Saugatuck: vacationing
Saugatuck: vacationing
Carol does not often read this journal and has declared that she does not like being mentioned here, so I won’t.
This will result in pronouns that while literally correct may be sometimes misleading. I can live with that.
Although the title of this site is self-portrait in the present sea, as I note in the journal introduction, making a journal public changes things, and not all of me or my life is here.
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Saugatuck is a small tourist town on the east side of Lake Michigan, a three hour, 160 mile drive from Evanston. It is farther north than Evanston, being approximately opposite Kenosha, Wisconsin, and is in the Eastern Time Zone. Although I moved to Evanston four years ago, until Sunday Michigan remained one of only two states I had never visited. Now there is only one, South Dakota.
Despite the short distance, probably not much more than sixty miles across the water, the Michigan shore is quite different from Illinois, with high sand dunes and many boat harbors formed at the mouths of small rivers running into the lake. Illinois really has no natural harbors. Though the mouth of the Chicago River was one once, it is difficult to visualize now after landfill and skyscrapers.
In Saugatuck the Kalamazoo River widens just east of a bend at its mouth, forming a well-protected natural lake-like harbor.
I arrived Sunday, part of the Memorial Day weekend, which for those of you outside the U.S., marks the beginning of summer here, one of the busiest days of the season for the town, whose three or four downtown streets were jammed with cars and tourists. I drove through without finding a parking spot, turned around and was driving back to my lodging when a car chanced to vacate one in front of me.
The artsy shops, street singers, and general atmosphere reminded me of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Yesterday, Memorial Day, marked the end of most people’s holiday weekends, and the town and the B &B where I am staying emptied, making both decidedly more pleasant.
The surrounding area is heavily forested, and road kill is on an epic scale. In two days I have seen six dead deer on the roadside..
June 2
Saugatuck, Michigan
A line of thunderstorms passed before dawn and rain is still pattering on the roof of the cottage as though on deck. This is not an Evanston experience, where any pattering from above is of the people walking about on the fourth floor.
Storms also moved over the area two days ago, with tree-toppling wind and as much as 5” of rain falling and flooding some places. Yesterday, however, was perfect. Sunny, light wind, 81ºF/27C.
I bicycled a couple of miles to Saugatuck’s ‘famed’--though I must confess I had never heard of it--Oval Beach.
The writer of Saugatuck’s official tourist literature likes rankings.
On a single page the reader is told that Saugatuck is one of the “Dozen Distinctive Destinations” named by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Fifth among the “Top 100 Vacation Destinations” of Midwest Living Magazine. One of “Michigan’s Coolest Cities” as determined by Michigan Governor Granholm. “Consistently named one of America’s Top 25 Art Destinations” but not specifically by whom. Has according to the Screen Actors Guild Magazine, the third most popular film festival in the world, after Sundance and Cannes.
Oval Beach is said to be ranked in the top 25 in the world by Condé Nast magazine, one of the top two in the United States by National Geographic Traveler, and one of the Midwest’s top five by the Chicago Tribune.
I don’t know about all that, but it is in fact a nice little town and a nice little beach, a narrow strip of sand at the base of a bluff of dunes covered with beach grass and backed by thick forest. The beach runs relatively straight north/south, and is not curved, much less oval.
Two power boats emerged from the river entrance just to the north of Oval Beach, turned a half mile offshore, one north, one south, and powered parallel to the shore. Farther out, a ship was heading south. I’m not sure to where. Certainly not Chicago. Perhaps Gary, Indiana.
Cycling back to Saugatuck, I found the town center almost deserted. Where on Sunday people jammed elbow to elbow, I looked down a treelined street and saw only two people looking in a gallery window.
I ate lunch at a restaurant that shares a waterfront building unexpectedly with the Singapore Yacht Club.
In the nineteenth century optimists founded a town on the north side of the river mouth which they named Singapore in the hope that it would become a great port. It is now lost beneath dunes. Only the yacht club lives on.
The photo is taken from the cottage in which I was staying at Saugatuck. One of the storms pasted foliage against a window pane.
Thursday, June 3, 2010