Nature's Will

I enjoy being in nature. I agree with such Romantics as Thoureau or Emerson in the belief that one must be in tune with nature and take a break from society at least every once in awhile. One such break from society that I took was during this summer. I went to Michigan with my brother, cousin, and aunt for my aunt's high school reunion. During the trip we stayed in a tent, something that I hadn't done since my childhood. The venue of the reunion was the Interlochen arts camp near Traverse City, Michigan. If you are not aware, this region is very lake-filled. With these lakes come the geographic feature of DUNES. My cousin, my brother, and I decided, for some odd reason, that we would go DUNE-HIKING.

We went to the Sleeping Bear Dunes on the beautiful and vastly large Lake Michigan. Native American legend has it that an enormous mother bear and her cubs went into the lake to escape a wildfire. The mother's two cubs began to lag behind and eventually drowned in the water, forming two dunes. The mother, already having reached the far shore, had fallen asleep. She was soon covered with sand forming the dunes, hence "Sleeping Bear". These dunes were a favorite destinations of our family back when we used to go to Interlochen almost every year. This story is one of the reasons that we decided to go back; we just wanted to relive some parts of our collective childhood.

After an incredibly long and winding drive following an inaccurate GPS we arrived at the dunes. We were running behind schedule at this point, and we had to be back to the camp by dinnertime. The following picture is what greeted us as we arrived.As you can imagine from seeing this picture, we did not think that the trek would be that strenuous or time consuming. Little did we know that there was another dune on top of the already substantial dune pictured above. We attempted to sprint up the first dune, but we were already tired about half way up under the scorching rays of the unforgiving sun. We were actually trying to reach the lake, swim for a bit, and return in about an hour. I swear, it seemed like we could hear the lake just over the next dune. We decided to rest for a bit and play some frisbee before we continued. Once we got to the top of the next hill, we saw a massive valley leading to another even larger dune. We just kept on going because we were feeling pretty scorched and we just wanted to swim in the cool lake from our childhoods. This process continued until we were absolutely sure that the lake was over the next mountain. We were, however, wrong still. We lost count of how many dunes we scaled, but our hour long hike quickly turned into a three hour odyssey. Once we reached the lake, however, it was all worth it. The water was crystal clear and sooooo incredibly refreshing. Once we got out, though, it started to sink in that we were going to have to hike ALL THE WAY BACK AGAIN. I'll admit, it did seem a little bit shorter on the way back, but that's just because we knew what to expect and we weren't hearing the sounds of the lake over every hill. This turned out to be a grueling yet incredibly enjoyable outing with two of my favorite people in the whole world. I would do it again in a heartbeat.