Now, as the Earth tilts the upper Midwest to the Sun, the grand passion begins. The mating of summer and Lake Michigan starts with an invitation as broad as the warming wind: Come to this celebration of the season and the great inland sea.
The invitation is written in genetic code. It says this: I am the water whence you came. Now, in the warm days of summer, come back to me to exercise the dark remoteness of your being and celebrate your ascension from the muck and mire.
First are the fishermen. They come when the summer dawn lurks behind the dark and watery horizon, shuffling out along the piers and the shoreline as if they are paced by the cadence of reptilian ancestors. They bait themselves with eternal optimism, and they dangle ridiculous little strings in the water and expect the lake to reward them with scaly gifts.
They wait, facing the east like a motley army standing a scattered reveille, and the opportunity is there for them to become experts in summer sunrises, those daily productions that are often so breathtakingly beautiful no music could ever be written to match them.
The pity is that these dramatic summer lake shows get no reviews that would urge others to join the fishermen; no public notice speaking of five-star cloud formations or the graceful rolling emergence of fantastic color or a main character that dominates in a blinding blaze of red.
So each morning the summer and the lake get their day going with a performance as fresh as a north wind, and, mostly, only the fishermen are in the audience, too engrossed in personal anticipation to applaud and too unimpressed by a show that is free to acknowledge its extraordinary nature.
Early-morning joggers and dog walkers are next, arriving with the sunrise, respectively adding the mundanity of perspiration and bodily functions to the scene, and last night`s city celebrant in the car parked by the shore emerges from sleep to greet the dawn with a bleeding hangover.
A police squad car eases by, its driver too familiar with the underbelly of summer life along the lake to get emotional about its beauty. Perhaps the hot summer night has brought the ”pop” of gunfire from a community within hearing distance of the lake, and, sadly, the brutal fact of violent death is as much a part of summer and the lake as is the explosion of life.
Appreciation of this time and this place is deferred further as the morning commuter rush begins. If this form of RUSH were an acronym, it might stand for ”Rotten Unsavory Summer Hell” because it clogs the streets with traffic and creates a great cloud of exhaust fumes, tension, frustration and noise. And along the lake, the celebration of summer becomes a battle between people and time. It is the price that must be paid to locate the great cluster of buildings that forms the skyline, that striking feature that boaters sail away from so they can look back at it.
Now, in the morning, the sailboats and the yachts wait in the harbors like big bobbers on short lines. Later in the day, or on the weekends, their owners will ride the bobbers out to feel the summer undulation of the lake. Because of their close proximity to the intimacy of it, they will claim a special role in the seasonal relationship. Summer, they will say, is the feel of a rising deck beneath your feet and the fresh wind in your face as you sail to a destination no more firmly defined than pleasure.
The summer lake is tolerant of such frivolity, participating most often with rolling waves that set a frolicking tone and accepting on its broad expanse a great variety of recreational excess.
But sometimes the lake and the summer combine to produce a sudden thunderstorm that chases the boats with a broom of black rolling clouds and lashes the cowering occupants with whips of yellow lightning. It is elemental summer play, but it comes as a reminder of who is in charge here: It is the lake, always the lake, using the seasons to re-establish its authority.
Then a summer boater might hear, in the sudden rush of the wind, fragments of a mournful history, when boating predecessors moved to another dimension and now sail eternally in the dark depths. Each summer a handful of lake users joins that unfortunate fleet, and all of the others pause for a second to tell themselves, ”But it could never happen to us.”
As it will never happen to any of them, neither will the youthful narcissistic crowd of Lake Michigan`s summer beaches ever grow old. In their golden limbs and svelte bodies and biologically sunburned brains, more than anywhere else, the spirit of summer on the lake is epitomized. They are the royalty, these grown children who live for the moment if not the season. To be of them in their environment of sand and sun and clean water cold enough to take your breath away is to drink the sweetest wine of the species. That
”older” person who can view Oak Street Beach on a hot summer day and not know a pang of regret for the retreat of youth does not have his or her memories in order.
There are a thousand places where the lake and summer come together with the force of youthful romance. One of the more spectacular settings is the top of Mt. Baldy, a sand dune in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. From its 123-foot peak, the grand sweep of summer across Lake Michigan is awesome. As if it were a reincarnation of the glacier that carved it all out and left it this way, the great sand deposit seems alive beneath your feet with the basic energy of the Earth.
It carries you along in its timeless creep that is fueled by gravity`s great leveling, and there is a sense of standing as part of the insignificant punctuation between powerful cataclysmic events. The last glacier has retreated so recently that its very shadow seems to loom out of the north, and the remnants of its cold breath can send an inexplicable chill up your spine even on the hottest day.
To the left, as you face north and pay homage to the ghost of the glacier, lie some of the cluttered workplaces of the sweat-drenched Midwest. Nothing is the same along the lake from one summer to the next, and so there is a weed-grown quality to some of the industrial area. Pigeons and sparrows prevail in the hot sunshine where once men and machines meshed like gears.
It is not all gone, by any means, and summer along the lake, for many, means boiling the starch out of their guts in monotonous labor. Since man`s economic systems were installed, that has been the way of the lakeshore: The people who sweat to pay for the yachts never get to ride on them.
To the right stretch the communities where the city people come to find relief from the steamy concrete. They inhabit cottages and fancy summer homes along the east shore, where the summer air has been rinsed clean and cooled off by its trip across the lake. It is only in the summer, in fact, that many of these places rise up out of seasonal lethargy and come to life. The cottage owners and the tourists flow to the shore like lifeblood, and the communities are infused enough to make it through the rest of the year.
All around the big lake, summer is when claims are reasserted, when the shoreline becomes infinitely more valuable to the human psyche. Then rich shoreline homeowners in plush communities become more outraged by trespassers, and the keepers of private shore facilities become more zealous in their control. A grand absurdity prevails as claims of property and privacy and ownership seem to spill over to include the summer and the lake.
Of course, no one can own the lake and the summer. They are for everyone. The people in the sweltering suburbs know that. So does the family far out on the flat, hot prairie. Its members feel the dry summer wind sucking at them, like a swarm of insects. They resist it with cold drinks and fight it with shade, but it is relentless, and in an action that is somehow instinctive yet intellectual, they begin to move toward the lake. They are there, then, at the beach or the concert or the park, drawn by something as deep as the will to survive.
And the hot wind that brought them frolics in the spectacular spray of Grant Park`s Buckingham Fountain before it slips out across the lake with a summery sigh.
