn I stood on the shores of that lake, right by the headwaters of the stream, where the current began to pick up beneath braided strands of loosestrife arching out from the bank, and watched the September sun set. A gentle billow of fair-weather cumulus drifted along to the west, looking for all the world like a pile of vanilla ice cream coasting through the sky, its image mirrored in the lake waters.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy. It shouldn’t take any of us much. Perhaps one of the blessings we’ll rediscover in these austere times is how little it really takes to be rich. In the words of Paul the apostle, “Having food and clothing, let us therewith be content.” Contentment is simple, or at least, it can be. Simple as watching the colors of a sunset play on a stream whose waters flow placidly through God’s great outdoors.

If you are in the Newaygo County area, you may consider picking up the 2009 Newaygo County  Visitors’ Guide. It is just off the press and is free! Full of good information and ideas of what to do.

If you are not in the Newaygo County area, you can view them on line and begin making plans for your visit to the area. It’s never too early to begin making plans for summer fun!

Several of our Newaygo County Lake reports are included in the guide. Be sure to check them out!

Michigan’s Hardy Pond is one of my favorite places. The other day as I drove across the Hardy Dam, the water was lower than normal. My eye caught the point by the marina and it reminded me of being in the U.P. somewhere.

Transmission towers, or as Wikipedia describes them, “electricity pylons” are scattered all over Michigan. Everyone has seen them and most people find them reprehensible.

This week I was talking with an engineer from the power company in Newaygo County. He said that many of the bases of these towers actually came out of the Sears Roebuck catalog many years ago. At that time they were designed  to be used as as bases for windmills, and only later adapted for their current use.

A little Michigan trivia today.

This Michigan lake, situated just outside the Manistee National Forest, is surrounded by homes tucked in their natural wooded surroundings. This lake is not overbuilt by any means, nor does it seem it will be, as many of the homes are on built on acreage sized parcels versus the smaller lakefront sites found on many of the lakes in the area.

Owning a home or cottage on this Michigan lake should prove to be a good investment as well as providing enjoyment during all four of Michigan’s seasons.

Much of the Little Muskegon’s riverfront is natural, it’s riverbanks lined with a variety of oak, pine, ash and elm. Michigan deer, as well as a wide range of other wildlife and waterfowl, make their home here, enjoying life in their natural habitat.  Fisherman report catches of small mouth bass, walleye and perch.

Due to the brush, low hanging limbs and the trees that have fallen into the river, as well as the seasonal water levels, canoeing is only possible in the lower third of the river.

As with much of the waterfront on Michigan’s lakes and rivers, much of the property along the river is privately owned. Please respect the rights of property owners by not trespassing.

For me, the Muskegon River is the starting line where I know I am getting close to being “Up North”.  When I am up north, the trees seem greener, the air seems fresher and the birds sing just a little louder.

And, as you can see from the sign, Newaygo is not that far!