Adventures at the Lake

I’ve only traveled to Lake Michigan a handful of times in my adult life, I never find the time or the money to be able to make it up to Holland or Grand Haven, and something always seems to get in the way. While my experiences with the lake are few, they were memorable and only mad more so by the lake.

During the last eclipse in the fall of last year, my boyfriend and I made a spontaneous decision to drive up to Lake Michigan to watch it. His mom's roommate at the time owned property on the private side of the lake, so we set off towards it once we got into Holland. It was about 4 a.m. and it was incredibly cold, colder than we imagined it would be (which is why we failed to bring proper warmth besides scant fall jackets). To get into the beach itself, there is a steep incline you have to trek up, one that is very physically demanding. Once we made our way up the hill, we started towards the beach. Being so early in the morning, and in the middle of fall, there were no other people around, we had entire beach to ourselves. You could hear the waves from almost a mile off. The wind was piercing and the cold was biting, but we managed to stay for almost two hours before we decided the eclipse wasn't worth the cold. During the walk back to the car (around 6 am), we would glance back at the moon, keeping our eye on it, and we managed to catch the last glimpse of it while we drove out of Holland and away from the lake.

During the Fourth of July weekend this summer, we made another trip up to Holland, this time to camp out for the holiday. We brought all the essentials with us (being that our area was not an actual campsite), including a grill, cooler, and charcoal. We parked in the woods, and climbed up a flight of stairs that easily contained over 150 steps, on a massively steep overgrown forest dune. Walking along the top of the dune, we got to another challenge (while lugging all of our equipment along the way, a sand dune, and a relatively large one at that, (if we thought that the hill to the eclipse was steep then this was downright vertical). We spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to climb up the dune with the tent and all, using the equipment we had as sort of grips to keep from sliding all the back down to the bottom. It was well worth the trek however, the view of the open expanse of valley was amazing, with small tufts of weedy grass sticking out of the sandy earth, and all of it surrounded by woods and just a short walk through those woods, Lake Michigan.

Hunting for the Already Hunted

As I got older I spent more time in the woods, traveling countless hunting trails (although never veering off my usual path due to my horrendous sense of direction), and finding almost mystically impossible fields of yellow daisies. I would look for bones and find small ponds that were if nothing but an endlessly thriving ecosystem. 

Although it sounds a little bit strange, finding bones in the woods is one of the most exciting feelings (infinitely more exciting than hunting helpless animals and watching the life fade from their eyes), they aren't as common as you would think, and there is nothing more satisfying than finding more than one bone (or if I was really lucky, a skull). So to the behest of my parents it became a hobby, searching for bones, cleaning them and taking care of them. I would travel to my usual trails armed with a plastic bag or two; bones are notorious at tearing holes in crappy grocery store bags. I learned my lesson one day when I had lost a rodent skull (a lucky and rare find) that slipped out through a broken bag, a grave disappointment that I realized when I started heading home.

My favorite find, a mouse skull.

I often use bones as a reference in my art; just like finding bones, drawing bones is extremely gratifying. It gave me a large appreciation for the beauty of the basic structure that holds a large majority of living beings together. I eventually found what I refer to as my 'bone graveyard': a small area of the woods, just off the trail (okay, sometimes I left the trail), where bones of infinite and often unknown things were dumped by the hunters and other residents around the woods. A large majority of them were deer, but sometimes I would be lucky enough to find something else (I found a large skeleton once that couldn’t be anything besides a cow or a horse).

Bones are beautiful, amazing, and under appreciated. Even after an animal passes on, the bones continue to live on for several days, depending on the species of animal. They continue the process of making tissue and healing, and the cells lay dormant until they eventually die. Bones are an example of how nature can be so magical and amazing; despite the stigma they face for bringing about the reminder of death. They should at least be appreciated as living things rather than viewed as a reminder of something macabre as death.

Middle-of-Nowhere-Ville

The place I come from is a small and strangely charming town (if not a little bit of a hick town), that I despised for a large part of the time that I spent there. The kind of town with only one grocery store and an infinite amount of farms and cow shit. A gateway town to an even more nonexistent town with ancient factories that seemed to keep burning down, and a head shop that also doubles as a restaurant for the lunch rush of the factories. A strange, charming town indeed. Dubbed by everyone who lives there Middle-of-Nowhere-Ville (or Middleville, as some people prefer.)

I moved there when I was four or five (I can't accurately say), from a nice caul-de-sac in East Kentwood, where we held street parades and the ice cream truck came every day (if it's any comparison, I've lived in Middleville for 16 years and I've seen an ice cream truck once, a severely disappointing experience for a city kid. However, the two ice creams shops that exist there are nothing short of amazing). We moved into the country right on the edge of town, surrounded by a large farm, and just a bit down the road expanses of never-ending forests. Our house was quaintly country, every edge of our large property was surrounded by pine trees and a field in the back, where trails were cut annually, and perfect land for snowmobiling when the snow fell. I can accurately say that I was not pleased with move, at all; it took me a few years to appreciate my new home, and even then I still felt homesick for the city.

However, I quickly learned that I loved nature, and I spent every waking moment outside until my mom would make me come in for dinner. I spent hours chasing butterflies and catching gophers with nets. (How I could ever be quick enough to chase them down on foot and catch them still astounds me.) My mom started a garden, which quickly turned into six gardens, leaving me infinite things to do outside. My dad would often neglect the lawn until it was nothing but dandelions (to my moms irk), and then he would drive us around on the back of the lawn mower through the yellow fields.

As I grew older, my love for nature lead and grew into a large appreciation for it. Our family would hike out to the woods for a day in search of the ever evasive Morel mushrooms, my mom and I often going together (once getting insanely lost and ending up on a back road two miles from our house). We then discovered that Morels thrive in dead pine needles, and we tended to them until they were of amazing size, and we never had to worry about a season without them. The amount of nature that surrounds such a small town is amazing, and it is has been largely untouched during my time there.

Just a three or four minute drive from my house is Lake Algonquin, the Thornapple River, and the Paul Henry Trail, a local trail built on old railroad routes, and a (very) small part of the North Country Trail. The North Country Trail is 4,600 miles long, and starting in New York, the trail passes through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and it finally ends in North Dakota. Having skated, jogged and hiked the 12 miles of the trail by my house (6 there, 6 back), traveled over bridges and past protected woodlands, through Middleville and other small rural areas, the small part of the trail I've seen is truly amazing. I've often thought about hiking it, and one day I intend to, all the way from Michigan to North Dakota, where an old best friend of mine lives, who will hike the trail back with me, and we have considered possibly continuing all the way to New York.

Middleville is a strange town indeed, but it's hard not to love it.

Mandatory First Blog Post

Blogging for a grade is something I would never consciously do; if I had to write a paper while sitting in the middle of the street I would choose the potential danger of getting hit by any number of cars over a blog on the internet. The anonymity of internet blogging is somewhat appealing, but the fact that it's available to the world's public gives me unease. This isn't one of my Tumblr blogs full of idiotic pictures and ridiculously hilarious posts, this is a blog about me as a person and my actually experiences within the world around me...which is to say a little unsettling. However I will push on and see how this project turns out.

As a Junior at Grand Valley State University, I study Bio-medical Science with a concentration in Microbiology while also obtaining a minor in Fine Arts. "What are you going do with that?" is often the first thing people say when I tell them my studies. The answer is the obscure and not often heard of art of Medical Illustration i.e. the art of illustrating life in its most basic and natural form. Medical Illustrators create drawings for medical textbooks, medical journals, new surgical procedures and basically any other range of medical literature.

I've always loved medicine as well as art, and studying to be a doctor and wasting my life in medical school no longer started to appeal to me. I became more conscious of how little time I had on this planet, and how little of it I wanted to spend crammed in my room studying day and night for a job that might be well paying, but also one I knew I would be miserable in. I was raised by a conservative family that wholeheartedly drilled into my young mind the (very biased and potentially incorrect) belief art wasn't a proper career.

Now I am aware that art isn't a stable career, but it is, if anything, a proper one. I enjoy art and I can be poor as a piece of dirt on the bottom of a shoe and know that I would still be happier than a career which I have slowly lost interest in. Medical Illustrators do make a livable amount of money, and with it being a freelance career with open hours, I can take time to do things I love and work on my outside interests. The stigma of this country is that you have to work constantly to pay for things that you ultimately don't need, that you can't stop or everything will fall apart, you have to keep working and progressing and going. I have no intention to fall into this position which so many Americans unknowingly do. I intend to live my life to the fullest, with the greatest appreciation for the life around me, to be present in every moment. And I hope that this blog will help others to see that they should too.