Walk a Mile in Our Shoes

Posted on September 30, 2017 by Joe Neely

Back to the Source – Foot Paddling

September 29, 2017

Tom Writes . . . 

Downstream from the Liberty Millpond Dam

mill pond dam

Water flowing over the Liberty Millpond Dam.

On July 24, 2016 (last year), we started this adventure at the Liberty Millpond Dam, near Grand Lake, the river’s primary source. On that first day, we paddled upstream, on the Millpond and its associated waters, a sort-of lake with no name. If you scroll all the way down to our first blog posts, last year, you can read about it. (And, you can see a photo and a video of the dam in winter, if you look at our January 7, 2017 posts. You also can read what Joe wrote on April 16, 2017, about paddling Grand Lake with one of his grandsons.)

Right after that dam, the river really is more of a creek. It is not deep enough to float a boat. So, last year, we skipped ahead to deeper water. For our second leg last year, we took our canoe to the Loomis Road Bridge, far enough downstream, deep enough that we could paddle most of the time. August 7, 2016.

BUT! We always knew we had to go back to that early skipped part of the river. We did it

ripples bottom mill pond

Riverbed rocks made for difficult walking, these just below the millpond dam.

today. We had to walk right in the river, mostly, on top of sharp rocks, through clear water and black muck. . No roads or trails along the route. Only a few places where we could walk along the bank, in people’s yards. I worried that the people might not like to see us in their yards, but no problem. We saw one guy cutting his grass. We waved at him, but he ignored us. A woman at another house greeted us cordially, welcomed us, and laughed at us.

Our river is only about eight feet wide in this stretch. We encountered fallen trees that blocked us. In one place, we got over a fallen tree, but then got stuck in vines that grew all over the tree. Honestly, we were trapped. I was able to claw and thrash the vines enough to get out, and Joe was able to crawl after me. This may seem silly, but it was a big deal. It took about 15 minutes. I came out with a bleeding leg and a bleeding forearm.

vines on the grand

These are the vines from which Tom emerged bloodied and bruised. Traveling the Grand in Jackson County is hard work.

Today was a beautiful sunny early Fall Michigan day. I spent most of my day looking down, at the rocks in the river. I had to remind myself to look up sometimes, to try to see birds and butterflies. But, I mostly just looked down. I saw a few minnows and fish plus clam shells, but I believe Joe, who was ahead of me, scared most of the wildlife away, before I had a chance to see them. I did hear some Blue Jays.

Today, we closed a big gap in our source-to-mouth Grand River adventure. In October, we intend to make it half way. We will close our other gaps. And then we will have done the entire river from source to Grand Ledge. Then, maybe, next year, we might make it to the river mouth, our home town, our home pier, our home beach, Lake Michigan, Grand Haven, Michigan.

tom shallow rivfer

A jaunty Tom just minutes into the day’s journey, before doing battle with rocks and vines.

(Editor’s Note: It is often said there are two sources of the Grand River. Under this scenario there is the Main Branch, flowing out of Grand Lake in Liberty Township/Jackson County; there is also the North Branch, flowing out of Center Lake in Leoni Township/Jackson County at Michigan Center. These branches of the river merge at US-127, east of Jackson, and from there the Grand flows as one river to Lake Michigan. Most efforts to paddle the entire river, it seems, start at Michigan Center because it is easier to float a canoe or kayak there. We consider the waters flowing out of Grand Lake to be the true source of the river and have concentrated our explorations in that area.)

CONTACT US: joe@lengthofthegrand.com or tom@lengthofthegrand.com

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK: Length Of The Grand

JOIN US ON THE RIVER: BYOC (Bring Your Own Canoe)

 

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The Grand and the Betsie: Two Different Rivers

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Joe Neely

Joe Writes . . . 

I recently stopped at an old friend’s cabin on the Betsie River in northern Michigan, not far from (as my brother might say) the nifty Lake Michigan town of Frankfort. I had not been at my friend’s place since the late 1970’s. We stood at the top of the bluff behind his cabin, looking down 50 or 60 feet into the river’s shallow, clear water. So clear I could see tremendous fish – salmon, I think – swimming just hard enough against the current so that they stayed in place. The fish are visible in the center of this photo; keep in mind that we were way the hell up in the air on the riverbank.

fish in water on betsie

See the fish? Dead center.

The Betsie River is clear laughing water and blue skies, a river without a care in the world. The Betsie is wind power and fly-fishing. Hipsters. Duck hunters in corduroy.  Ever-so-rarely the Betsie is a grizzled fisherman keeping watch o’er his bobber, but mostly the river is Chad and Jeremy singing A Summer Song on a sunshiny, wispy-cloud day.

Our river, the Grand, is working-class. Groaning, struggling, carrying the weight of the world on its back. The Grand is blue collar with Richie Rich occasionally slumming it in a million-dollar-boat near the Big Lake. The Grand is coal-mining, ship-building smoggy Newcastle. The Grand is Eric Burdon fronting the Animals in 1965. We love the Grand but sometimes  We Gotta Get Outta This Place.

The Grand will never be the Betsie, and that’s ok. I’ll never kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Flow on, Your Tired Majesty; flow down to the sea.

P.S. I suspect that most people were prone to jumble up the songs of Chad and Jeremy and Peter and Gordon’ back in the 1960’s. My favorite song among both duos repertoire was ‘I Go To Pieces’ by Peter and Gordon. That song was written by Del Shannon, he of ‘Runaway’ fame. Del Shannon was born Charles Westover in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids is split by and built around the Grand River. Del Shannon grew up in Coopersville – west of Grand Rapids – and lived for a time in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he sold carpet, worked in a warehouse and drove a truck by day while playing music by night.

P.P.S. If you decide to visit Frankfort  you can get one hell of a perch sandwich at Port City Smokehouse. You can get other lake fish there as well – fresh or smoked – and top-notch beef or turkey jerky, too. 

the betsie general pic

The clean blue waters of the Betsie go laughing along.

CONTACT US: Joe@lengthofthegrand.com or Tom@lengthofthegrand.com

JOIN US ON THE RIVER: byoc (bring your own canoe)

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK: Length Of The Grand

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Invasive Mussels on the Grand River

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Joe Neely

Tom Writes . . .

During our last trip on the river (Monday September 11 – we already wrote about it), I forgot to write about the mussel shells. When we portaged around Moore’s Dam, and put back in, we saw many hundreds of thousands of mussel shells. The whole area on the right bank, call it a beach, maybe, was entirely covered in dead empty mussel shells.

mussels

photo credit: US Fish & Wildlife Service

All the area under our feet, under the canoe as we dragged it back to the water was mussel shells. Not just a coating, but a deep layer, probably at least a foot deep. These mussels are an invasive species, originally brought here in the ballast water of ships from Europe, not too terribly long ago.

We have seen other types of shells on our river cruise, including native clam shells, including clam shells as big as a human hand. But, these maybe millions of mussel shells really made an impression on us.

We have read about these invasive mussels, but we never saw them before in real life. They are a big deal. Imagine, maybe, that all the sidewalks in your American neighborhood got covered in some sort of European worms. That is what the invasive mussels have done in this stretch of the Grand River.

Editor’s Note: To learn about the devastation mussels and other invasive species have visited upon the Great Lakes, pick up a copy of The Death And Life Of The Great Lakes by Dan Egan (W. W. Norton & Co., 2017). The following excerpt from page 123 refers particularly to the invasion of quagga mussels:  “The chaos this has brought is like nothing – not even the sea lamprey – the lakes have suffered in their 10,000-year history.”

And now come the Asian Carp . . . what hath we wrought?

 

 

 

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Lansing: the Industrial Side of the Grand

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Joe Neely

Tom writes . . . 

tom w mich pricess

The paddle wheeler Michigan Princess and Tom at Grand River Park

September 11, 2017, sixteen years after 9-11 – Lansing, Michigan

My brother Joe waxes wonderfully poetic – see his recent entry featuring Langston Hughes and Van Morrison – so it is my job, I suppose, to tell you about our actual paddling progress today.

We paddled through the city of Lansing, Michigan, our state capital, right in the center of the lower part of our state, from Grand River Park to the Lansing Northern Dam.

On the way, we had to stop, and drag our boat around Moore’s Dam. Two dams in the small city of Lansing. Two too many dams. Get rid of them, we say. Please let the Grand River flow.

power station on the grand

The Eckert Power Station at Moore’s Dam, just before a too-long portage.

Anyway, today, Joe told me about twenty-five times that this was NOT the prettiest river stretch we have seen. Dare I say, “duh?” We stopped at the first big dam for lunch. And, we ate great sopresseta sandwiches on French bread, sitting across the river from a power plant. This power plant had invasive plant growth all over it, and it had a big gap in its wall. Not a pretty river-side vista.

Continuing down river, Lansing has at least two huge parking structures right on its river banks. Huge ugly parking structures are not the best use of potentially lovely littoral real estate. Yikes.

A couple nice riverside developments give us some hope, though. I hope Joe will post a photo of the Lansing Market, which is retail plus residential, with nifty decoration. And, Lansing has a medium-size River Walk, on the right bank (editor’s note: walkers were observed on both sides of the river). Lansing is making an effort.

I just hate complimenting Joe, but he said another interesting thing: Today was the first day, in all our twenty or thirty days on the river, that we saw no herons. If you have read us, you know that we love the herons that guide us down the river, every day except today. We saw none. No herons. We missed them. We hope they will come back, farther downstream.

Joe adds . . . 

Good things Lansing is doing with its riverfront: good access to the river for watercraft of all kinds at Grand River Park; the river walk trail/walking paths on both sides of the river; some nice looking art and residential development not far upstream from Old Town.

new bldgs public art

Jazzy new buildings going up just upstream from Old Town, riverfront sculpture far left.

Where Lansing could do better: Portaging around Moore’s Dam is damn difficult. Take-out is decent on the upstream side but put-in is terrible on the downstream side. Yes, I know the water is low right now but more could be done to encourage through-paddling. And would it kill someone to clean the brush off the power station? Long-term: get the parking lots and the power stations off the river.

parking on the grand

There’s got to be a better use for prime riverfront real estate

Contact Us: Leave a comment in the space provided here or send us email: tom@lengthofthegrand.com; joe@lengthofthegrand.com .

Join Us on the River: BYOK/C (bring your own kayak/canoe)

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On Langston Hughes, Van Morrison and Writing

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Joe Neely

Joe Writes . . .

River’s gonna take you where it wants you to go:
can’t tell the wind not to howl or the river not to flow.

I have been thinking of writing a piece on the river in art – literature, music, visual arts –  but the topic is simply too huge to tackle right now. One day I will take that on, but today I will touch on the potential of youth and the tenacity of the creative soul once youth is no longer a factor. Oh, and the writing process, too.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes as a young man

I have a friend who would not allow younger colleagues to use their age as a bar to accomplishment. “George Washington was commanding troops in battle when he was 19,” my friend would say, and so George Washington was, in the French-Indian Wars. When I see my friend again I’ll tell him about Langston Hughes writing the poem ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ at the age of 17; perhaps my friend will want to add the story to his inspiring tales of youthful accomplishment.

In his autobiography Hughes wrote that ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ came to him quickly as he crossed a bridge over the Mississippi while traveling on a train. “No doubt I changed a few words the next day, or crossed out a line or two. But there are seldom many changes in my poems, once they’re down,” Hughes wrote in his autobiography.

Thank God that Hughes did not write his magnificent poem under the guidance of virtually every writing instructor in the world. The process advocated by these instructors is to vomit out a first draft – it doesn’t matter what you vomit, just so long as you puke up something – then cutting, rewriting and editing your work forever and ever until you are absolutely exhausted, entirely discouraged, and the finished piece bears little resemblance to the initial inspiration.

I am not opposed to the idea of rewriting – and doing so over and over and over again – but I wonder how many brilliant written moments have been discarded forever under the false notion that nothing good is written in a first draft. Abe Lincoln didn’t do badly with his one draft of the Gettysburg Address; did he? I guess the trick is in learning to recognize what is true inspiration and what is garbage. (And lest you think I don’t revise and rewrite, WordPress tells me I have made 26 revisions to this post.)

Here’s  Langston Hughes’s first draft – almost, at least – on rivers and so much more.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

While we marvel at 17-year-old Langston Hughes, let’s consider that age is no bar to accomplishment at the other end of the spectrum, either. Van Morrison turned 72 this year, and his recent album includes some beautiful river music.

Contact Us: Joe@lengthofthegrand.com; Tom@lengthofthegrand.com

Join Us: BYOC/K (bring your own canoe/kayak). Our next trip will be from Grand River Park in Lansing to the dam/fishladder downtown, after which we plan to close out the season by backtracking to a few spots we skipped last year in Jackson County.

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Dimondale to Grand River Park in Lansing

Posted on September 2, 2017 by Joe Neely

Sept 1, 2017

sandburg

from Chicago by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

Joe Writes . . .

Carl Sandburg loved Chicago. The first stanza of his poem by that name provides evidence of that affection and a vivid description of Lake Michigan’s great city in 1914, when the poem was published.  Read the entire poem here. Chicago is a wonderful, accessible poem. So much poetry now seems to be written by one graduate student for the exclusive comprehension by and enjoyment of other graduate students . . . but I digress.

I once I taught high school English and we referred to Sandburg’s technique as a “stacking of images.” Students seemed to enjoy stacking images of their own creation about a place that they loved. Tom and I have been toying with Sandburgian  images of our own , stacking images of the Grand. So far the results have tended towards the silly (Carp Grower for the Big Lake, Heart Breaker of Paddlers, River of Fallen Trees, Provider of Comfort to Mediocre Restaurants) but I am beginning to think this a worthy exercise, deserving of more serious effort as we continue down the Grand.

I downloaded a new app (Downloader of Apps) called Map My Hike which, along with measuring the distance we paddle and creating a map thereof, purports to calculate the number of calories burned on each excursion. Yesterday the app reported we traveled 7.88 miles in about 3 hours and 20 minutes of active paddling and that I burned 1,420 calories while doing so. Lord, I hope that’s correct! By way of comparison, the display on the elliptical machine at Planet Fitness tells me I burn 10 calories per minute at level 5. If that is accurate, it would take me 2 hours and 22 minutes to burn 1,420 calories on the elliptical machine but I would be dead long before I reached that goal. I am on a program to reach a certain weight by Thanksgiving and I need all the calorie burning I can muster as I am already falling behind schedule.

Trump Territory: Danger Ahead?

After our next outing we will have traveled all segments of the river from Eaton Rapids to Grand Ledge. From Grand Ledge on we will be traveling through Trump Territory and communication may be sporadic. At night we will form a triangle with our canoe and the two vehicles and sleep in the protection of that enclosure, so access to the internet is by no means guaranteed. While government agents assure us the plains are peaceful, we have learned from experience that caution is always advised and that the situation can change in a heartbeat. All it takes is for Sean Hannity to report the inane utterance of one Hollywood liberal – or for someone to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” – and the marauding and plundering begin again. Pray for us.

circle wagons

Tom Writes . . .

September 1, 2017 – Dimondale to the southern border of Lansing

It was a cold morning for this time of year, about fifty degrees Fahrenheit, which equals about 10 degrees Celsius. Definitely autumn morning temperature, even though it still looked like a summer morning.

We got started without getting very wet. We paddled and made progress against the breeze. The river is wide in this section, widened by the dam up ahead, in Lansing. That dam makes the river spread out, into a shallow lake-like configuration.

You can read a little about that dam in one of our previous posts. One thing about that dam in Lansing is that it actually stinks, in an olfactory sense. In general, Joe and I advocate removal of that particular dam, and all dams along our Grand River.

Today’s paddle from Dimondale to Lansing is mostly suburban Lansing. Many houses along here. Some of them are magnificent littoral mansions, but most are just regular American homes. However, there also are half a dozen parks in this section. It is a good mix of civilization and wild.

If you have read us before, you know that we particularly like the herons on the river. This stretch appears to be wonderful heron habitat. We saw maybe twenty Great Blue Herons, plus an Egret, maybe.

A small dragonfly got into my car, and rode all the way back from Lansing to Grand Rapids with me, seventy-five miles. I let it out of the car when I got home. I hope it finds friends and lovers and a happy life over here.

grand at lunch on sept 1

Our view across the Grand to Woldumar Nature Center

Contact Us: Joe@lengthofthegrand.com; Tom@lengthofthegrand.com

Join Us: BYOC/K (bring your own canoe/kayak). Our next trip will be from Grand River Park in Lansing to the dam/fishladder downtown, after which we plan to close out the season by backtracking to a few spots we skipped last year in Jackson County.

 

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On to Dimondale: the quest continues

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Joe Neely

Riverbend Nature Area to Dimondale

August 18, 2017

Tom Writes . . . 

You guys may or may not know that we do our canoe trips backward, in a certain sense. We always need to leave a vehicle at our ending places, and then drive back to the starting places. (Clear as a muddy river?)

So… Yesterday, our ending place was the cool little river town of Dimondale, Michigan. We parked my car there, next to the river. And then, before we went back to the starting place with Joe’s truck, we ate lunch at Mike’s Village Restaurant in Dimondale.

joe fishing

Joe had no luck fishing at the weir in Dimondale.

Mike’s is a genuinely American place, in a genuinely American small town. If you get visitors from other countries, please take them to Mike’s in Dimondale, to show them what the USA really is like, and to meet, or at least see and eavesdrop on, actual Americans.

This was lunch time, not breakfast time or supper time. But, the people at Mike’s apparently offer a full breakfast menu AND a full supper/dinner menu, all day long. This, I believe, partly, is a throw-back to the days when rural Americans used to eat their big meals at noon-time, rather than at night. In the USA, dinner used to come at noon. Joe and I opted for the supper-ish menu. Joe ordered a burrito, and I ordered perch with mashed potatoes. ( Note that in most of Michigan, they put beef or chicken gravy on the mashed potatoes, even when you order fish.)

Mike’s has a lot to offer, a wide menu selection; they bake their own bread, and, Mike’s still seems to be the center of community life in Dimondale. Plenty of customers there at noon yesterday.

We had good service. An interesting fact about Mike’s: Every time an order is ready, some cook pushes some button that causes a version of our national anthem to play. The first two lines of the Star-Spangled Banner, in bell tones. This, I suppose, is to alert the servers. It also alerts the customers. We heard it at least twenty times while we were there. (Editor’s note: Tom is too nice to say so, and I also liked Mike’s, but the Star-Spangled Banner chime quickly becomes annoying.)

We left well-nourished for our time on the river. When we finally got out on the river, we encountered rocks and rapids, more than ever before. We saw a pair of eagles. I will leave it to Joe to write about our paddle time, since I have used up my writing allowance on Mike’s Restaurant.

Joe Writes . . . 

There is not too much to add about Friday’s paddle, although I think we made good time for a couple of old codgers: just under five miles in two hours flat. There was no one else on the river, which is always a bit disappointing for me. The Grand is such a great resource, but few of its co-owners (the citizens of our fair state) get much use from it. The river is low from lack of rain and we twice had to get out and pull the Billie V through the shallow areas., something we have not had to do since last summer in Jackson County. Two immature eagles were spotted just as we left the Riverbend Natural Area, but I didn’t have either of the cameras (my iPhone or the GoPro) ready. I will insert some video of a heron lifting off and a few photos, below.

Top: Video concludes with blue heron taking flight.

Photos: (L) Stone monoliths as we approach Dimondale, MI appear to be old railroad bridge supports; and, (R) the stone weir in Dimondale where there used to be a dam. The weir creates some fast water which would have been more fun if water levels in the river had been higher. The trend on the river is to remove dams and allow the river to return to a more natural state. Eaton Rapids and the Village of Lyons have both removed dams recently.

We would love to hear from any who may stumble across this blog: Tom Neely can be reached at tom@lengthofthegrand.com; Joe Neely can be reached at joe@lengthofthegrand.com. If you have a kayak or canoe we would love to have your join us for a day. Our next trip is likely to be Dimondale to one of the parks in Lansing.

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McArthur Park in Eaton Rapids: Why We Care

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Joe Neely

Tom Writes . . . 

August 1, 2017

Gale Road Landing to MacArthur Park

Do you remember that “MacArthur Park,” is my brother Joe’s favorite song? Do you remember that he sings it at the top of his lungs often, while we paddle down the Grand River, even though he is not totally sure about the correct lyrics?

It was a hit back about 1968 CE. Please note, however, that many Americans believe “MacArthur Park” is the worst song ever, worst in the century, silliest, least comprehensible song.

Jim Webb wrote the song, and Richard Harris recorded it. It was a hit. Joe used to own the Richard Harris album, way back when.

Well, my friends, today, Joe and I paddled to a real place named McArthur Park. It is a real place on the right bank of our beloved Grand River, on the outskirts of the lovely river-island town of Eaton Rapids, Michigan.

Part of the lyrics of “MacArthur Park” are:

Someone left the cake out in the rain… All the sweet green icing flowing down…

 So! I brought a great cake from the Nantucket Baking Company. Nantucket made me some great sweet bright green icing. And, I put the green icing on the great cake, flowing down.

IMG_0673

We cut into that iconic cake on a picnic table near the outhouse at McArthur Park, and ate! Today. Joe has video and audio of this momentous event. I hope he will post it here.

I don’t think that I can take it

Cause it took so long to bake it

And I’ll never have that recipe again…

 If you are over the age of about 45, you may remember the song, and you may get the joke. If you are younger, or if you just do not get it, sorry. Maybe google the song. But, I am sure Brother Joe will add to this post, and give you a chance to listen, and to make up your own mind about how absolutely hilarious Joe and I really are.

(Editor’s Note: Donna Summers had a disco hit with the song in 1978, but we don’t do no disco, never did. I learned something cool just now, and that is that Waylon Jennings recorded this song, too; you can find it on Youtube. One of the comments says, “Waylon sang the shit out of this song, but Waylon sang the the shit out of everything.” I like that sentiment. To me, Waylon’s version starts strong but fades . . . Richard Harris still the best with this song.)

 

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The Grand River, Jackson County

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Joe Neely

Joe Writes . . .

It’s been hard for us to get started this year – our mother is failing, among other family health issues – but we remain enthusiastic and will be out on the river next week and most weeks, I hope, until mid-October. The big news is that we now have email addresses attached to this blog. We’ve apparently had them for a year, truth be told, but didn’t know how to access them. If you see something you like, or want to join us on the river, or feel like contacting us for any reason whatsoever (unless we owe you money) you may reach us at joe@lengthofthegrand.com and/or tom@lengthofthegrand.com . Hope to see you on the river!

The Grand in Jackson County (a prose poem in progress)

Here near the river’s beginning,
upstream from the mill pond,
we bottom out in the muck
long before we reach the dreamed-of source
river nymphs dart under our bow
disappearing before proof can be had.

gr spider bridge july 24

♦     ♦     ♦     ♦     ♦

A year later I resume the quest
and at last explore the source,
permission required from a property owner
to launch onto this lake we all own.
Water could scarcely be cleaner than this
issuing from springs buried in the deep lake’s floor.

across grand lake

A low bridge stops us from entering the river
where it leaves Grand Lake to the north,
intended, I’m certain, as much to
keep paddlers from reaching the lake
as to provide safe passage across
the nascent river at its birth.

♦     ♦     ♦     ♦     ♦

At Loomis Road the river is small, more a creek,
and a high school long jumper, boy or girl,
could soar across, from bank-to-bank
if solid footing were to be found,
but that’s seldom the case on this day.
Later the river widens as we press on,

IMG_2650

press on towards Vandercook Lake.
Other travelers briefly share our road,
paddlers and sunburned couples on tubes,
cradling cheap beer in floating coolers,
the kind of beer my dad bought on summer Sundays
so uninvited guests could not question his hospitality.

♦     ♦     ♦     ♦     ♦

Few are we who paddle, float and fish
this river we own, this river we love.
We make no demands on the Grand,
here near her source
and the journey is not easy
here where the journey begins.

seanpetergrandlake

At the end of her journey, at the Big Lake,
the river is overwhelmed by demands
for freighters must fill their holds
and pleasure boats promenade
the piers, but here unencumbered,
she gathers strength for her run.

– Joseph Neely, July 2017

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Daylillies in Southern Michigan

Posted on July 11, 2017 by Joe Neely

July 11, 2017

Tom Writes . . . 

Canoeing in Michigan requires a lot of driving in Michigan, out on the country roads, to get to the canoe launch sites and pull-out sites. As Joe and I drive through these back road places, we see lots of flowers.

And, especially, we see daylilies everywhere, all across the southern part of the state, from Detroit in the east to Grand Haven in the west. These are the large, tall, orange version of daylilies. People plant them in their yards, but these lilies also just seem to grow on their own, and they are lovely this time of year (around the Fourth of July).

Daylilies seem to like to grow along roadsides, out by the country mailboxes, all along the roads. I believe some people cultivate them, but I also believe daylilies just like to spread on their own, and glorify the Michigan countryside.

Please come here, and drive our back roads, and enjoy for yourself. Here is a picture Joe took of some daylilies near his home. I do not have pictures of the beautiful large roadside daylily stands, but I will try to get some such pictures, for my next post.

IMG_0527 (1)

 

 

 

 

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