Glen Arbor Sun

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June 19, 2003

Farmland Preservation Exhibit opens Friday at Cherry Republic, followed by grand opening on Sunday

By Jane Greiner
Sun contributor

Fifteen impressively large panels of photos ten feet wide and five feet tall will decorate the walls of the new timber frame building at Cherry Republic in downtown Glen Arbor for the opening of the Farmland Preservation Exhibit on Friday, June 27th. Read Greiner’s article on how Cherry Republic’s timber frame building went up.

The Farmland Preservation Exhibit is the product of a group including Cherry Republic, led by President Bob Sutherland, local photographer Carl Ganter and his wife, writer Eileen Ganter, and regional land conservancies. The exhibit is dedicated to saving Northern Michigan’s farms and orchards.

“This exhibit is about reaching out and touching people – both locals and tourists, and motivating their hearts as well as their minds,” said Eileen Ganter. “Because this is a national problem, not just a local one. This country loses approximately one million acres of farmland every year, and this project has grown on us over time as we have seen farmland disappear.”

The pictures feature days in the lives of area farm families as they struggle to keep their land in agriculture. Rex Dobson’s centennial farm in Leelanau County and the Lyon, Seibold and Ocanas farm families of Grand Traverse County are featured.

In addition the Ganters’ video documentary “With These Hands” blends numerous pictures, recordings and commentary into the stories of the four hard-working families.

“Our passion was to communicate what we ourselves had experienced with people who didn’t know these four families,” said Eileen Ganter. “These farming families represent something that is vanishing, even though they are essential to our national character. They don’t just nurture the land, they also nurture the community.”

Carl Ganter is an award-winning photojournalist and broadcast reporter whose work has appeared in magazines such as National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and Paris Match. He has also been featured on CBS, NBC and NPR.

Carl and Eileen will be present for the exhibit’s special grand opening party, which is planned for Sunday, June 29th from 3-5 p.m. Members of the four farm families are also expected to attend. Bob Sutherland and Cherry Republic staff will also attend, as well as representatives from the land conservancies. The public is invited, and refreshments will be available.

Sun editor Jacob R. Wheeler contributed to this report

Posted by editor at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)

History of The Sylvan Inn

By Norm Wheeler
Sun staff writer

“There’s everybody’s own version of events, and then there’s what happened. All the loose ends you find in between are what make it interesting.” Rob Rader

Origins

On the wall of the Sylvan Inn hangs a stamped government document scripted in the florid calligraphy of the nineteenth century. It has the authoritative, definitive, official look of an unalterable truth, and it indicates that William Walker has made full payment and hereby records the Deed of Purchase and assumes Title to 72 acres of property in Glen Arbor on November 1, 1890. Another document, filed with the State of Michigan registering the Sylvan Inn as an official state historical site, recorded on August 6, 1975, identifies the construction date as “circa 1885.” So the building was built and then the land was William Walker’s. What has happened since, who lived there, and when they came and went (not to mention why) is a richer story to tell.

In Rob Rader’s book Beautiful Glen Arbor Township; Facts, Fantasy, & Fotos, published in 1977 by the Glen Arbor Township History Group, we learn that there was a dock owned by the Glen Arbor Lumber Company on Sleeping Bear Bay at the end of the old railroad grade that is now Sylvan Court, right next to the Inn. According to Bill Olson, (former owner of the inn with his wife Jenny from 1990 – 2000), that pier was the first one on the bay and its posts are still visible in the shallow water. In 1907, Gordie Earl sold his shingle mill there by the dock to John Nessen, who connected that dock to his other mill on Big Glen Lake (at the other end of Lake Street) with a rail line for his Porter train. On the property near the mill were several shanties for the lumbermen to stay. Did Nessen own one side of the railroad tracks and Walker the other? On whose land were the shanties? Bill Olson’s story goes that the Sylvan Inn was originally built by Walker as his home, but it was quickly changed over to a rooming house to accommodate the mill workers for whom there weren’t enough shanties.

But of course there’s another version: The Sylvan Inn used to be Nessen’s house. According to an interview of Pearl Sheriff in Oct. 1975, Rader’s book reports that Pearl worked for the Walker Hotel for Mrs. Estelle Walker Grady until it burned down in 1914. Then “Mrs. Grady and her husband, George, bought the Nissen (sic) house. They named it the Sylvan Inn. Mr. Grady managed the Inn and did a lot of business. The Inn was always neat and clean – George was a very fussy man.” Indeed, the picture of the inn on page 51 of Rader’s book shows it as Grady’s Inn. If the original Sylvan Inn had been Nessen’s house, how did it come to rest on Walker’s land? A careful search of tax records and land titles from a century ago might unearth the answer. For now, it remains one of local history’s mysteries.

The Grady’s

In the early 20th century there were several inns and hotels around Glen Arbor that catered to the summer tourists arriving by steamship at the docks on Sleeping Bear Bay. One of the most popular was Walker’s Inn. Rader’s book says, “But the Walker Inn was different because it was elegant. It had plush rugs, elaborate chandeliers and a beautiful ballroom. It was the scene of some of the most elegant dances in the entire northwest region.” Dr. Walker and his wife Eliza managed the Inn, and after the Walkers died ownership transferred to their daughter Estelle, who was married to George Grady. “But one winter’s eve in 1914 the Walker Inn caught fire. George and men from the town formed a bucket brigade from the hotel to the lake. The blaze was too heated, too far along to stop, and George, exhausted and grief stricken, had to be pulled away from the inferno.” Then George Grady took over the building that is now the Sylvan Inn. He “turned that inn, former quarters of lumberjacks, into a very nice place for people to stay. His cooking abilities were quite well known. But he never took in anyone he didn’t like.”

George and Estelle Grady owned the Sylvan Inn from1915 until the early 1960’s. As George aged his disposition apparently got more like the little cigar he always had in his mouth, from “particular” to “grouchy” to “crotchety” to “crusty.” Bill Olson tells a story he got from Gordon Plowman: “George Grady was cheap. When Gordon delivered wood and went to get more loads, George would throw some into the basement so when the total volume was calculated it was less than what had been brought.” Helen Peppler reports, “They were nice clean people, just different, real characters. He could be grouchy.” Mary Rader recalls, “George cooked good food, but he was grouchy sometimes. When my husband (Jack Rader) went to get the mail at the post office next door, George invited him over for a nip. He never invited me for a nip.”

George was quite a bit older than Estelle, and he passed away many years before she did. Estelle lived next door to the Sylvan Inn in what was then the Glen Arbor post office and is now Leelanau Interiors. She was the Postmistress from 1942 – 62. Jenny Olson remembers Estelle as “nice, generous, and chatty, but she never went down to the lake. When I asked her once why she didn’t she replied, ‘Oh, we know it’s there!” Bill Olson recalls that Estelle’s barn next to the Inn held “a spotless, perfect car, a Chevy. The realtor George Forman would come over and take the car out of the barn and take Estelle for rides, as she wouldn’t drive it herself.” The Sylvan Inn had been closed for several years after George’s death when Bill stayed there in 1960. “There were sheets over the furniture and things packed in boxes,” Bill remembers. “I came up here to see Jenny, and Estelle said she’d fix up one of the rooms in the upstairs of the Inn so I’d have a place to sleep. I remember the thick, cedary-smelling sheets. The upstairs was still about the same when we bought the Inn in 1990.”

In her widow years Estelle always had Thanksgiving dinner at Rader’s. Bea Thatcher remembers having the Grady’s boat, a dory called “Estelle”, and donating it to the Traverse City Boat Society. Ken and Bea also have a large tool shed that was the box in which the Grady’s piano was shipped from Chicago.

The “Slither” Inn (so nick-named by the Euchre players who would close Art’s & then slither In to Euchre the remaining night away)

In 1962 a group of local investors including the Raders and the Pepplers bought the old Walker/Grady property. It remained closed-up pretty much until the 1970’s, when the Happy Hippy era managed to also visit Glen Arbor. There were two contrasting waves of hippies to rent the Sylvan Inn for a summer each, the “good” native, local hippies, and the “bad” exotic, Traverse City hippies. In 1972 locals Jim Dorsey, Linda Barrett, Kathy Baad, Larry Shalda, Dan Obershulte, Whitney Bourne, Cheryl Manning and Pat Watson rented the Inn as a benign “commune” while all of them worked at summer jobs around town. “We all had jobs and everything,” says Pat Watson. His wife Karen, with whom Pat now runs the Arbor Light, concurs. “Those were the permanent people,” Karen recalls. “There were also a few overnighters.” “We were a fairly tame group, actually,” says Pat. “Another group moved in from the TC area for the summer in ’73,” Karen recollects. “That’s when there were some complaints. But we had fun and kept it clean in ’72!” she insists.

John Peppler stayed in one of the original lumber mill shanties behind the Sylvan Inn for about a week around that time, but “when the hippies moved in, I moved out,” John says. “That wasn’t my thing.” Bill Olson recalls those times, “We went down to the beach at the end of Lake Isle Street to see the beach fires and the skinny dippers sprinting into the water!” “How we all worried,” echoes Helen Peppler, John’s mother. “When you say hippie, you don’t know what to expect.” Helen Peppler’s mother came by steamer to Glen Arbor at the age of 11 in 1906, so the family has witnessed many changes in the human landscape here for many generations. After the Raders sold the Totem Shop, Mary had an antique shop in the basement of the Sylvan Inn for a summer, but then the Pepplers and Raders opened a new chapter for the inn when they sold it to a family from St. Louis, the Belows.

The Belows, the Williamsons, and the Olsons

Mr. and Mrs. E. L. (Elaine) Below bought the Sylvan Inn in 1974. Bea Thatcher remembers musicians performing on the porch for the pedestrians who would stop their wanderings to sit in the yard and listen. “Right after the Belows bought it they hired David Stevens, who was newly married, to stay there and paint the building. George Bleckner’s son, Gary, was a musician, too, and they would sit on the porch and play bluegrass music. Sometimes quite a few people stopped to listen.” The Belows ran the inn as a seasonal arts, crafts, and antiques shop, and in the 1980s they started the construction of the newer rooming house behind the original inn. After Mrs. Below unexpectedly passed on, Joe and Sue Williamson purchased the inn. “They had just framed up the new building,” Joe said. Joe hired an architect to convert the frame into six new guest rooms.

Having expanded the Sylvan Inn’s elegant accommodations and redefined it as a contemporary bed & breakfast, the Williamsons sold to Bill and Jenny McCray Olson in 1990. Bill had already slept in the Inn in 1960. Jenny’s family had rented the former shanty behind the Inn for $35 a week in the late 1940’s, and they’d later stayed in the building that was moved in behind the Inn and is now Thatcher’s house for $75 per week. So they knew the neighborhood. The old shanty became the quarters of the night manager Sally King during the Williamson’s ownership, and she stayed on with the Olsons.

Ralph & Rose Gladfelter

The current owners, Ralph and Rose Gladfelter, took over the Sylvan Inn in June of 2000. For them, the inn was love at first sight. Its rich history and the wonderful preservation of the building spoke to them. They enjoy continuing the tradition that George and Estelle Grady started: Providing a place where guests could enjoy good food, interesting conversation and a good night’s sleep in a charming, historic setting.

Posted by editor at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

Salsa Without Borders makes my mouth water

By M. Leth-Soerensen
Sun food critic

My son and I have a lunch date for 1 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. We arrive at the lovely modern Victorian home on the outskirts of Glen Arbor where Rose Saavedra lives with her two teenage children. After opening the front door we are led to the functional and carefully crafted kitchen by the smells of great food cooking. Rose is setting the table displaying paella with seafood and sausage on a bed of saffron rice. There is a tray with beans, guacamole, Mexican cheese (Caesa Fresco) and, of course, her famous salsa. The tortillas are wrapped in a cotton napkin to be kept warm. Naturally, we consume this hearty but tasty traditional meal with Coronas and wedges of lime squeezed in the bottles.

The meal we are eating is delicious! We pry to find out more about the salsa that Rose calls her specialty. Naturally, she can’t give away her secrets, but the few things we do learn are that Rose uses only fresh ingredients, and that she doesn’t like most salsas sold on the market. Her goal is to educate others that salsa compliments a variety of food dishes. Most Americans know only about salsa as an accompaniment to chips, and are missing out on salsa mixed with rice, beans and eggs. The weak-tongued should be cautious though. Salsa without Borders is somewhat spicy, and it woke up my son’s numb mouth with a jolt after he returned from a visit to the dentist’s office.

Rose is chatty and I have to stop her several times to slow the flow of information that she shares so easily in a quick-witted fashion. She tells of an upbringing in southwest California where she grew up radically different from the lifestyle she has sought and achieved for her own family.

Her childhood meals always included tortillas, and they served as the tool to scoop up most of the meal. But the grass is always greener on the other side. Rose remembers dreaming of a sandwich like the white children had to eat. Working on the railroad, her father would sometimes trade his freshly made tortilla for a coworker’s sandwich since his wife Chita’s (her real name was Lucy) cooking was known to be very good. Rose’s mother usually held two jobs to help support the family of six. Despite working as a laundress and raising a family, she would wake up at 5 a.m. to make fresh tortillas every day. Early on Rose learned to love to cook and savor fresh, wholesome and well-prepared food.

Rose is a middle-aged woman with beautiful, dark skin and expressive, sparkling eyes. She laughs easily and likes to talk. She is a lioness who is very close to her four children. Her twin daughters live in New York and her two younger ones attend high school at Glen Lake. They all consider themselves Mexican even though they only hold American passports. Alyssa, in New York, is the only one who speaks Spanish fluently (with an Argentinean accent after studying there for a year as an exchange student). Rose understands and speaks some Spanish, of course, since she was exposed to it while growing up near Los Angeles.

But like most children of first generation emigrants, English was the language encouraged at home.
After marrying local Barry Krull, the two lived in northern Idaho and later in Texas and upstate New York. Their four children were born on the sojourn west and east, and the young family had six members when they chose to return to Glen Arbor 12 years ago. Northern Idaho did not offer the food that Rose craved, so her skills as a cook grew with her longing for food from her childhood days. Thus, she is reclaiming her heritage through cooking authentic Mexican food.

Posted by editor at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

How Green is our valley

By Jane Greiner
Sun nature correspondent

A few weeks ago we lived in a world of muted color tones, the ground was brown and the trees were just starting to show pink and chartreuse buds. Everyone was busy searching for mushrooms, enjoying the Trillium, planting gardens, or waiting for bass season to open.

Now the green is on, full blast. Masses of green leaves towering above have filled in the trees. Down at ground level the grasses and ferns obscure the forest floor.

Spring is charging into summer as docks come out along the lake and more and more boats hit the water. Fishing has begun and sunny days bring hints of warm water swimming fun to come.

Birds have nested, and many babies have fledged. A young hairy woodpecker was following its mother around our yard today waiting for her to put food in its mouth.

People have taken out their mowers. Gardens are planted and beginning to grow. Flowers are everywhere. The lilacs are magnificent this year, and the iris farm along M-72 is coloring the landscape. People have begun talking about the need for rain.

Man-made changes are visible as well. One of the older cottages on Big Glen Lake was lifted up and trundled off over the Narrows Bridge. A new building is taking shape at Cherry Republic. Business is picking up in Glen Arbor, galleries have opened, banks and bookstores are switching over to their summer hours, the deck is often occupied at Boone Dock’s, schools are all out now and graduation parties are recent history. Meanwhile, dozens of sports cars glide through town in colorful packs, and work progresses on the new condominiums where Le Bear used to be.

As necessary and inevitable as change is, it is still a double-edged sword. The seasons move forward so relentlessly that sometimes I want to put on the brakes. I love welcoming each new period as it comes along, but I hate to lose the old. Part of me wants everything to stay the same. Why can’t the Trillium last all summer? I wasn’t finished hunting morels yet! And though I enjoy our lovely country roads without snow, I’m not quite ready to welcome the increase in traffic on them.

My heart harbors many contradictions: I revel in my electric garage door opener, and wish that cars had never been invented. Though I long for swimming in Lake Michigan, I dread the hot days of July and August. And while I enjoy the progression of the seasons and find reassurance in their reliable pace, I know that just as winter holds the promise of spring, so does summer hold the promise of fall. And winter will surely follow, just as it does every year, and it will last too long.

Albert Schweitzer said, “An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight … The truly wise person is colorblind.” I wish I could be colorblind and wise, but then I would miss the joy of color.

No, for me it makes sense to be grateful for the glorious green and enjoy it while it lasts, knowing full well that the ghost of winter hovers nearby. I will dwell on the beauty and the freshness and the predictability and nod at the ghost, acknowledging without inviting it in…just yet.

Posted by editor at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)

How to plan the perfect sunset

By Forest Mullin
Sun contributor

Once you have arrived at your favorite Lake Michigan beach, instinctively place your hand up towards the sun and impress your company by telling them how many minuets are left before the sunset. Well OK, this is not quite Crocodile Dundee material, but it is an easy addition to your “woods wisdom” or the first step for some. This easy backcountry skill will guarantee you the ability to calculate how many minutes are left before the sun plunges into its abyss, using a very high-tech device called “your hand”. I’m taking a guess, but I think most people enjoy watching sunsets. However, if you are in the minority, this skill can also prevent you from being in the woods after sundown, in the darkness, alone!

Just place your arm straight out towards Lake Michigan. Bend your hand 90 degrees so your palm faces you. Line your pinky finger up with the horizon, or, in this case, the lake. Counting from the bottom, add how many fingers fit between the horizon and the bottom edge of the sun. Each finger, in modern terms, equals fifteen minutes. No, your thumb is not a finger. For instance, four fingers fit between the horizon and the sun in the adjacent graphic, meaning the sun will set in one hour. But if you arrive too early you might have to stack your other hand on top, giving you eight fingers or two hours of time. If you arrive even earlier than that you can use a stick and measure how many fingers fit along its length.

Posted by editor at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

Leelanau School students harness wave energy to light bulb

By Kristen Counts
Sun contributor

Imagine you are a student in a classroom on the first day of school. The teacher says, "Your objective in this class is to light a 100-watt bulb using the power of waves on Lake Michigan. The only help I will give you is in acquiring materials that you determine you will need."

To me, that sounds more like a quest than a class; an ordeal through which someone might suffer on one of those reality television shows. As a mathematically challenged student, I probably would have bolted, no pun intended, for the door.

Impressively, Alex Levin-Koopman of Ann Arbor, Lindsay Simmons of Traverse City and Jon Wohlfert of Kalamazoo -three enterprising seniors at The Leelanau School - took on just such a challenge. Their math-physics instructor Nick Counts said he handpicked the students because of their combination of practical knowledge and “book smarts".

Simmons, the group’s unofficial spokesperson, commented, "I and my classmates decided on the materials ourselves because there was no set way to make it. We conducted the whole process through trial and error." Simmons, who had learned the basic concepts the previous year in Counts' physics class, created the design for the "wave generator". She is on her way to Michigan Tech University in the fall,

Wohlfert listed the materials used: “Copper wire, magnets, a PVC pipe, a metal rod, washers and nuts, rope, a pickle barrel, a dishwashing glove and a rotor from Mr. Counts' old Honda Passport."

The rotor served as the anchor. Wohlfert, always the joker, added, "We had to go with the '94 Passport to get the maximum anchorage. The '95 just wouldn't do."

Some materials for the project were generously donated. The students received copper wire from John Rutheford of Lake Leelanau, a pickle barrel from Art's Tavern, and Rob Csortos, the Vice President of Duramagnetics in Toledo, Ohio, donated a high-power permanent magnet and offered advice along the way.

After a school year of planning and constructing, the day finally arrived to put the students' wave generator to the test. On that drizzly, windy day in late May, I asked the students if they thought their project would work. Could light up a 100-watt light bulb with the power of the waves on Lake Michigan?

Levin-Koopman thought so. Wohlfert confidently announced, "I know it will work for a fact."

Always the realist, Simmons thought for a moment and answered, "I'm not sure."

But the battle plan never plays out just as it does on paper.

On the Lake Michigan shoreline as the wave generator awaiting its christening, the three suddenly realized that, despite all their high-tech constructing, they had nothing with which to cut the rope. A vicious two-out-of-three game of rock, paper, scissors was played to settle who had to go back for a knife.

Finally the big moment arrived. Levin-Koopman had imagined a warm, sunny day when he volunteered to take the wave generator into the lake earlier in the year. No dice. Unwilling to wear a wet suit, he braved the chill of Lake Michigan for the sake of science and, of course, his grade.

Now all the students could do was wait. Storing up the energy needed to light a bulb would take a while. The students left to attend to other work as the teacher stood sentry, watching the bobbing pickle barrel with high hopes.

In the end, all did not go as planned. The wave generator did not capture enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb. But the students were able to see enough energy harnessed to power a smaller light bulb.

"The problem was with the diode," said Counts.

"If we would have had more time left in the school-year, we could have fixed the problem. We tested it late in the year because of the water temperature. Students next year will do some trouble-shooting on the project."

Despite the outcome, Counts said he was very proud of this group for how hard they worked and all they learned. “The problem-solving abilities acquired for this project are invaluable."

Sounds like the threesome earned "A" for effort.

Posted by editor at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)

Timber Framing at new Cherry Republic building

By Jane Greiner
Sun staff writer

The timber framing for the supporting walls of the new building at Cherry Republic went up in just one day. Robert Foulkes and his crew of six, from White Oak Timber Framers of Suttons Bay assembled, hoisted, braced, pushed and pounded the tree-sized components into place. “Handy Randy” Weirich, the Cherry Republic carpenter, was also on site lending a hand wherever needed.

Raising and positioning the pre-assembled roof trusses was expected to take one more day before construction of the new building could continue.

Timber framing, also called post and beam construction, is unusual in modern buildings. Each timber is hewn from a single tree. All the timbers making up the structure are connected with mortise and tenon joints and pegged together with wooden pins.

When completed, the building will house a new Cherry Republic retail store that will be 30 percent larger than the current store, according to Wendy DesAutels, Art Director at Cherry Republic. It will replace the old makeshift structure, which housed offices, a storeroom and racks of t-shirts.

“As we grow our first priority is to continue improvements to our Glen Arbor property,” DesAutels said. The idea is to make Cherry Republic “a destination, a place people drive to Glen Arbor to visit, not just happen to stumble on.”

In addition to the new building the crew will do some elaborate landscaping. They plan to include a quiet space where people can sit and read, a fun place for cherry pit spitting, and an expanded garden.

The garden, which has been the passion of President Bob Sutherland’s wife’s Amy since the beginning, will also be expanded. “She will probably have people to help her maintain the garden,” DesAutels said, “but it will always be Amy’s garden.”

DesAutels said they would like one day to see Cherry Republic become a gathering place in Glen Arbor similar to a town square.

When the new building opens for business, the current store will become a new cherry beverage store featuring cherry wines, cherry juice, cherry cider and an extended line of Boom Chugga Lugga Cherries Soda Pop.

Controller Todd Ciolek volunteered interesting information about the four trusses that will span the sidewalls and tie the structure together. They are called scissor trusses because of the way the beams criss-cross. The trusses are so big and heavy, Ciolek said, that you need special overload trucks to carry them and special permits to haul them on the roads. “Just one truss weighs more than all the wood you see out there today,” he said.

One of the reasons Cherry Republic chose timber frame construction was because it wanted a nice open feel, DesAutels said. Timber framing creates large open buildings because the big exterior wall timbers carry the load.

The new building will have a huge skylight on the peak for a lot of natural light. The floor will be a combination of stone and wood with in-floor radiant heat.

Another “neat feature” DesAutel mentioned is the helical pile foundation used for the building. This method allows building without digging deep foundations, which can destroy nearby tree root systems. The helical pile is like a screw. It spirals down 8-12 feet and supports and stabilizes the foundation, which can then be very shallow. There are eight of these piles supporting the foundation of the new building. Their use saves several huge, old trees surrounding the building.

Timber framer Robert Foulkes, the owner and operator of White Oak Timber Framers of Suttons Bay, was on-site supervising the construction. He uses all Michigan wood in his framing.

Foulkes has been building timber-frame structures for 27 years. He started out with a degree in filmmaking but went into timber-frame construction because he had to make a living. He found it to be creative, “like a sculpture,” and he also retains fond memories of playing in timber framed barns as a kid. “They’re just beautiful,” he said.

Over the years Foulkes claims to have built “houses, barns, banks, bordellos, bomb shelters and wineries.” His company did the timber framing for the Boskydel and L. Maube wineries here in Leelanau County.

For most of his timber-framing Foulkes uses Michigan white oak. His crew prepares the posts and beams at his Suttons Bay site and shapes the mortise (slots) and tenons (ends). The pieces are then hauled to the building site and assembled there. The mortise and tenon joints are slid together on site and everything is locked in place with wooden pegs or trunnels.

The pins come from Pin Oak trees, Foulkes said. Pin Oaks have branch tips that grow unusually straight. The dead tips are harvested for the building pins and that’s why the trees are called Pin Oakes. The wooden pins are all handmade.

The roof beams used in the trusses are tapered beams. They are 8” X 14” thick at the base where they carry most of the load. At the top, where the roof carries much less weight, they narrow to 8” x 8” square. Trusses are assembled off-site and trucked in.

The entire frame is fitted together and raised on site before the wooden pins are driven in.

Foulkes said that timber framing is an ancient form of construction. “It’s indigenous all over the world,” he said, “some Native Americans use it, the English use it, the Japanese, the Norwegians, everybody.”

One Native American tribe in Canada has timber frame houses that they build and live in, then take apart, move, and put together again twice every year, according to Foulkes. Because they are held together with the pins, the structures are simple to disassemble and reassemble.

President Bob Sutherland says Cherry Republic started using timber construction at least eight years ago with the logs in the old store and cherry beams in the café.

He thinks timber frame buildings make the best show of a natural Michigan architecture style and also of the Cherry Republic style.

“My goal over the next five years is to make Cherry Republic look like it’s been around for 500 years. And one of the ways to do that is with stone and timber construction,” he said.

“One of the fun things about the new building is that it’s going to have a bench all around the inside,” Sutherland said. The first timber that supports the entire building will be a beam so wide that you can sit on it. It will run around the entire building on the inside.

There will be stone seating on the outside. The dolomite stone for the project is coming form a quarry in Cooks, Michigan (just west of Manistique) on the garden peninsula.

The “cool” thing is that the quarry owner, an 86 year-old man, has offered to sell the quarry to Sutherland. Though he hasn’t made the transition from cherries to boulders, the Cherry Republic president has purchased a tractor from him, and several members of the Cherry Republic staff will travel up to Cooks to get some rocks. “We’ll be playing Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone up there,” Sutherland said. The stone will be used for landscaping and on the outside of the building foundation.

The new building will also feature a super-efficient boiler made in France. Sutherland said it looks like a car engine and will run on natural gas.

“One of the things I’m really hoping to accomplish with the building is that layered timber effect like they have in England,” he said.

Sutherland hopes to get that “super 3-d effect” in the exposed beams of the roof structure of the new building so the visitor will see four layers of timbers.

When a timber frame building is completed, a pine bough is traditionally placed on one end of the ridgepole. It resembles a Christmas tree and remains up there until the roof is put on. “When our building is finished, we are going to have a pine bough at one end and a cherry bough at the other,” Sutherland said.

The new building should be ready for a Grand Opening in the summer of 2004.In the meantime, people can walk in anytime to see what’s going on.

The public is also invited to a special opening on Sunday, June 29th of the Farmland Preservation exhibit, which will be housed in the new building. The show is dedicated to saving Northern Michigan’s fruit farms and features “massive” photos, and a video on hard working farm families and the struggle to keep farm and orchard land from being swallowed up by developments.

Posted by editor at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

On the Road: Leaving the Midwest’s gloomy grey for Southwestern red dirt

By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun editor

The American boy’s passport is his driver’s license, and a fortuneteller’s reading of his future spells itself out on a Rand McNally road atlas of the United States. Tiny county roads flow into highways like tributaries driven by fate towards the roaring river, and, in turn, the highways are engulfed by massive expressways that crisscross the country and introduce major cities, thousands of miles apart, to each other in a linear fashion. This is the America of constant open pavement and exit ramps that mirror each other from coast to coast. The coffee at the rest area in Muskegon, Michigan tastes just as watered down as it does in Eugene, Oregon, just as the same engineers must have designed the overpasses in Missouri and in California.

But there is variation between points on the map, as long as the traveler pulls off the Interstate, leaves his guidebook on the passenger’s seat and turns off his compact disc player, occasionally. In his book “Travels with Charlie” about traveling the country with his dog in 1960, John Steinbeck lamented that American micro-cultures were disappearing and cashing in their local dialects whenever they turned on the television. His statement wasn’t entirely false, but even today the attitudes of the population still differ from state to state, and from plateau to mountain range. In a country this large, this writer opines, the people will never completely forget what sets them apart from their neighbors two exits away on the expressway. And that is comforting, even as the specter of suburbia suffocates the imagination of the wanderer who tries to find something unique about every American city he visits.

With this as my mission I embark in mid-January on a three-and-a-half month journey that will take me hurtling towards the warm Southwest, then inching my way up the Pacific coast to the Columbia River, and braving the Rocky Mountains in early spring as my automobile prepares for another yawn across the Great Plains to arrive back home before the Great Lake sstates warm to a boil. My trusty companion is a 1989 manual transmission Honda Accord with 170,000 miles on its odometer and rust creeping up the sides. My baby makes an awful rattling sound when I throw her into first gear, but that subsides when I make my first turn. She’s not glamorous, but she’ll do. If my car were a human, she’d be an old farm hand, sagging and wrinkling in some places, but always able to milk the cows early in the morning. As soon as I leave the snowy roads of the Midwest, I figure, she’ll hum like spring is on its way.

The timing of my trip across America has to do with my longing for space, both physical and psychological. Until recently I lived in a tiny apartment in the middle of Copenhagen, Denmark, where cars, bicycles and pedestrians share the same narrow alleys and stringent governmental policies try to mold everyone into one colorless class. It is against the custom to stick out as being unique in Denmark; Salmon Rushdie once half-jokingly called it the most boring country on Earth. There are no endless highways there. If you seek therapy by losing yourself in open spaces, you’d better dive into the North Sea and swim toward the Arctic.

Thus begins my quest for personal freedom in the automobile - the symbol that defines us Americans above all else. Gasoline prices are on the rise as a war in Iraq looms, and preparing to spend hundreds of dollars to burn fossil fuels is not the act of a saint, but I figure the angry mobs in Paris and Karachi have more against the man in the Humvee than they do with my clonking Honda that gets nearly 30 miles to the gallon. So off we go.

Fresh off a whirlwind, 36-hour Greyhound bus trip to Washington D.C. to protest the oncoming war, I am prepared to sit long hours in a car seat and focus just enough on the road ahead. As any wanderer should, I will let my mind drift occasionally but snap back into form like a military cadet if ever the tires veer off onto the shoulder. I have an extensive CD collection next to me, and a laptop computer for writing at rest stops. A tape recorder in my pocket may come in handy, too, if my solitude induces a poem or speech. By the time I’ve reached US-31, heading south of Benzonia on Day One, January 20, I can already control the steering wheel with my knees, change the music with my right hand and grab a handful of granola with my left hand, concentrating on all three actions at once. Children, do not try this juggling act at home.

South, to Shelby, Michigan

In Shelby I turn off the expressway at the exit ramp where my father’s boyhood home used to be – marked by a mere boulder today – and visit my grandparents for a night. Like anyone with a fixed daily rhythm they envy the trek that awaits me, especially when I tell them I’ll arrive in sunny New Mexico within two weeks. From the kitchen we look out the window at a good foot-and-a-half of snow in the front yard. Old Man Winter has reclaimed his estate in the Midwest this season. Like any small town this far north, the gossip at the local bakery always focuses on when spring will arrive, in this case over the local sticky buns. But in wintry Shelby, the surge of Mexican immigrants over the past few decades provides an interesting counterpoint to the whites that who lived here for generations and are more adept with their snow shovels as a result. A fine Mexican grocery store opened up recently on Main Street, where one can buy a dozen different types of salsa, or even cassette tapes en espanol, behind the counter. Meanwhile, the locals are still mourning the Congregational Church, which nearly burned down just before Christmas.

Southeast, to Ann Arbor, Michigantwo introduces me to the first of many stretches of expressway, but only for a few hours. I-96 is an aberration, as it stretches only across one state, from Muskegon, near picturesque Lake Michigan, to Detroit, on industrial Lake St. Clair. This expressway is well-kept and full of state troopers since it passes through Lansing, the state capital. Adhering to the popular motorist rule, I set my cruise control at 79 miles per hour in a 70-mile zone, avoiding any problems. I sleep that evening in Ann Arbor and spend the next three days wandering around my old college haunts, visiting with old friends who opted to stay around and manage a deli counter or tend bar instead of going off to law- or medical school. They thrived more from the town’s atmosphere, itself, than they did from the cutthroat, competitive University of Michigan, which occasionally spits out students onto the Diagonal in the center of campus who are gasping for breath.

Ann Arbor is a town for young, idealists, much like Berkeley or Madison. It is an island of artists and writers surrounded by working-class southeast Michigan. A hard day at the plant for an Ann Arborite would be interpreting a chapter of Kant while sitting in a café. I once worked for an environmental action campaign for a month while studying at U-M. We went door-to-door to collect money, first in Ann Arbor, where I would regularly haul in $500 in only a few hours, then in the farming towns nearby, which often yielded nothing. One day I knocked on doors for eight hours straight, and collected nothing but a shot of Jaegermeister.

South, to Columbus, Ohio

As college towns go, Columbus is the opposite of Ann Arbor. In the latter, you should give the homeless man on the park bench a dollar because he might pull a harmonica out of his parka and play you the blues. In the former, you better do it to avoid being shot. Columbus and Ann Arbor are often mentioned in the same sentence when talk of college sports arises. The Buckeyes and Wolverines are archrivals on the football field and meet every year in November as the regular season reaches its climax. The coaches, players and fans from each university hate the other, but in a different nature altogether. U-M students often refer to Ohio State University as the largest, and best, community college in the nation. OSU fans are more primal in their hatred, sporting obscenity-laced t-shirts that question the manhood of the linebackers wearing the Maize and Blue colors.

I had attended a basketball game in Ann Arbor against the Minnesota Golden Gophers, that was clinched in the final seconds by a group of upstart young Wolverines – their eighth victory in a row even though the program is suspended and won’t play in the postseason this year. But the fans’ reaction, as always, was muted. They cheered a little, threw a little popcorn, and then returned to the Undergraduate Library to resume studying. Not so in Columbus. My friend the psychologist is still at the office when I arrive, so I cover my Michigan license plate with snow and sneak down to a neighborhood bar for a cold beer. It’s 4 in the afternoon, and this dive is miles from campus, but the bartender Charlie is offering free shots to anyone who remembers the number of rushing yards former OSU running back Eddie George racked up during the year he won the Heisman Trophy. I quickly remember that Ohio State won the national championship in football just two weeks before and respectfully congratulate Charlie without revealing too much about myself.

Before the psychologist returns, I walk down the railroad tracks near his house, then think better of it after being approached by an intimidating, large man who insists he missed his train to Toledo, and that I should offer him a ride there so that I “sleep better that night”. Typical story, says my friend, who opens his doors to a warm house filled with books and ferrets he keeps as pets. In his job he counsels unemployed people, and tries motivating them to initiate the hunt for jobs, while taking graduate classes at the university. So the plight of the Columbus working class is nothing new to him. We dine on shepherd’s pie and Guinness at an Irish Pub that evening, and make a meal of pizza and potato chips the next while watching the Superbowl at his grandfather’s house on the city’s outskirts. Grandpa Lloyd is in his ‘90s but owns the memory of a 15 year old. He is sad tonight because he will soon make the move to a room in a nursing home and say goodbye to this grand old house. Stick pads label every piece of furniture, silverware and hardware, to aid the moving men when they clear out Lloyd’s home. He says to me, “this place feels like a museum” and I contemplate. His life possessions have turned to artifacts, measured by the ripeness of their age, and some day when he passes on they will be referred to as history.

Southwest, to St. Louis, Missouri

On January 28 I put the pedal to the medal and kick this journey into high gear. A carwash and tune-up in downtown Columbus and three cups of genuine coffee at the bistro across the street prepare me to lay waste to I-70 and drive through three different states – Ohio, Indiana and Illinois - before crossing the Mississippi River and shaking hands with the West. This major interstate unites Washington D.C.’s marble boulevards with Utah’s Mormon temples, passing through nine states along the way. I vaguely remember downtown Columbus’ grey skyline and catch a glimpse of Indianapolis while zooming by like a roadrunner. The skyscrapers looming in the distance somehow look sad and lonely to me against the backdrop of endless cornfields: giants out of a C.S. Lewis novel wandering over the tundra looking for signs of life. Of course, I would find life if I pulled off the expressway and stuck to the “blue highways” that are William Least Heat-Moon’s medium in his excellent book of the same name. Least Heat-Moon drives the back roads, called blue highways on the old maps, as he journeys through small towns in America and strikes up conversations with every carpenter, blueberry farmer and diner waitress he can find. But I’ve had enough of winter and already know these states well from my days on the U-M Men’s Basketball beat, when we traveled from one Big Ten city to the next, chronicling America’s best sharpshooters who always seem to hail from the heartland. Level ground aids the jump shot? Read Larry Bird. Plus, my online translating job for a Danish newspaper requires me to set camp in a town of some size every weeknight evening. And tonight I want to pass the Gateway Arch for the first time.

The St. Louis Arch is immense, and does its part to overshadow the industrial Mississippi River’s sludge color. But my eyes also fixate on a gigantic cross that looms just before East St. Louis, in Illinois. I am passing through one of the most predominantly Christian areas of the United States, jokingly referred to as the “Bible Belt”, and there is no end to the eloquent, passionate preaching I hear on AM radio: poetry in its own right. What surprises me is the number of billboards in southern Illinois advertising God. Many believe the mighty force is everywhere, touching the grand cathedrals of yesteryear as well as man’s more dubious architectural distinction – the super highway. I am not a deeply religious man, but witnessing this culture’s great commitment to faith is a powerful experience. With the help of a different time zone I set my car’s dashboard clock back an hour and arrive at the suburban home of a distant relative by 4 p.m. She takes me up in the Arch the following morning and we marvel at how an object this narrow at the top can remain standing. The secret: the structure is buried several stories deep at its two base points. A museum located underground, in the womb of the Arch exhibits the Lewis and Clark expedition, appropriate because they embarked from this area 200 years ago on their journey to explore the Wild West. This was the fruition of architect, and this nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson’s dream, and he would grin with pride at the Gateway Arch today.

Southwest, to Norman, Oklahoma

I am an adventurer, too. I come within a heartbeat of ditching I-44 west of St. Louis in the mysterious Ozark Mountains for a dusty dirt road that leads to some sketchy shack, where I would dismount and amble up to the bar for a little homegrown “moonshine” and strike up a conversation with Billy from the Hills while two old men without any teeth play their fiddles in the distance. But I might never find my way out again, and think better of it. I make due with a good pickin’ music station on AM radio and hum along to a tune called Ozark Memories, then later insert a Greg Brown CD. Brown is a folksinger from these parts, his father was a Baptist Minister, and one can wander off and get lost in his throaty voice, just as I suppose one could in these hills. The religious billboards persist, and soon I pass into Oklahoma, the state that was ushered into the union with a Land Rush – still one of the best examples of the reckless pace at which this nation was founded.

After rounding the bend in Oklahoma City I hug I-35 south in rush-hour traffic for one hour, en route to the college town of Norman. This Interstate stretches all the way from Duluth, Minnesota to Laredo, Texas, nearly introducing Canada to Mexico with a handshake and a trade, a Cornish pasty for a tortilla. Oklahoma has uncovered spring, which pleases my white hide. I step out of the Honda into red dirt, and immediately rub some into my pale cheeks. This is the ritual I recommend for travelers: when you come to a spot that you deem sacred, or at least noteworthy, bend down and touch the earth, become one with the ground, if only for a moment. Then go out and find the local cuisine – in this case a meal of barbecued ribs, cornbread and potato salad to satisfy your palate. For beef is a way of life here. In the way that we Michiganders take pride in our Great Lakes, folks in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas or Nebraska boast their cattle. They even have their own stock exchange for trading cattle shares. So even if I were a vegetarian, I would be remiss not to try their prideful offerings on a plate, smothered in a dark red sauce. Mmmm.

My hosts in Norman are theater directors at Oklahoma University, and relish the opportunity to introduce their students to the acting world, which is much more predominant on either the east or west coast than it is in Oklahoma or Texas, from where many of their students hail. I tag along for a dress rehearsal of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and giggle with delight at the local dialects which occasionally slip through Tennessee Williams’ script. My stay in Norman lasts three days, ample time to bask in the sunlight, walk barefoot for the first time this year and kick the remaining clumps of snow out from under my tires. I have arrived!

On my way out of town I stop in Oklahoma City at the memorial where the Murrah Federal Building once stood. There, next to a reflecting pool and gravestones for the hundreds of people who perished in the Timothy McVey bombing, there is a museum dedicated to the history of terrorism, or almost lack thereof, in the United States before this tragedy. Yet in the ever-present wake of September 11, and Bush’s rallying cry for war in his State of the Union address on January 29, this museum seems a precursor of things to come. I drive away in the Honda, shuddering.

West, to Albuquerque, New Mexico

Somewhere along I-40 my mind begins to drift. Mirages rise up out of the ground, and an oil refinery in the distance turns into an angry demon throwing boulders at my car. I change lanes and swerve from left to right, narrowly avoiding being squashed. What’s going on? Can this be real? Then I remember a companion in the Southwest once telling me to keep my focus in Texas: avoid letting my imagination wander, or bad things will happen. She told of visitors she had expected recently who forgot to screw the gas cap back on the tank after filling up in Amarillo, then panicked as venomous fumes destroyed their car and subjected it to a dishonorable burial on the side of the road in the Lone Star State. Dehydrated and disoriented, they passed out in a nearby field and somehow made it to Phoenix on a Greyhound Bus three days later. One thing is for certain: I will not let my trusty Honda fail me in Texas, a setting as hostile and foreign as Timbuktu. And so I focus my eyes on a point several miles ahead on the road to nowhere, for what seems like hours, days, even months. A shrub may be only a shrub, but it could be the difference between life and death in this climate. My radio picks up no channels out here, so I play compact discs with plenty of lyrics, anything to keep me focused. Listening to Beethoven would be a recipe for suicide in these parts. I survive Texas.

Suddenly I come over a little ridge and the tundra has given way to tabletop mesas, interspersed as far west as the eye can see. Gone is the occasional green shrub, and replacing it are red rock faces that make me want to get out of my car, put on my shorts and climb. Hallelujah, I have reached New Mexico! This land of contour and change, shaped and molded and beaten by oceans that receded a long time ago, cursed the peoples here by never satisfying their instinctual longing for water. I pull over for gasoline in Cuervo, a couple hours east of Albuquerque, and wonder in amazement at the station attendant who speaks only Spanish, a beautiful language I do not know yet, but will some day. ¿Veinte dolares? Si senor, gracias. To spend time in New Mexico as one who speaks only English is to be a cripple in an able-bodied man’s marathon.

I climb the Sandia mountains and descend into Albuquerque after dark, my first true nighttime driving experience on this trip into the unknown. No matter, the directions are on target, and have been at every point of the journey so far. I pull up to my friends’ adobe hut after dinnertime, though time is an abstract word in these parts. They are happy to serve me warm lentils, rice and bread and a glass of white wine at 9 in the evening. Then we take in a gala of Hispanic-American art at a local museum sponsored, or inspired by the movie star Cheech Marin. The paintings and sculptures are strikingly colorful and hot-blooded, featuring everyday scenes of curvaceous women and men with a lacquer shine to their hair: at the beach, the ice cream parlor, the car wash or the bodega. This art introduces a vibrance and will to stand out that I think is common among ethnic minority groups. It’s also evident in jazz clubs or Baptist churches frequented mostly by African Americans.

I spoil myself, physically, within two days of arriving in New Mexico. My hosts take me to the Ghost Ranch, where part of “City Slickers” was filmed, and we engage in a semi-strenuous hike up to Chimney Rock. I order the spiciest item on the menu and throw down a couple margaritas in lieu of water at a picante restaurant in Santa Fe that evening. The next day I explore the Jemez Springs on my own and spend two hours too many in a bubbly aquifer nearly hidden on the side of a mountain. Drinking the hot chocolate made with spring water given to me by another tourist was probably a mistake too. By Tuesday evening I am bed-ridden with a nasty fever and no desire to travel any further. I was ignorant of my own limitations, having forgotten about the dramatic change in elevation: Albuquerque is thousands of feet above sea level, and my stomach is apparently still in Columbus.

But onwards I must go. Instead of driving I explore Route 66, which passes through the downtown, on foot. This must be the longest strip of greasy-spoon diners, cheap motels and tattoo parlors in the world, and yet somehow Route 66 has become a cliché to the extent that businesses up and down Central Avenue make money off motorists cruising the great American artery. I duck into Busters Route 66 Café one morning for some heavy scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee and people-watch through the window. But the absurdity suddenly dawns on me. In cities with narrow walking streets and an eclectic, hip crowd is where one people-watches: Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, Greenwich Village in New York City, the Bastille district in Paris. This drag is not for people-watching, but car-watching, for that is the true American status symbol. An old Volkswagen bus rolls by, its long-haired driver puffing on a long cigar; a tough-looking cowboy in a red pickup truck changes lanes, his left hand hanging out the window bares a “Kiss of Death” tattoo. My frustrations fade now that I know what to look for around here.

To be continued in the next issue of the Glen Arbor Sun

Posted by editor at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

An Irritating Experience

By Torin Yeager
Sun contributor

Picture this scenario: a boy, his dog, and his little sister walking peacefully along a path through the woods near the shore of Lake Michigan. The boy tosses a fair-sized stick into the brambles surrounding the path, and the dog, ever enamored by wood, goes howling in after it. After chasing a few squirrels and leaving his mark on a few trees, the canine in question returns to his boy, proudly lofting the wrong stick. The boy congratulates his four-legged friend just the same with a nice pat on the head, and then throws the stick once more. Meanwhile, the little sister is playfully romping through the woods off the trail. She spots some pretty flowers, and, remembering her mother’s love of pretty plants, picks the lot of them. She then tramples back through the undergrowth to the trail. The boy laughs dismissively at the tangle of flowers squashed in the hands of his sister, and then calls the dog. The trio heads back to the trailhead to enjoy a family picnic with the rest of the crew.

As the boy dives into a scrumptious meal of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, his mother ties his sister’s shoes for the fifth time that day. The boy’s father throws a Frisbee to the ever-energetic dog, patting the playful pup after each successful catch.

That evening, at the family cottage, the boy’s hands feel irritated, so he wipes them on his legs. Much better, but a few minutes later, his legs itch. The little girl complains loudly to her mother about itchy legs as she scratches them violently. The mother rubs her temples with her own irritated hands, willing her daughter to be silent for once. As the tension rises higher, the father is taking a nice cool shower, happily wondering what the next day will bring.

The next day brings interesting news indeed. The little girl’s legs are a bright shade of pink from a night of scratching. The boy’s legs are a similar color, no doubt due to a fit of vigorous scratching as well. The mother has a rash on her face and hands, and she feels no better even after sleeping in past 10 o’clock. The father, on the other hand, feels perfectly normal and ready to face the day, and the dog simply wishes to chase more sticks. What has just happened to an otherwise relaxing vacation?

Annoying events like this occur many times each summer, and the culprit lurks in the shadowy depths of the woods and other plant-hosting areas of Leelanau County. This fiendish member of the environment is none other than Rhus radicans, known colloquially as poison ivy. Poison ivy produces an oil that causes skin irritation, but how did a little plant wreak so much havoc on a family trip to northern Michigan? A closer look at the events leading up to this vacation nightmare reveal that the answer is not so invisible as it seems.

The faithful dog chased the stick thrown by the boy straight into a thicket next to the trail, a prime habitat for poison ivy. As the dog rolled around in the brush, it probably rubbed against some ivy, where the irritating oil stuck to his fur. The little girl was running through the woods, where she could have gone right through a lush patch of ivy without noticing. So far, we have two infected vacationers, although they have not yet felt the symptoms. The dog’s fur protects his skin from direct contact with the poison ivy, but the oil is still on him. The boy pats the dog on the head, thus transferring some oil to his hands. Now there are three unwilling carriers of ivy oil.

At the picnic site, the little girl’s mother ties her shoelaces. Poison ivy oil could stick to an article of clothing such as shoes, so now the mother has oil on her hands. The father pets the dog while playing Frisbee, and he also receives a dose of oil on his hands.

At the cottage, the boy rubs his hands on his legs, spreading oil there. The mother and daughter both do similar things, and, by morning time, the three of them are covered in rashes. This is all easily explainable, but what of the father? During the evening, he took a shower only a few hours after getting the poison ivy oil. Being the tough guy he is, he neglected to rub his irritated hands on anything, and now the soapy water in the shower washes them clean. Any other areas that may have come into contact with the oil are also washed, removing all the last remnants of poison ivy.

This whole episode could have easily been avoided if only the family had known what poison ivy looks like and how its oil can be transferred. “Leaves of three, let it be”, is a popular adage, and it holds true for most forms of poison ivy. Poison ivy inhabits the edges of woods and beaches, growing alone, in a clump, as a vine, or even as a bush, but all these types have clusters of three leaves. The leaves are somewhat reddish and shiny when they are new, but progress to a duller sheen. Hiking trails and beaches are a favorite habitat of this malicious plant. Dogs are supposed to be on a leash in the National Parks, but even when that rule is obeyed, our canine friends have an uncanny ability to get into the bushes alongside the trail. If there is any reason to suspect that a pet has been in poison ivy, a good preventive measure would be to towel the creature down. Throwing the towel away afterwards wouldn’t hurt either, as cloth can harbor the oils for many weeks, or longer.

If you do recognize poison ivy while hiking, stay away from it. Unfortunately, recognition has a tendency to hit you after the fact. Do not scratch! Wash your hands first, then the infected area, then wash some more. Cortizone and Calamine might help as well, but the best defense is to recognize poison ivy before you enter it, as the rashes and itches developed can vary from bad to worse. Even if poison ivy has not affected you before, there is no point in pressing your luck.

In the spirit of learning through repetition, the best defense is to recognize poison ivy before you come in contact with it. There are plenty of medicinal remedies that work for some people, but as stated before, it’s better to just recognize and avoid. More information about poison ivy can be found at www.poison-ivy.org.

Posted by editor at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

Leelanau School navigates history and water

By Ashlea Turner
Sun contributor

If you’re out on Lake Michigan, Lake Superior or maybe even the St. Lawrence Seaway in the near future, you might just witness history repeat herself. The Leelanau School’s replica of a 16th-century Voyageur Canoe might just speed right past you in its 33 feet of cedar glory.

Since October, the Leelanau School students, led by faculty member Michael Jarvis, have been spending afternoons, evenings and weekends building ‘the boat,’ as it is affectionately called. ‘But the boat’ is truly an unassuming name for this magnificent piece of craftsmanship. The canoe is made of hundreds of cedar strips and fiberglass and weighs a mere 350 pounds. The canoe is much more than pure craftsmanship, however, because it serves as a hands-on learning tool, combining the study of New World history with stapling, sanding and glueing.

Speaking of history, here’s a quick refresher for you:

The Hudson Bay Company created the original Voyageur Canoe in the 16th century for use as a trade vessel. The original canoes were made of birch bark and leaked incessantly, making any journey arduous. The HBC, including both the French Canadians and the Native Americans, traveled from Montreal, Canada through the St Lawrence Seaway, along the perimeter of Lake Superior all the way to its western edge. In a canoe!

The HBC, nicknamed “Here Before Christ” because of its arguable infamy as the oldest company, arrived at the destination with a canoe full of trade goods. They would then swap these goods for various furs and canoe back east to Montreal. Other adventurous people navigated the smaller waterways to the Rocky Mountains with shorter and therefore, more maneuverable, canoes of about 24-26 feet.

Testing the limits of their own canoe was one part of the Leelanau School students’ learning experience. At the end of the school year, the whole student body congregated to test the canoe for the first time on Little Glen Lake, as a proud, smiling crew launched the Voyager under clear skies. The launch was met with jubilant cheers from the whole school. “It really floats!” was a common response from the often-skeptical teenagers. “It’s so big!” was another popular comment from both faculty and students. Most people, however, were simply left in a speechless awe at such a beautiful and inspiring site.

Although the Crystal River runs through the school’s campus, the canoe is too large to navigate the intricate twists and turns of its home waterway. So where do the students and faculty canoe from here? Michael Jarvis, the father of the boat project, believes that the possibilities for adventure and learning are endless. A trip to South Manitou Island from Sleeping Bear Point, only about six miles, is definitely on the horizon. Watch out, Manitou Island Transit, you might have some competition!

Longer and more challenging trips are also being planned as students continue to learn how to use the canoe. The Senior Class of 2004 might take it to the eastern edge of Lake Superior in October to navigate those historically alive waters. But Jarvis has even bigger plans for his prized craft. He would love to take a month or so in the summer and “island hop” from the Manitou Islands to the Fox Islands and further north, possibly ending up at Mackinac Island for some more Michigan History. Michael also sees no reason why Leelanau students can’t trace the HBC’s tracks all the way back to Montreal.

For more information on the canoe’s upcoming navigations, call 1-800-Leelanau. Bon Voyage!

Posted by editor at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)

SpiritWorks on the 45th parallel

By Sue Woodward and Nadine Nienhuis
Sun contributors

The 45th parallel, an imaginary line that circles the globe halfway between the equator and the North Pole, passes through Suttons Bay, Old Mission Lighthouse, Yellowstone Park’s Mammoth Hot Springs, Bordeaux, Venice and San Francisco. Some think there is a unique, creative force in the surrounding areas that draws people to live here. Is it a phenomenon of magnetic force? Could it be the speed at which we travel based on this point of the earth? Or maybe it can be attributed to the inspirational fortitude of the landscape that seems to culminate near the 45th parallel.  Perhaps, it has something to do with lowered atmospheric resistance, as one student researcher theorizes, recommending the 45th as the best place to launch a rocket.

What if launching ourselves into all our potential -- our most free, creative and spirited selves – was also easier where there is less atmospheric resistance? What if we are drawn to these areas because, somehow, we are able to look through an "opening" that shows us how we might live in the most balanced and passionate manner?

Whatever truths and theories lie around the 45th, it is this vision that prompted the founders of SpiritWorks Creative Pathways to Health and Inspired Living to open their doors in Glen Arbor. We are a consortium of independent practitioners who share a common vision -- people who are inspired to live passionate, creative lives by connecting with their bodies, minds, emotions and spirits. We want to serve as a resource for the community by offering and sharing the skills, tools and strategies we’ve learned (and continue to learn) that can support, empower and free each of us to launch more fully into ourselves and our lives.

Bringing over 20 years of combined experience, we have set up our new offices in the heart of downtown Glen Arbor, sharing the office complex with the Martin Company on Western Avenue. We have already worked with adults, kids and families through our independent practices. If you are interested in setting up an appointment, or would like more information about a particular practitioner, please contact us at the numbers listed. We are thrilled to be here and look forward to meeting you.

We are: Margie Harnden, Registered Occupational Therapist, M.A. Clinical Psychology, Healer at Glen Arbor Alternative Healing. “Through discussion we determine your approach to wellness. Then, we facilitate balancing you mental, physical, emotional and/or spiritual disorder through a ‘hands on’ process. Simply put, the body presents ‘blocks’ which are as evident as a disease. These ‘blocks’ can be opened through energy facilitation so you can enjoy your health. I am developing research to assist the autistic population and those with other disorders that have ‘no cure’ in modern medicine.”

Nadine Nienhuis, MSW, Licensed Social Worker, Artist

Waves of Expansion: “Relearn the art of listening to your soul and use that wisdom to change your life. The soul speaks through life’s dreams, passions, relationships and physical or emotional ‘symptoms’. Through intuitive listening, guided visualization, art and writing exercises, I teach you to listen to the particular language of your soul. I specialize in working through creative blocks, depression, anxiety/stress, relationship difficulties, alcohol, drug, eating or body image problems and healing past trauma.”

Sue Woodward, EFT-CT, EMO-Free Technique-Certified Therapist

The Solution Place: “I empower both kids and adults to create the life they desire instead of reacting to the one they currently have. Rediscover your innate love of learning, tap into your passion, create success, and reduce resistance, stress and anxiety.  I specialize in advocating and connecting kids with their passion and innate potential with mentoring, support, tutoring, celebrity role models for motivation, or whatever it takes to motivate you to create personal success.”

Our vision is that SpiritWorks will expand as we grow along with the community. We imagine more practitioners, energy workshops, empowered kids’ programs, art therapy workshops, meditation groups, nature retreats, massage and yoga classes. We welcome ideas, inquiries about how to become affiliated and requests for more information.  Please contact Nadine (231-218-8294) or Sue (231-883-3569).

Posted by editor at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2003

Dorsey’s sunken steamer eludes search, but fuels local folklore

By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun editor

Nearly 90 years after the mysterious passenger steamboat captain Ralph Dorsey disabled and sank his magnificent craft, Rescue, with an axe on Big Glen Lake, the boat’s whereabouts remain as murky as his motives for doing so. Not even a team of professional scientists from the University of Michigan, a hi-tech underwater robot, more than a dozen local fishermen and storytellers, and boatloads of enthusiastic students who searched the lake together on May 20 and 21, were able to find a trace of the lost steamer – whose story is one of this area’s great mysteries.

Even as the half-million dollar M-ROVER combed the depths in vain for two days in places where locals guessed the Rescue might sit, legends about Dorsey and his peculiar ways seemed to rise to the surface of Glen Lake one after another, like bubbles in a fish tank. And congregating on a flotilla of motorboats and pontoon boats were students from the two local high schools - Leelanau and Glen Lake – to record the lore still leaking from Dorsey’s stunning act back in 1914 and, eventually, to produce a documentary.

Virtually the only clue they had was a black-and white-photograph from Rob Rader’s historical book Beautiful Glen Arbor of the Rescue slowly capsizing in the lake, and a man nearby in a rowboat, presumably its captain. Barely visible in the background is what appears to be Alligator Hill, fueling the theory that Dorsey sank his boat on the northwest end of Big Glen Lake. But that is unclear. The identity of the photographer, and why that person happened to be nearby at the moment in question, is also unknown, especially given that cameras couldn’t have been that numerous in 1914.

“Ralph was a heavy drinker, and his passengers refused to ride with him any longer,” voices one legend. Ralph’s nephews, Jim and John Dorsey, who took a joyride on the lake during the first day of the search, confirmed that their uncle liked to tip back the bottle, even in his latter years living in Frankfort after he brought his boating business here to an abrupt halt. “We were known to drink a little hard cider whenever the neighbors came for a visit,” recalled Jim.

“Nightmares of drowning children haunted Ralph, so he sank his boat before tragedy could strike,” is another theory, introduced by Dave Taghon, the proprietor of the Empire Historical Museum who cruised around in his motor boat on Day One of the search, looking for clues with his fish finder. “Some say he had a premonition that something bad was going to happen,” said Taghon. According to Barb Siepker, who owns the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor and is another local historian by association, Ralph had six brothers, one of whom disappeared while boating in northern Lake Superior. And the first shots of the First World War were fired in June of 1914. Siepker cites these facts as possible ingredients for nightmares.

“Ralph lost the boat in a card game, but didn’t want anyone else to ride off in his mahogany-lined craft,” voiced another, brought to the table by Dottie Lanham, who arrived at the scene on Day Two just after the search had been called off indefinitely. “I heard they played a lot of cards in those days because of the idle time on their hands,” she added. “But these stories have probably been exaggerated as they were passed down through generations.”

“Business was bad, and the frustration of cruising around the lake, only to find no one on the docks waiting for him in need of a lift to Glen Arbor, finally got to Ralph,” is yet another explanation. Dr. Chuck Olsen, the initiator behind this entire project, recalls a story told to him by the late John Tobin, who claimed to be fishing where the Narrows Bridge is today when Dorsey paddled ashore in a rowboat, minutes after having chopped a hole in Rescue’s hull with an axe, muttering “If they won’t ride with me, they won’t ride with anyone else!” Which explanation this eyewitness, one time removed, account supports is anybody’s guess.

Olsen, a part-time local resident, is a former professor at U-M and former trustee at The Leelanau School. He pulled the strings to bring his friend, Guy Meadows a professor at the university’s Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering up here with two assistants, Hans Van Sumeran and Chris Rauch, and their awe-inspiring M-ROVER (Michigan’s Remote Operated Vehicle for Educational Research) to comb the bottom of Big Glen Lake.

The M-ROVER itself is amazing. This 500-pound underwater robot can locate an object as small as a dime in an area as large as a football field (100 yards) with its sonar. It flies like a helicopter does through air, rotates on its own axis, hovers, backs up or flies sideways. The two-man crew operating the M-ROVER at all times can control the amount of thrust to give them complete control over the robot as it illuminates and videotapes whatever it sees underwater. It can reach speeds of up to four miles per hour, lift 100 pounds of in-water weights and cut a line with its razor sharp claw that moves at three different joints. The M-ROVER can reach depths of up to 1,500 feet as a long tether feeds it electricity from the operating ship (or, in this case, a generator on the pontoon boat provided by the Narrows Marina).

So it can penetrate any spot in the Great Lakes, and at approximately 140 feet at its deepest point, Big Glen Lake is cake, technologically. But that’s assuming the M-ROVER has a general idea of where its target is located.

“We’ve never done a project as diffuse as this,” said Professor Meadows. “The underwater vehicle is not ideal for a massive search project. Ideally we’d have a side-scanner from the state police that could cover the distance of a football field on either side of the boat. Without that, the search is for a needle in a haystack.”

When its not busy with educational research projects, the Michigan state police often rent the M-ROVER and its crew to help in dangerous recoveries, such as when a Ford Bronco drove off the Mackinac Bridge one winter. The robot locates drowning victims, snowmobile victims, even weapons. But it doesn’t do rescues (unless the shipwreck in question is named Rescue), because the meticulous machine cannot mobilize quickly enough. “Bottles and beer cans light up well underwater, acoustically,” said Meadows. “What we’re doing with the sonar is basically like giving the lake an ultrasound.”

Sitting on the pontoon boat for two days watching only the lake floor and a few fish pass by on the video screen as crewman Hans Van Sumeran controlled the M-ROVER with his hi-tech joystick eventually proved cumbersome for the local high school students, who let out a “whoop” when the robot suddenly encountered a sunken ice shanty at around 12:30 on Day One. The Rescue search would also unearth a bucket and an errant anchor, but no boat was attached, unfortunately.

Yet Olsen, always the teacher, put the entire project into perspective. “The real advantage here is getting the students involved in something they would never experience otherwise,” he said. Glen Lake student Pete Richards refuted claims that he was “playing hooky” from class and sun-tanning out on the lake. “I’m not skipping,” said Richards, whose video clips will be used in the documentary. “I’m learning more out here right now than I would be, sitting in English class reading a book.” Leelanau student Mark Evans agreed, as sweat poured down his face while he pulled at the tether connected to the powerful M-ROVER, to retrieve it from the depths. “This kind of hands-on learning is what works for me.”

Current Leelanau School teachers Bruce Hood and Norm Wheeler, who secured a grant to make a documentary of the project, also basked in the extensive media coverage that the Rescue search generated, as two local television stations, several newspapers and a radio station all spent time on the lake with the diverse crew. They fended off suggestions that the hunt was a failure just because Dorsey’s boat wasn’t found.

“This is about the process of doing careful research with sophisticated technology for the science students, and the process of gathering stories, of listening to the community’s oral tradition, for the storytelling and videography students,” Wheeler said in a radio interview afterwards. “The Rescue just gives us an excuse to ask questions and to search for something that is elusive.” He teaches a Storytelling class at Leelanau, and runs the Beach Bards Bonfire - a temple for the oral tradition, poetry and music, held on Friday nights throughout the summer on Sleeping Bear Bay. Wheeler isn’t bothered that no steamboat was found, because the stories will live on. In fact, it may never be found.

“I believe, if he wanted people to find it, he wouldn’t have sunk it in the first place,” said Carl McBride, a local fisherman with hide-tough skin who looks like he could weather the worst storm on Big Glen Lake. “I know I wouldn’t chop a hole in a perfectly good boat. I don’t know what he was thinking.” That big Lake Trout mounted in the glass on the wall of Art’s Tavern was hooked by McBride, who enjoys an All Star’s reputation among local fishermen. He claims his fish finder has located the Rescue several times in 85 feet of water, near the lake’s northwest shore by Glen Craft Marina, but every time he tries to pass over a second time, the object down there disappears.

“I’ve lost cannon balls from down riggers. I’ve definitely hit something a couple times,” claimed McBride matter-of-factly. “But that lake is full of odd things. I once went looking for old cars in 45-50 feet of water, thinking I could haul them up and redo them. I never found a Model-T tough.”

McBride’s claim contradicts that of Gil Warnes, who swears his son once found the wreck while diving in water between 100 and 120 feet deep. Warnes wasn’t able to make it out onto the lake because of health reasons, but he sent his grandson, Justin, to deliver the message instead. The M-ROVER team made one last-ditch effort on Day Two to find it where Warnes suggested, but to no avail.

And so, the legend lives on. Captain Ralph Dorsey has gotten his way; if he won’t pilot the Rescue, then no one else will either. “He was upset this morning,” said Jerry Hodge, as he pointed to storm clouds up above on Day One of the search. Hodge is also a member of the Dorsey family, and accompanied Jim and John Dorsey on their joyride. “Ralph is somewhere up there, saying ‘Don’t monkey with my boat!’”

Posted by editor at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

Local Women Attend Cougar Tracking Seminar

By Jane Greiner
Sun nature correspondent

Sandra Catlin of Honor and I recently attended the Cougar Tracking Seminar put on by the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. Catlin has twice spotted a black cougar on the roads between her home and her job in Glen Arbor. Having seen a cougar with her own eyes (when they supposedly do not exist in Michigan) has sparked her interest in the elusive big cats.

At the seminar we learned that cougars were thought to be extinct in our state since 1906. Nevertheless, there have been numerous unofficial cougar sightings in both Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas in the years since that supposed “last cougar” was killed. The Conservancy estimates that there may actually be 50-80 cougars living in Michigan today. They can be found in state and national parks and forests, on Native American land, and on private land. There have been numerous sightings of big cats in our own Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

People have an unreasonable fear of cougars. Only last fall, a number of “kill permits” were issued in the Kalkaska area for big cats after some farm animals had been attacked.

The kill permits were clearly upsetting to Dennis Fijalkowski, Executive Director of the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. “In two hundred years of recorded history, there has never been a cougar attack on a human” in Michigan, he said. He wants to educate the public about the cougar in Michigan so that no more kill permits are issued for our rarest of big predators.

The Conservancy is a tiny organization operating on a small budget, but its efforts are beginning to make a difference The Conservancy is doing everything it can to raise awareness, change perceptions, and help create a rational program to study, protect and manage these majestic creatures in Michigan..

As a first step in that direction, Dr Patrick Rusz, Director of Wildlife Programs for the Conservancy, has been able to document the existence of Michigan cougars through tracks, scat samples, and the few rare instances of private photos and videos. Two cougars were actually observed during the fieldwork in Benzie and Roscommon Counties. That scientific work has gone a long way to prove the existence of cougars in both Upper and Lower Michigan.

In addition to his own study, Dr. Rusz noted that hundreds of sightings have been unofficially reported in the Sleeping Bear Dunes area, alone, since the National Park was established in 1972.

The Conservancy’s next goal is to prove that the Michigan cougar is a “wild, resident, and breeding population.” In other words, they need to show that current cougars are descendants of Michigan’s original cougars, that they live here and are not just passing through, and that they are an ongoing population. Once recognized as legitimate native Michigan cougars, the state and the DNR should recognize its interest in protecting our cougars.

To help with the cougar population study, the Conservancy is training volunteer trackers through the Cougar Tracking Seminar to identify cougar signs, record tracking data, photograph tracks and scat, and make plaster casts of tracks. For this effort they are providing “tracker training” for citizen volunteers like Sandra and me, for hunters, private groups, Native American tribes, park rangers and other interested state and federal officials.

This intensive training covers how to identify cougar tracks, kills, scat and scrapes, and how to document them when found. An extensive slide show presentation covers these areas thoroughly, and by the end of the day the audience is able to distinguish between cougar, bobcat, dog and bear tracks, which look similar at first glance.

Hands-on experience is provided as participants practice stirring up plaster of Paris and pouring a cast of an animal track. This is good practice for making a cast in the field. Everyone receives a Cougar Field Guide with sample drawings, photos and tools for recording tracks.

Seminar participants learn that the cougar can survive well in almost any habitat, from swampy wetlands to dry-desert regions and from flat woodlands to snow-covered mountains. Indeed, according to Dr. Rusz, cougars have “the largest distribution of any land animal in the world, other than humans.” Cougars can be found everywhere in the western hemisphere, from the southern tip of South America through Central America, the United States and Canada. There are none in the eastern hemisphere.

They are powerful, solitary animals. A cougar can leap 18 feet high and 35 feet horizontally. They are efficient killers of deer, their main food source. They generally attack by leaping on the animals back, knocking it off its feet and severing the neck vertebrae with a single, lethal bite.

The size of a cougar’s range is dictated by habitat. In Texas’s semi-arid country their range can be as large as 1600 square miles. The best guess for Michigan cougars, where large deer herd’s roam, is about 200 square miles. Dr. Rusz pointed out that the range is not necessarily round. A range might be 15 x 15 miles or 10 x 20 miles, or even stretch along a river.

Fijalkowski listed a number of inaccurate theories about the Michigan cougar sightings. They are not released pets. Even if they were all released into the wild, the few legal cougar pets in Michigan could not have produced the number of sightings that have been documented.

They are not always tan in color. In genetically isolated populations, black cougars would likely develop from black recessive genes. Fijalkowski said that “a small but significant number of sightings are of black animals.”

This information was especially interesting to Sandra Catlin who has seen a cougar on the roads between her home and her job in Glen Arbor on two different occasions. The big cats Caitlin saw looked black. And yet books and people told her that cougars “aren’t black.” Now she knows that what she saw could have been real and that “she is not crazy”.

Most importantly, they are not dangerous to people. Fijalkowski uses the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore to back that up. Clearly, one or more cougar has lived among millions of visitors each year in the Dunes area without a single incident. “People have nothing to fear from a well-fed, healthy cougar,” he said.

The next Cougar Tracking Seminar is scheduled for Saturday June 7.
In addition to the tracking seminars, the Conservancy is attempting to reach a broad segment of the general public with information about cougars. They want everyone to be able to recognize and understand cougars, without being afraid of them.

The Conservancy also offers a free 45-minute slide show for the general public called “Michigan is Cougar Country”. They hope to bring the slide show to the Philip Hart Visitor Center or another Sleeping Bear Dunes location.

Anyone who has seen a cougar or found good cougar tracks may contribute to the organization’s official sighting report forms.

Free brochures called “Living with Cougars in Michigan” will soon be available.

The Michigan Wildlife Conservancy can be reached at (517) 641-7677 and emailed at wildlife@miwildlife.org. On their website, www.miwildlife.org, you can learn about its programs and download “Cougar Investigation Reports,” where you can report your own cougar sightings.

Posted by editor at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

Cottonwood Inn: New Life for Historic Roen Farm

By Jane Greiner
Sun staff writer

Empire’s reclusive Roen brothers never dreamed that one day their three-man bachelor household would be replaced by a mother-daughter duo that would turn their farm into an old fashioned bed and breakfast. Holly Decker never dreamed it either. Not until it occurred to her while enjoying a stay in a bed and breakfast that she would like to have a bed and breakfast of her own, and what better place to have one than in her home town of Empire, Michigan.

That the place chosen for the new bed and breakfast turned out to be the historic Roen farm adds a hint of mystery to the charm of the newest Sleeping Bear Dunes area bed and breakfast.

The Roen farm has a long and colorful history. Andrew Roen Sr. moved to Empire in 1892 from Norway and was a founder of Norway Town near Empire. He began as a lumber stacker at the local sawmills. He bought a saloon on Niagara Street in Empire around 1900 and ran it for about 30 years. He acquired a 133 acre farm and orchards on Front Street, east of what is now M-22, married and raised five sons there.

Two of the Roen boys married and moved on, but the three bachelor brothers lived and worked on the farm until their mysterious deaths many years later.

The first to die was Severt Roen who disappeared one day in 1977 when he was 75 years old. Despite intense local interest and many organized searches, he was never found. Some people thought he was senile and just walked away. Others speculated that the other two brothers killed him and hid the body somewhere on the farm or in the basement. No one will ever know, as his body has never been found. He was declared dead eight years later.

The two remaining brothers, Andrew and Benhart, also died under unusual circumstances in 1985 when they were 75 and 87 years old. Local men Dave Taghon, then owner of the nearby Amoco station, and Gary Hilts found the two bodies. Hilts theorized from the way they found the bodies that Andrew died first in his bed. His older brother Benhart, who was senile, could not manage without him and died within a day or two. His body was found in the living room.

When the last two brothers died over $100,000 in cash was found in the house along with numerous valuable antiques. The unusual deaths plus the large amounts of money and antiques in the estate were enough to attract wide news coverage at the time. The story was even carried on Michigan’s Unsolved Mysteries television show.

Andrew had been a member of the Empire Area Heritage Group, which put together the Empire Museum. Many of the items on display there today came from the auction of the Roen estate, including the 1900’s bar and fixtures from the old saloon.

Of the original Roen furnishings, only the magnificent old majestic woodstove remains in the bed and breakfast. The impressive black and silver cooking stove sits in a central room in the house, the room Holly calls The Roen Room. “It’s the heart of the house,” she said. “I think of the Roen brothers when I walk through this room.”

The B&B women have learned a lot about the history of the Roen farm. They have gathered newspaper clippings describing the strange deaths of the three brothers and will have them available for their guests to read.

The Decker women have a considerable history of their own in this area. Holly Decker, owner/proprietor of the bed and breakfast, was born and raised in Empire. Her mother Judy grew up on Old Mission Peninsula but has lived in Empire for over 30 years. And everyone knows her dad Jerry Decker, owner of Decker Pumping.

Holly and her mother bought the Roen farmhouse, barn and outbuildings about a year ago. The two women moved in and began the work of converting the spacious old house into a working bed and breakfast. They named it The cottonwood Inn after the magnificent old trees that frame the front yard.

Carpenter Glenn Brown and his wife Judy have been helping them “since day one” to get the place ready. Judy said “we couldn’t have done it without them.”

Holly and Judy feel that they have had a “huge” amount of support from the community in general in getting their new business off the ground.

They expected their first guests on Memorial Day weekend. Holly had said, “we’ve been receiving calls and at this point the guests might arrive before our new sign goes up on Saturday.”

The bed and breakfast will offer four large rooms each with a private bath. Two of the upstairs rooms have a connecting doorway and can be made into a suite.

The spacious guest room on the main floor, called The Monarch Room, features a huge old antique bed. The room has extra-wide doorways and is wheelchair accessible.

The guests will breakfast in the large east-facing room, which Holly likes to call the Sunrise Room. On the opposite side of the house is the L-shaped Sunset Room, which will serve as the common room. The long room has an entire wall of glass so everyone can enjoy the sunsets.

The upstairs guestrooms are called The Trillium Room, the Cottonwood Room, and the Sunset Room. Each is decorated around a theme and all include some antique furnishings. Judy pointed out that many of the antiques come from Holly’s grandparents and great grandparents. Those earlier Deckers were originally from Detroit and had a cottage near North Bar Lake on what is now National Park land.

The rooms in the bed and breakfast will include the usual amenities of televisions and air conditioners. In addition they will soon have Internet hookups installed in every room.

Holly envisions many special activities at the bed and breakfast. “We already have reservations for two receptions and a wedding,” she said. Someday she hopes to have other business functions there such as conferences, spas and women’s weekends. Who knows, they might become a stop on a mystery tour.

Of course, most of their guests will come for the attractions that bring so many visitors to the area: the beaches, the sand dunes, the hiking and biking.

The staff will consist of Holly and Judy. Neither has any previous experience running a bed and breakfast, but they have stayed in them before and are confident that they can learn.

The most fun Holly and Judy have had so far has been in decorating the rooms and seeing everything come together. Meeting new people and hearing their stories has also been a big bonus as they have worked on their project.

Holly recalls their first winter in the house when they joked about feeling like characters in Little House on the Prairie. “I’m going out to the pump hose to bring in some wood,” they would laugh, as they bundled up.

The hardest part of the bed and breakfast project so far, according to Judy, was the painting. “We painted every room but two,” she said. For a big old farmhouse, that’s a lot of painting.

On a serious note, Holly added that the “hard part has been not knowing the outcome of the adventure. It has been a big risk, financially and emotionally.”

We wish them all the best. The Cottonwood Inn has a great old farmhouse, a hint of mystery, a grand location, and two enthusiastic and determined women ready to give it their best shot. What more could anyone ask for when looking for a great place to stay?

The farm is located on Front Street, less than half a mile east of the village. It is near the corner with Bennet Street, the road opposite the entrance to the Philip Hart Visitors Center.

The Cottonwood Inn Bed & Breakfast
Empire, Michigan
231 326-5535
www.cottonwoodinnbb.com
e-mail: hollydecker@cottonwoodinnbb.com

Posted by editor at 09:06 PM | Comments (0)

Absent all answers, poetry necessary

By James Coleman
Sun contributor

This piece was originally published in the Norwich Bulletin and submitted to the Glen Arbor Sun by Mr. Coleman, a close friend of Norman Wheeler, a local poet who runs the Beach Bards Bonfire, which meets every Friday at dusk from June 20 until Labor Day weekend on the Leelanau School beach just north of Glen Arbor.

We don’t need poetry if we have all the answers. Every poem is an investigation of a human problem, where the poet invites us to look over his or her own shoulder as he or she tries to express an important truth, an important insight that can’t be said in any other way.

Dr. Phil can’t get at it; Pat Buchanan is at a loss for words. A poet, in short, is needed.

Robert Frost was often asked what he meant by his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He always claimed, “If I could have said it any other way, I would have.” We return to poems as part of our cultural heritage because they way what cannot be otherwise expressed.

William Carlos Williams tries to capture this quality of poems in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” when he tells us “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

Here Williams argues that some of life’s essentials can be found only in “despised poems,” as he calls them. “Hear me out!” he says to the reader.

Williams raises an interesting problem when he asks us to hear him out: the problem of access. If we don’t know where to find poetry, we can’t hear him or any poet; we can’t “hear him out.”

Unfortunately, I have to tell you that the chance of poetry reaching your ears is diminishing. Community poetry readings are being painted as irrelevant, and funding is being withdrawn.

The Connecticut Humanities Council Cultural Heritage program has had its entire budget cut for next year. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Public Radio are slated for elimination by prominent members of Congress, according to recent e-mail petitions. Library funding, both state and local, has been cut.

TV dotes on retired generals

I have not heard of any plans to cut the number of retired generals appearing on television. I enjoy listening to the retired generals, but their dominance in the media was highlighted by a claim made by Robert Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, that the media did not cover the environmental issues raised by Bush administration initiatives. He said that his organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, had asked him to step forward as its spokesperson because his celebrity might gain him access to the media.

Other environmental experts had no hope of gaining access. That seemed to be the case on the show I was watching, “Buchanan & Press.”

Access is an important issue. If critics of administration environmental policy cannot get a hearing, vital issues may not be debated. Kennedy’s strongest example was the catastrophic rise in childhood asthma, and its relation to air quality and the policies affecting it.

How does the analogy extend then to poetry? Do poets get time or access to policy makers? Should they? What do they have to offer?

Laura Bush had scheduled a “Celebration of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes” for Feb. 12 at the White House. When informed that some poets felt disquiet about the upcoming war, she cancelled the event, with the comment: “American Literature is not political.”

Was the White House action political? Did the White House action influence network coverage of poets’ views on the war by signaling the White House position? Does it matter?

Here we return to Dr. Williams. “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably ever day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

I defer to the West Pointers on military issues, but I think the poets may have empowering ideas about love, justice and other deep human issues that we need to hear.

Poetry may live, as W.H. Auden put it, “in the valley of its saying.” Yet after the tragedy of September 11, his poem “September 1, 1940” circulated widely on the Internet. Its language expressed something for people about the otherwise sad, turbulent and confused emotions with which they had to contend.

Will we be the richer for deciding now that poetry does not matter?

Mr. Coleman of Norwich, professor emeritus of Three Rivers Community College, is a scholar, writer and editor. This column comprises his introductory remarks, “Does Poetry Matter?”, delivered April 27 at the Community Poetry Reading.

Posted by editor at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

The colonel that flew with Orville Wright

By Marge Barrett
Sun contributor

Amidst all the stories Colonel Thomas J. Barrett could tell about flying military planes and jet fighters from 1934 to 1962, he likes to recall the day he flew with Orville Wright. While stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just after the end of the Second World War, Tom was called upon one day to pilot a small transport plane with some VIPs aboard. Surprised and pleased, he discovered that one of the passengers was Orville Wright. Orville was a man of very few words, but at the end of the flight, he thrilled Tom by shaking the pilot’s hand and saying, “thank-you sir, that was a very good ride!”

Born in Kenton, Ohio just 10 years after the Wright Brothers’ historic flight and close to Dayton where they lived, Tom Barrett is happy to still be around for the 100th anniversary of the first powered aircraft flight. Will and Orville’s flight launched the beginning of aviation and fueled young Tom’s passion for flying.

Tom began flying while attending Ohio State University. To survive the Great Depression he paid for lessons by doing odd jobs around the Columbus airport like washing planes and sweeping out hangars. He sold Harley-Davidson motorcycles to pay for his tuition and fulfilled ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) requirements in hopes of entering the Army Air Corps to become a pilot. He considered himself truly lucky to reach that goal soon after graduation in 1934.

Never attracted to the barnstorming kind of flying that he had watched in those early years of stick and rudder airplanes, Tom’s interests lay in improving instruments and flying techniques. He force-landed for the first time during his second month of training – without much damage to himself or the plane. He also survived some tense moments training at Mitchell Air Base on Long Island when aviators had no radio communication or safety instruments while flying in zero visibility. But despite these experiences, Tom’s love for flying never faltered. His thrill was always “being above the earth in amazing skies with the power to go wherever you choose”.

The colonel and his wife, myself as the co-pilot, settled at their Glen Lake home after he retired, but Tom never stopped flying. For a time he even owned an amphibian aircraft that could land on water or land. Then he discovered gliders and sailplanes. Tom eventually purchased an experimental motorized glider before returning to conventional airplanes like his favorite, the Grumman Tiger.

I love flying too. I had already earned my pilot’s license the year I met and married Lieutentant Barrett in 1941. We spent the next two years together in the Panama Canal Zone. I missed going along with him on duty in places like Alaska and several countries in South America, but I accompanied my pilot husband to Air Force Bases in Tallahassee, Lubbock Tex., Las Vegas, and Tokyo.

We exposed our son and daughter to airplanes, and they often flew with their father as they grew up, but never completely caught on to their parents “flying fever”. Still, Tom Jr. and his sister Linda remember visiting Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on a cold and windy day much like the one when the Wright Brothers made their first flight there. They enjoyed living in Virginia when Tom was stationed at The Pentagon, and they visited more historic places than airports during that time. They also experienced life in Japan and can recall seeing Mount Fuji from their own backyard on a clear day.

Colonel Barrett is grateful to celebrate his birthday in June, just after Flag Day and Father’s Day, especially since he will have 90 candles on his cake this year. He says he will be thinking of those Dayton boys who conquered the skies with their homemade flying machines a mere one hundred years ago this coming December. He hopes the celebrations will be spectacular.

Posted by editor at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)