When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  Stick out your left hand again. See Traverse City? Starting there, trace around your little finger, the whole thing. That’s Leelanau County, pronounced LEE-luh-gnaw, maybe even more beautiful, with its astonishing one hundred miles of Lake Michigan shoreline. If you were driving that route, more or less at the point where your little finger meets the rest of your hand, you’d come to the Sleeping Bear Dunes, sand dunes 450 feet high and spectacular, now part of a national park, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Until you see them, you have no concept of how big they are, these colossal white sand cliffs. From the top of the dunes, Lake Michigan, far below, spreads out like a flat blue floor all the way to the horizon.

  Leelanau County has dozens of much smaller lakes, too. They play hide-and-seek with you as you drive the narrow roads. They twinkle from behind trees and flirt, teasing you with a glimpse of beach, like a flutter of petticoat, before disappearing when a hill gets in the way or an orchard or a farm. After World War II, my parents bought forty acres of woods and a boarded-up old house on one of them, Lime Lake, a half-hour drive northwest of Traverse City. They fixed up the house, called it Deer Trail Cottage, and loved it desperately. All their dreams found a home there. Great, ancient maples and beeches stood guard outside our doors and held off the forest lurking where the grass ended.

  From the time I was old enough to feel anything, what I felt was the wildness of where I lived. I am an only child, to this day a solitary person, comfortable with being alone. I had no playmates until I went to school, except when my cousins visited in the summer. So I noticed my surroundings, which had stories to tell.

  We had no close neighbors. The nearest house was a quarter of a mile or so away, but no one lived there. It was quiet enough to hear cars a long way off, to know by the sound when they rounded certain curves, went up and then down hills, making their way along the gravel road, slowly getting louder as they came closer, finally reaching our house in a cloud of dust. The bark of a dog echoed all the way across the lake. We often saw deer and foxes, sometimes bears and even wolves. At night we heard whip-poor-wills and owls and loons, their calls lonely and pure, coming from someplace deep in the velvety blackness beyond the insect chorus. I watched fireflies out my bedroom window. Wild blackberries grew in a tangle at the edge of our driveway.

  My favorite thing in the world was to go for a walk in the woods behind our house with my father. In the spring it was carpeted with wildflowers: Dutchman’s-breeches and jack-in-the-pulpit and glorious, white trillium. Morel mushrooms pushed up through generations of dead leaves. Shelves of strange fungus grew on fallen trees and patches of moss shaped like imaginary countries. As we walked, my father would sing German songs to me, the songs of his childhood in Bavaria before World War I.

  The path to the lake was different. My parents held my hand as we crossed the road and descended into what we called “the swamp,” a moist, dense cedar forest that was dark and fragrant, a little frightening. We balanced on planks and tippy logs at spots where streams bubbled up along the way. Our dogs loved rolling in the muck whenever it was particularly wet.

  Trees grew all the way to the water’s edge. The lake was warm as bathwater, hot almost, where it was shallow, its sandy bottom covered with thousands and thousands of smooth, slimy boards, layered on one another, shoved into the water when a sawmill once located nearby burned down in 1897, more than half a century before I was born. Every summer my father hired a man with a bulldozer, who came and piled boards into a huge heap. When they dried, and the snapping turtles had all run off, we would build a bonfire that would burn itself down to the water. Every spring, there were more boards. Go there now. You’ll see them.

  Once, shortly before she died, I asked my mother if she remembered anything hopelessly romantic, the most romantic thing she and my father used to do together. In all my memories of them together, they were young and strong and wonderful to watch. She sat for a long time without responding, then said quietly, simply, “In the summer, when the moon was full, sometimes at night, we would go down to Lime Lake. We would push out the raft and swim in the moonlight.” We had a housekeeper, so it wasn’t as if they were leaving their sleeping child alone in the house.

  In my mind I could see them slip out, hear the sound of their breathing, of their footsteps as they descended the path to the lake. I imagined the water, calm and silvery in the night stillness, rippling softly, lapping their bodies as they moved through it, bathed in moonlight, the sky alive with stars, the magic of being there alone filling their hearts. This had been my mother’s secret, a small, special treasure she had stored away for decades, so precious she only allowed me a glimpse of it as she was dying. When I wrote about it, after all I’m about to tell you had taken place, I said, “My mother’s gift to me of a silver, moonlit memory, I pass on now.…” I say it again, here.

  I believe that in the country, where the earth hasn’t been paved over, a place, a piece of land, can become part of us. We eat what its soil has produced. We drink water that has passed through it. We feel it inside ourselves as surely as if it were in our DNA.

  My mother and I never, ever, truly recovered from the loss of our home, when it was sold, and we moved to another part of the state the year after my father died. I was ten. Just as we held it in our very chemistry, it held us. The ghosts of our memories were still there among the trees, the sound of my father’s laugh in the wind through their branches. For more than thirty years, we stayed away.

  In 1992, I came back with my mother’s ashes and Winkie’s, to bury them next to my father in a cemetery at the edge of another of Leelanau County’s lakes, under a towering pine tree that was a sapling in 1957, when I’d seen it last.

  I drove past our house, someone else’s for longer than it had belonged to us. It was a different color, not white with green shutters anymore. My mother’s bright flower gardens and my swing and the sign that said DEER TRAIL COTTAGE were gone. Our low cedar hedge had grown into a line of tall trees shielding the house from the road, which had been paved. I kept driving. A little farther along, the old Ludwig house was leaning to the right, about to fall in. I stopped. By some strange coincidence … or not … I had just received an order from the county to demolish it.

  When I was maybe four or five, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, bought the twenty acres next to our forty, known to everyone for miles around as “the Ludwig place.” The house was empty, the Ludwigs long gone. I don’t remember it having indoor plumbing. It smelled musty, but to me and to my cousins it was fascinating and mysterious because it contained a post office dating back to the 1890s, the old sawmill days, not much more than an attached shed, but still there in the 1950s. In the alphabetized mail slots, we found letters, their scrawly, handwritten addresses faded, to and from real people, surely dead by then. There was something forbidden about them, as if opening the dusty envelopes would have allowed evil spirits to escape. We did open some and lived.

  My grandmother had planned to remodel the house and move there from Chicago. She died before it could happen. At first, all of her children paid the taxes and argued about what to do with the property. Then one by one they stopped, until finally, after maybe thirty years, my mother was the only one who paid anything. The property ended up hers, and when she died, mine. By then, I was paying the taxes. I suppose the timing, the fact that I had notified the county of my mother’s death, explained how it happened that just at that moment I was informed that the house was a hazard. The notice ordered me not only to knock it down but also to fill in the well, meaning that legally the property would be considered undeveloped, as if no one had ever lived there. When the job was done, I received photographs of a mound of earth with a polite ring of trees around it, like mourners at a new grave.

  My next visit to the area was four years later, in 1996. By then I’d moved back to the United States from London to work at CBS Sunday Morning. The private school where my father taught for many years had invited me to speak. The organizers of th
e event asked if there was anything special I’d like to do. I said yes, I’d like to be driven around Lime Lake. As we passed the old Ludwig place, my twenty acres, I heard the growls of earthmoving equipment. Just beyond my property line I saw acres and acres of torn-up land. “What is this?” I asked in shock. The woman driving me answered, “They’re building a golf course.”

  As beautiful as some golf courses are, the chemicals used to keep them that way can harm the soil and water nearby and even the wildlife. What would become of Lime Lake? What would happen to the woods? Would there be pressure on landowners to sell to developers? Development begets development, I’ve found. Just outside the national park, this little lakeside seemed to have CONDO written all over it. So much for wild. I asked whether some nature organization was trying to protect land in Leelanau County. Yes, I was told, the Leelanau Conservancy. That was on a Saturday.

  On Monday, I called and gave my twenty acres to the Leelanau Conservancy. It became the Teichner Preserve. I was asked to write something for the conservancy’s newsletter. I said I hoped my gift would inspire other property owners to protect land around Lime Lake, but no one did, not then.

  * * *

  TWENTY YEARS HAD passed when I accepted my new friends’ invitation to visit them in northern Michigan. I hadn’t been back in all that time. I was excited to be there. Jeannie and Gordon Hillock have what I consider the perfect summer home on a little string of lakes east of Traverse City and are wonderful hosts. They were planning a party to celebrate Gordon’s sixtieth birthday, but Jeannie and Frank Manganello, the mutual friend who’d introduced us, suggested we make time to drive the fifty miles or so to Lime Lake so they could see the Teichner Preserve and where I lived as a child.

  Here’s where what seemed like random, unrelated events turned out to be anything but. If we had done just one thing differently, none of what happened would have taken place. People can say what they like about Fate, deny it exists, but how I’ve managed to be in the right place at the right time more than once amazes me.

  We were originally going to make our trip to Lime Lake on Monday, but then changed our minds and decided to go on Sunday morning instead. What if we hadn’t? There are a lot of what-ifs about this story. Jeannie said, “Oh, let’s stop in Cedar and go to Pleva’s.” The village of Cedar, population slightly over ninety, was on our way. My mother started shopping at Pleva’s in the late 1940s, long before it became famous locally for its sausage made with cherries. In cherry country, you can buy cherry anything. When we got to Cedar, we discovered Pleva’s didn’t open until eleven o’clock. We sat in the car watching the door as if we were on a stake-out. When we saw the CLOSED sign being flipped over, we made for the door and were the first customers inside. We sampled sausage and made our choices and discussed the framed newspaper clipping on the wall about the Pleva girl who had been Traverse City’s National Cherry Queen in 1987. We decided to go to the general store, next door, because it had an extensive selection of Leelanau County and Traverse City area wines. We wanted to buy a case for the party. It’s illegal in Leelanau County to buy alcohol before noon on Sundays, so we had to wait some more. I reminisced about the Cedar of my childhood with its one blinking yellow light; the little former bank building that the Casben family turned into a meat locker, where hunters paid to hang the carcasses of the deer they shot to age; the family restaurant friends of my parents owned in the building where the general store was—history that only mattered to me. Cedar hadn’t changed much, except that it had gotten smaller. We chatted with the owner of the store, who knew which of the local wines were actually good, until finally, he looked at his watch and announced that it was noon. We paid and headed off toward Lime Lake.

  As we neared the house, Jeannie asked, “Do you want to see if anyone’s home?” I hemmed and hawed. Unless I’m working, I’m shy, not the sort of person who talks to strangers. “Well, it might be an intrusion. I don’t know the people who live there. What do you think? Maybe we shouldn’t.…” Jeannie ignored me and pulled into the driveway. I felt uncomfortable and nervous. A woman about my age with short blondish hair was sitting in a lawn chair next to the dining room door, speaking on a cell phone. As the three of us—Jeannie, Frank, and I—got out of the car, I saw the woman say something into her phone and put it down on the arm of the chair. She stood up, stared at us, stared at me for a couple of seconds, then threw her arms open wide and beamed. “You’re Martha Teichner. I’ve been waiting all these years for you to come!” Later, Frank, an opera fan, said the scene reminded him of something from an opera.

  The woman embraced me and said her name was Janna Blakely and that if we’d arrived any earlier, she and her husband, Eric, wouldn’t have been home. We told her we’d thought about coming the next day but changed our minds. “Good thing you did. Tomorrow we won’t be here. We’ll be at work.” The Blakelys invited us in.

  Forty-seven years. I did the arithmetic in my head as I walked from room to room. It had been forty-seven years since I’d been in that house. The Blakelys had made changes, but my memory of how it felt to live in its space flooded back. I could almost see my father’s morris chair in the den with its yellow leather cushions, where I sat on his lap. In the dark hall I could almost see what we called “the petting stool,” where our German shepherd had been taught to park his front paws, so he wouldn’t knock us over when he greeted us in the morning at the bottom of the stairs. My old bedroom was just as I remembered it, a tiny wedge of a thing, tucked under the slant of the roof, with that window all the way to the floor. I realized for the first time that nothing in the entire house was symmetrical, and I wondered, as I had a thousand times, about the mystery of the floorboards, maple in some rooms, pine or oak in others, wide in the den and the hall, narrow everywhere else. As we all sat in the living room, Janna Blakely asked me where my family had put our Christmas tree. I pointed to a space to the right of the fireplace. She laughed. “That’s where we put ours.” Then she asked the most important question: “Do you want to walk down to the lake?”

  Instead of the dark and fragrant swamp I remembered, closing in on us as we made our way along the old muddy path down, down into its green thickness, there was a gravel road wider than a car. The huge old cedars, so many were gone, what was left of them broken and toppled over, dead, their roots exposed, like casualties of war abandoned on a battlefield. The route to the lake was bright and hot and dry. I know that a child’s perception of a place is different from an adult’s, but I couldn’t have been that wrong. This place had been violated. It had lost its will to live.

  The Blakelys told me they owned only the house and one acre around it. Piece by piece, the land my family had owned was sold off by one owner after another. I said that for much of my life I’d dreamed of buying it all back, even the house if it was ever for sale. Eric Blakely told me that the previous summer, a good-size chunk had been on the market, maybe seventeen acres, he recalled, all the land between the house and the lake. Some kind of speculator owned it. “Is it still for sale?” I asked. “Could you please make quiet inquiries without mentioning my name?”

  I felt light-headed, disoriented. Conversations buzzed around me like clouds of insects. The rest of my visit to Michigan was a haze. All I could think about was another what-if, what if I could actually buy those seventeen acres and give them to the Leelanau Conservancy, add on to the Teichner Preserve? I had no idea what it would cost or how I’d find the money, but if I could, I would.

  A few days after I got back to New York, the Blakelys called, appalled by what the owner had told them. He’d been granted a permit to cut down trees and fill in the wetlands. He planned to build another road, like the one down to the lake, and at least one spec house. He had hired work crews. They were coming in two weeks. No. No. A voice in my head shouted, “I have to stop him.” I felt sick. Enough damage had been done.

  I phoned the Leelanau Conservancy, asked for help, and waited.

  We were up against that two-week dead
line, caught in a relentless countdown. The more I learned, the more I worried. The owner had a bad reputation. He had built spec projects before on other lakes: houses, a kind of marina. From what people at the conservancy could find out, all tacky, insensitive to nature. When he applied for his permit to build on Lime Lake, neighbors who discovered what he wanted to do were alarmed. They held meetings, petitioned the state, did everything they could to protest a project they argued would cause irreparable harm to the watershed, to the ecology of the lake … and lost. The State of Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has to approve any request to fill in wetlands. The way it was explained to me, if the DEQ fails to act on an application in three months, it’s automatically granted. That’s apparently how the developer got permission. Property owners on Lime Lake were angry and suspicious. They had made enough noise that the bureaucrats couldn’t have just forgotten.

  Then, knowing none of this, I showed up on a Sunday morning, not a Monday, when the Blakelys happened to have just gotten home. Was it chance? Or was it my parents, heartsick, reaching out from somewhere beyond the grave, guiding me to where I needed to be? How to explain such things…?

  The Leelanau Conservancy tried to convince the owner that if he sold the land to me, he wouldn’t have to borrow money and pay interest on it until the development was completed and sold. Who knew how long it would all take? By selling, he wouldn’t have to do anything. He’d be cashing out and making a profit immediately. No risk involved. But would he agree?

  “Probably not,” I was told, “but we’ll keep trying.” Days went by; for me, terrible days. A woman who owned the seven acres of lakefront next to the Teichner Preserve called the conservancy with another proposal. “I don’t think he’ll say yes, but if you can pull this off, I’ll give you my land.”