Northern Michigan (22 images)

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  • The Sleeping Bear Dunes Lake Michigan shoreline has a stark beauty that encourages the mind to wander and our feet to do the same. On windy mornings, the dunes are a weather vane, indicating wind currents in the form of rippled sand. When hoof or paw prints are blurred by blowing sand, there remains a hint of a passing creature. And the complicity of the lake breezes helping cover animals’ tracks, feels like a mystery in which nature aids and abets the wild things. Knowing a deer or bobcat or other denizen may have detected and fled your proximity is thrilling.

  • A morning walk is rewarded with the sight of a web glistening in a meadow among dead cedars and yellow lance-leaved coreopsis. At dawn in the summer, the fruit of hardworking spiders garlands fields. Sunrise spills over the scene, illuminating a spectacular installation created by eight-legged artists. It’s impossible to feel alone amid the evidence of so much activity. The words of Emily Dickenson come to me, says Tusa, who often recites poetry while hiking. “A spider sewed at night/Without a light …” One should tread carefully, Tusa advises, to avoid disturbing the lacework and also to prevent getting a face full of wet silk and spiders.

  • Esch Rd Beach, June 22, 2020.

  • Sleeping Bear Point, November 24, 2020.

  • As Christmas Eve approached, with no family or friends near, and the pandemic still raging, the wind and lake were in a mood. “I was trying to capture the feeling of it,” Tusa says, “the riled-up water, the cold and the vulnerability of all of us. I focused on this this lonely stand of trees, and employed a very slow shutter speed, some exaggerated camera movement and a bit of over exposure to come as close as I could.”

  • Woods on ridge overlooking Lake Michigan, May 28, 2020.

  • In April, vertical clouds descended, wavy, like Rapunzel’s hair let down at sunset. Horizon views attract visitors and locals to the dunes and shore, for a quieter version of the Key West evening vigil. In places where seasons are clearly delineated and the weather shifts hourly, whatever is discovered one day will have transformed in some way by the dawn of the next.

  • Seeing a Great Lake surprises the uninitiated, and their reactions can be entertaining. “Is that an ocean?” Tusa heard one young hiker gasp at the shoreline termination of one trail. “At first,” she says, “I wondered where on earth she had traveled from. Then I figured, more charitably, that the vastness confronting her was probably so unexpected, that her utterance was simply awkwardly stated awe.”

  • Sunlight illuminates grasses and makes shadows of towering trees along an old logging road in Benzie County, Michigan, August 18, 2020.

  • A tree in a ghost forest within the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore pierces a sky full of gathering clouds as evening comes on the first day of September, 2020.

  • Barn off Norconk Rd in Empire, Michigan, December 21, 2020.

  • Queen Anne’s Lace in meadow off seasonal Rd in Benzie County, August 16, 2020.

  • April’s morning chill allows fringy frost to linger, looking as if leaves were somehow embellished with tatting lace over night. By engaging our senses and checking our cell phones, we can spot and quickly identify our discoveries. “Being able to put a name to our finds makes us feel less alone,” Tusa says. “Isolation becomes community.<br /> “And we can also send a photo to a friend who, if not for the pandemic, might be walking with us.”

  • Bear track near Glen Haven, Michigan, May, 1, 2020.

  • Footprints heading toward the beach at the end of Esch Rd. in Benzie County, January 26, 2020.

  • Ice lanterns forming in grasses near the shore of Otter Lake, December 16, 2020.

  • Erosion along shoire of Lake Michigan, Mar. 28, 2020.

  • Come July, the Goatsbeard has gone to seed. Its transformation from floral firework to a look more akin to a sea creature gives it an exotic presence in the midwestern meadow. With organized garden-tour travel canceled by covid, the wild blooms of U.S. National Parks offer a gardeners’ holiday. The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is awash in native blooms. They include orange dune lily, purple beach pea, wind anemone, yellow Saint-John’s-wort and milkweed. Some wildflowers, the National Park Service says, such as the Pitcher’s thistle, are endangered species and found only in the dunes surrounding the Great Lakes. “I’ve been anthropomorphizing plants, and even rocks, a lot lately,” Tusa says. “Missing people.”

  • In summer months, country roadsides near the National Lakeshore sprout farm stands sporting festive banners and hand-painted signs designed to attract buyers to the local fruit. In winter, the utilitarian lines of agricultural architecture, solitary in fading light, seem to express pandemic isolation. Battened down. Weathering the storm. Enduring.

  • South of Empire Bluffs, Dec. 12, 2020.

  • Field off Stormer Rd., September 3, 2020


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