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.