Weathering

Grand Ledge, Michigan is a quiet suburb with more ice cream shops than major intersections. Its namesake Ledges are a marvel. The Anishinaabe, who came here to tap sugar maples, knew them as Big Rocks. In the 1910s, thousands came here from around the Midwest for spiritual seances atop these cliffs. Here, at one particular spot along their crest, I’m connected not only with history from ten thousand years past, but with the mystery of what is to come.

When the glaciers carved out Michigan, they left behind a whole bunch of crap. Mostly boulders, and a ton of water. That water formed a lake, which broke up the boulders into sand and lapped that sand into shores which petrified to form these amazing Ledges.

100 years ago, it seems like everyone in the region knew about the Ledges. But I didn’t even know they existed when I moved here just 2 years ago. Seriously. I love history and nature but I learned about these stunning rocks just hours before I signed my lease to live here. Now, I trace the inscriptions of old tourists (the European/American ones), with dates going back to before the 1900s, and track the progress of the lichen and moss filling the notches.

The glaciers brought something else - vegetation from what is now Canada. One species left behind was the Eastern Hemlock Pine. Their trunks are tall and straight, their needles are short and thin. And from my research, the last remaining stand of these trees in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan is right here, in Grand Ledge, at my favorite spot, not a long walk from my home.

These trees, descendant of forced migrants, are my neighbors. When I walk by, I say hello. I know them better than I know a lot of my human neighbors. If I were to walk the ledges blindfolded (do not recommend), I’d know when I found them, because the air takes on its own scent. 

I go here when I’m feeling heavy things.

Recently, two people who meant something to me died.

At the first shock of the news, I walked to my spot, for a moment or two with my neighbors the Hemlocks. In between the old Pines that flank this, my favorite spot, you can see the Grand River, down one side of the point, and it’s tributary Sandstone Creek down the other.

In our last conversation, one of the two people who died, Rosalie, remarked that she loved to go for walks and to smell the fresh air. Rosalie is one of those Italian family members where, you can never remember if she’s a cousin or an aunt, because it didn’t matter. She was a loving elder who was there for you. That last conversation was no small reason why I was out walking right now. Rosalie hadn’t been for a walk for quite a while. I promised I’d take a breath for her. So I took a breath here, at my favorite spot atop the cliffs of Grand Ledge, where that air smells like nothing else in all of Michigan.

This spot is well-traveled. It’s where lots of kids like to climb up from the lower level trail. It’s the only point along the Ledges that you can really call a “corner”, being between a river and a creek. It’s scenic. It feels a bit like a chapel, how it’s framed by the rivers and the Hemlocks. This time here, however, no one else passed me by. It was raining.

In that last conversation, Rosalie shared some parting wisdom, “do what makes you happy.”

I love to take a look at things up close. I love dioramas, the ones you find in museum wings. Making my diorama for “civil war class” was my favorite project in four years of high school. These days, my favorite place to look at things up close is a forest. Springtime stream beds dazzle me with their little eddies and tiny waterfalls after the yearly melt.

This point between the river and the creek is a wonderful place to look at things up close. Surrounding the hemlocks are pretty healthy moss colonies. Moss and fungi up close are like little worlds of their own.

Exposed and well-traveled, the sandstone here erodes quickly, exposing many rock layers at once. One patch, exposed enough, has nothing growing atop it, and looks like the slot canyons of the American Southwest, a sloping, striated, funnel. Other patches at this weathering point are draped with moss and lichen, which, with the right perspective, transform these “tiny ledges” into lush jungle cliffs where, if you can just reach them to swipe away the growth, you’d reveal ancient petroglyphs, like the ones just found in Colombia.

As I sat here on this rainy day admiring the world up close, my thoughts turned to the other person in my life who died, Sarah, who co-led a student group with me in college. She pulled most of the weight of our student org, and as years have buried that experience into my own layers, I’ve come to intensely admire her attitude and grace, thinking about how I want to be more like Sarah.

Before she died, Sarah said, “I think we can learn a lot from our past, have awareness and appreciation for our present, and just have faith and hope for our future.”

After about twenty minutes, the rain picked up quite hard.

When each layer of sandstone here is first exposed, it just looks like rock. Then, through the random erosion of wind, rain, and footsteps, that layer breaks up into loose sand, returning to the form it once held before.

And on a rainy day, that wet sand exactly matches how it was just seconds after being laid down by those ancient waves, water from the same glaciers that left behind both the boulders, the ancestors of the sand, and the ancestors of the Hemlocks now huddling around me.

The rain picked up more, and I knew it was time to leave. I’ll come back.

When I do, the point will look a bit different, forever changed by the forces around it, just like we are by the people whose paths cross our own.

Some of that sand will have been swept away by water, wind, and insatiable gravity, flushing down toward the river valley.

That sand is freed again. Those little grains have no idea where they’re going, but their path is known all too well by the river here beneath us all.

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