One of my most treasured memories is of my now husband readying his Jon boat in his parents’ backyard, on the sandy shore of Sunset Lake. It was a hot and humid July day. He was in his olive drab Marine Corps shorts. It was one of our first dates.  We trolled around the lily pads. We packed sandwiches. We jumped in.

I’ve been with him nearly a decade now, long enough to have a good long think about the lake that framed his childhood: one spent catching bass and snakes and map turtles in the summer, falling through the ice in the winter, and leaving its mark on his soul forever. A mark that I recognize in me, from my childhood on a small lake. We grew up a different sort of wealthy because we were filled with the wonderment and adventure a natural place provides. Lakes have played an indelible part of the most indelible part of our lives. As I age, I ponder how these two lakes are perhaps intertwined in the cosmos of our life paths. They are an opportunity to realize our shared experience and to celebrate what we loved as kids – the haunting pop and groans of shifting ice at night, the buffleheads and teals that appeared in the fall, letting bluegills kiss our toes, the spectrum of its changing moods. We ultimately became children and adults of the outside. We were compelled to take on park ranger jobs in college, where we met. Now it is the place we go on cheap dates.  We take the canoe up the channel where, after a few minutes, we feel as if we are in an untrammeled wilderness, complete with toddling baby beavers, yellow-rumped warblers, canvasbacks, deer, coyotes, and oil-pan-sized snapping turtles.

We are who we are, to the depths of our identity, because of this. I see this place as sacred. I feel it as a living, sentient being. I become small when I think about who I would be, and who my beloved would be, if this place was not here. How often do these small places…ordinary and overlooked, serve us as teachers, beacons, refuges, or redeemers to the soul? If they aren’t there, what have we lost, intangibly and beyond the obvious? Most startling, I believe, is not knowing what could have been gained, when we don’t know in the first place, that a place and a time existed, yet is no more.

What is a sense of place? What should it be? What, in a world of 7.2 billion people, should we rally around and protect? After all, we only live to be about 100 years old if we are lucky, and we base the value of conservation in a snapshot of our own experience. For my husband and me, it is preserving Sunset Lake, like it is now and what we falsely assume has always been, so that other folks can make their own memories. We define it as “good” and “right.”  But the area of land that we call Sunset Lake has lived many, many lives. Short lives, fast lives, deaths and births and transformations, some lives that were never written and are forever lost to memory.

And so, I share the long and colorful history of Sunset Lake, so that we may see the other ordinary places for their true nature: multi-dimensional, ever-changing, and living.

Michigan was under ice, some areas more than a quarter-mile thick, on and off, for about 2 million years. Each advancement of the continental ice sheet wiped Michigan clean, erasing the record of life from the previous interglacial. A hair’s breadth of time ago, just 11,000 years, the Wisconsin Glaciation came to an end in Michigan. Along with it went giant beaver, mammoths, mastodons, Pleistocene bison, musk ox, and, although not yet unearthed in Michigan, but in Indiana, dire wolves and saber-toothed cats – all unable to adjust to the rapidly changing environment (Wilson 1967). One of the glacial retreats birthed the gentle hills and valleys around what is now Sunset Lake. It also created, at least in part, a gorgeous rolling prairie, one of the biggest in Michigan. It was dotted with patches of oak barren, with stands of maple, beech, elm and birch and perhaps some Ohio buckeye and blue ash. It was described in some areas as “a verdant carpet, variegated with dazzling wild flowers, without an obstacle to intercept the view for miles, save the somber trunks of the low oaks, sparsely spreading their shadows across the lawn” (Coffinberry 1880).  It would have been frequented by elk, deer, bears and wolves, and home to the Potawatomi Tribe of Native Americans for many years.

But just 200 years ago, the richly diverse, black-soil prairie was settled so thoroughly, that it only presently exists in sparse checkerspots of rights-of-ways and one or two historic cemeteries. We will never know the true community of plants that actually grew around Sunset Lake, as Southwest Michigan was so quickly and completely altered at the onset of white settlement, that it was gone before we could scientifically know it. In the early 1800’s, we know that Sunset Lake was actually a stream. Meandering through heavy forests and swamps, it bordered the eastern edge of Gourdneck Prairie. It flowed out of Gourdneck Lake. It fell 8 feet into a gully and spread into a low-lying marsh before meandering further into what is now Barton Lake. This was the Nottawa-Seepe reservation, home to Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi. In 1831, a treaty purchasing 8,000 square miles of Lower Michigan was signed at Fort Dearborn on the Chicago River. Attending were fifty-five Potawatomi Chiefs, eighty Ottawa chiefs, two Chippewa chiefs, Lewis Cass, the Governor of the Michigan Territory, and Solomon Sibley, U.S. Indian Commissioner. The next year saw the treaty of Tippecanoe, which ceded remaining lands except the 73,600 acre Nottawa-Seepe Reservation – an area full of rivers, lakes, and heavy forests (Schneider 2004). It was one of the last strong-holds of Native American settlements in Lower Michigan. Yet, in 1833, it too was surrendered to the Michigan Territory. Native Americans who stayed were eventually forcibly removed by Gen. Hugh Brady, and it has been said that some simply vanished into the forest. Sunset Lake lived as a stream, inhabited by Native Americans, for thousands of years, until white settlers squatted, bought, and forcibly removed those that remained.

In the 1820’s, young farmers from Ohio, New York, and Vermont, with about $100 and enough grit to endure years of primitive living, cooperated in “cabin bees”; a half-day of work cutting, notching, erecting, and bark-roofing cabins. One of these people, John Vickers, with the help of his friend, Joe Frakes, felled enough trees and brush to dam the 8 foot waterfall and create a mill (Schneider 2004). They most likely built a preemptive campfire and “claimed the stream.” For Vickers, the bounty of this place was in creating his future, in using the power of what the glaciers had left to create a life. For about 30 years, the waters backing up the dam and mill race complex slowly accumulated. Sunset Lake as it is today, was born. First known as Vickers Mill Pond, it was renamed Sunset Lake in 1886 (Schneider 2004). This simple act of damming the stream essentially set the path not only for Vickers, his mill and tavern, but for the very town and ecosystem we see today.

Sunset Lake, in its youth, lived a brief life of famous, elegant beauty. In the late 1800’s, throngs of visitors from distant places would take specialty excursion trains to the nascent Village of Vicksburg to see the ephemeral 3-week Augustan bloom of creamy, saucer-sized Nelumbo lutea, or American lotus flowers. With soft green, two-foot wide elephant-ear leaves that punch out of the water in fists of defiance, American lotus is native to much of the Midwest and into Canada. Lotus were apparently rare even in the 1800’s, as their immense, delicate presence created a hubbub of nature tourism for Vicksburg. Youngsters even sold the lotus lilies to train passengers traveling to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Lotus was a staple food source of many Native Americans and early settlers, with a sweet-potato flavored root, and “alligator corn” seeds able to be cooked. Nobody knows where the lotus came from, or if they had always been there. I like to think that a member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi planted them, as a food crop when Sunset Lake was a stream and marsh. More importantly, nobody knew what caused them to slowly die out, blossoming for the last time in 1930. In fact, the last time an American lotus was spotted in Kalamazoo County was in 1979. In all but 1 of the 8 counties in Michigan with recorded lotus identifications, lotus have not been sighted for more than 10 years. Today in the Vicksburg Depot Museum, a dried lotus blossom is displayed, resembling a dusty alien honeycomb. A remembrance to this short lived time of beauty, I secretly hope there is a tiny seed hidden away in one, with all of its million-year old genetic ancestry tightly locked up, awaiting a bold citizen’s bio-theft in the name of restoration.   

Sunset Lake then lived as the primary safety net and economic ladder for the Village of Vicksburg. In 1905, Lee Paper Company was established due to the abundance of water able to be powered from Vickers Mill Pond. The company employed 205 workers to make 35,000 pounds of rag paper a day, and was one of the largest mills in the world (Schneider 2004). Like many of the paper companies that made Southwest Michigan famous, it served as one of the most important economic growth engines of the area for nearly a decade. Men and women, many of them Polish immigrants from Chicago, sorted the rags, removed buttons and other objects, shredded the cloth, and then cooked it and processed it to make high-quality writing paper (Schneider 2004).

Sunset Lake lived as a wintertime natural endowment.  In the early 1900s, because trains depended on ice to keep perishables refrigerated, a sizeable economy developed to harvest Sunset’s ice. The ice harvest was led by the Godshalk brothers and started in January 1902. It took forty men and ten days to stock the ice house on south bank of Sunset Lake. Horse drawn plows scraped the lake clean of snow and scored it with a special cutting flange into 22-inch wide strips. Young boys would be employed to search the ice fields for horse droppings to keep the ice pristine for customers. The boys were allegedly called diamond pickers. The ice was cut with massive hand saws. A water channel was created, and the strips and blocks were broken off with long poles. About 20 blocks were hauled up the ramp to the ice house at a time by a giant cable and pulley, packed in and covered by a foot-thick layer of cordgrass to await delivery to train cars and residences by the “ice man” in the summer.  Sunset Lake would have witnessed horse teams breaking through the ice, some to their deaths. When we skate in the winter and feel the almost imperceptible shifts that ripple across the lake’s entire surface from our weight, and watch in shock as the cracks follow behind us, I wonder if such a violent death stays with a place indefinitely. I wonder if the horses were ever recovered. I wonder how the giant, perfectly preserved tree trunk got to the center of the lake in front of my in-laws’ house. I wonder if there are other perfectly preserved harnesses under the bed of weeds. I wonder about the lives that sunset has washed away.

Sunset Lake lived as a garbage dump sometime before 1940. Another cheap date, and perhaps why my husband and I don’t have many friends, is that we like to find and rifle through vintage, abandoned trash piles in the countryside. We see it as an intimate passageway into the lives of people that lived a push-pull existence with the environment – people that lived during a time when it was more obvious and evident when you hacked out an existence from nature, rather than seeking to find it amongst the supreme evidence of a mass of people. It is evidence that a real, live person shaped, valued, and de-valued the environment in the very same place we presently rifle through. Really though, it’s just neat to see the way people lived and build stories off of the trash we see. My in-laws live on the leeward side of Sunset Lake, where the village dump was. Fittingly, when winds are high, sometimes treasures from other people’s yards escape and find their way across the lake to the dump side, where my father-in-law repurposes them. A beach ball. A seat cushion. What is so incredible about the old dump, is that my husband and father-in-law find old bottles occasionally, and sometimes in the root balls of old trees that fall around the house and near the shore. We used my father-in-law’s dump-bottle collection as flower vases for our wedding. What were once unwanted are now, because of my personal experience, and because of their resilience through time, revered.

If we choose to preserve the present-day snapshot of what this sacred place is, it means we use chemicals to kill off some of the yellow lilies that dot the surface of the lake. We watch what resembles a nineteenth century miniature paddleboat eat up the encroaching aquatic vegetation to prevent eutrophication, the natural life cycle that wants to turn parts of the lake into an eventual meadow.  We use blue dye to make the water prettier. We marvel at and celebrate the invasive and beautiful mute swans that coo and snort throughout long summer nights, outcompeting native trumpeter swans, and releasing their nitrogen and phosphorus-rich excrement into the shallows, encouraging the growth of aquatic plant life (see above). We attempt to eradicate a brand new super-invader; red swamp crayfish that destabilize the shoreline with their burrowing, outcompete native crayfish, eat everything from fish eggs to decaying plants, and are the tasty centerpiece of Louisiana craw-dad boils. We capture and relocate the once rare but now abundant Canada geese, so they don’t poop all over the beach. We close the beach when e-coli gets too high regardless. We drag our Christmas trees, many of them blue spruce originating from Norway, onto the ice to entice bass and perch during next year’s ice fishing trips. We fertilize the golf course that butts up to the channel. We take away what we don’t like and leave what we do, and we rarely think twice about it.

If we instead, lived to be 500 years old, how would our perception of this place change, and how would that change our notion of the fate of the natural world that has marked us? Would we see our deep originating dependence on the Wisconsin Glaciation? Would we fiercely try to bring back the lotus of our childhoods? Ought we struggle towards permanence of place, to be able to come back, and remind ourselves of what is righteous? If we see the landscape for its impermanence, and the reasons behind its many transformations, we might sober and think the deeper questions of human purpose: of stewardship, of giving and thanking, and the notion that we alone can shepherd or destroy. Perhaps we would better cultivate life in all its forms, above and beyond the strict enjoyment and pleasure taken from its bounty. Which life of this place is the one we should covet, the true baseline in which we measure conservation success, in which we steward the last vestiges of nature in the 21st century? The ice-harvest, village dump, gully? Should we let it go through the natural life cycle of a lake, and eutrophication – to become a meadow? Do we allow non-native, invasive species to functionally replace ones that have gone? All of these decisions are rooted in our definition of nature and why it matters. I am o.k. with that, as long as we don’t start debating if it matters. All places have these rich histories, and all places have future lives directed by human constructed values. These values change over time, with the whims of human needs and human wants. When we see the landscape through a lens of 500 years or so, our relationship with nature becomes drastically different and on a much more precarious edge. It is when we see in this light that we begin to appreciate it for itself, and not what we think it ought to be, for us, but rather, what we ought to be for it.

References:

Coffinberry, S.C. 1880. Incidents connected with the first settlement of Nottawa-Sippi Prairie in St. Joseph County). Michigan Pioneer Historical Collections 2: 489–501.

Schneider, A. 2004. A tale of one village, Vicksburg, Michigan 1831-2000. Evangel Press. Napanee, IN, USA.

Wilson, R. L. 1967. The Pleistocene vertebrates of Michigan. Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 52 (1966 Meeting).