anything man made
breaks, will break and once it breaks ..
that’s it, game over

“An oil spill would be catastrophic for all of North America, this place would become a toxic wasteland that would be contaminated for years,” said Whitney Gravelle, an Ojibwe person who is president of the Bay Mills Indian Community. “People often can’t even believe there is a pipeline going through the Great Lakes. It seems crazy that we just have this heart attack waiting to happen.

So writes Oliver Milman, the environment reporter for Guardian US in his article, ‘We can’t drink oil’: how a 70-year-old pipeline imperils the Great Lakes.

Mr. Milman continues, At the centre of this maelstrom are the native Great Lakes tribes that cherish the Straits of Mackinac, the four mile-wide stretch of water the ageing pipeline bisects, in creation stories as the birthplace of North America itself. They claim Line 5, which cuts through swathes of native land in its 645-mile route, is a “ticking time bomb” that imperils the Great Lakes, which contain a fifth of Earth’s entire surface fresh water, and risks severing deep, existential bonds of cultural connections that stretch back millennia.”

(What would an Oil Spill look like? Click here.)

If you grew up in the State of Michigan like I did, at some point in your life your family made a trip to upper lower Michigan, or the Straits, meaning the Straits of Mackinac, the body of water that joined Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

A body of water spanned by the Mackinac Bridge and the location of Mackinaw City, Michigan.

Or as Clifton Webb pronounced it, talking to his estranged wife Barbara Stanwyck, who was in the process of leaving Mr. Webb in London and taking the children the quickest way possible which was to buy tickets on the RMS Titanic to her home town of, “MACK – EEE – NACK, Michgan” in the 1953 movie Titanic.

There is a park at the top of the Michigan Mitten and you can park at the park and walk under the bridge.

On one side of the bridge is a sign that says, LAKE HURON.

And on the other side is another sign that says, LAKE MICHIGAN.

My Dad would stand there and every time say, “This is the Straits of Mackinac, Lake Michigan is way over there and Lake Huron is way over there past the island.”

All of us kids would nod our heads in agreement and wonder how the State of Michigan could screw up something so simple.

We made the trip to the Straits on what seems a yearly basis.

There were 11 kids in my family and whoever happened to be home at the time would be invited along so anywhere from 6 to 13 people would pile into the car for the trip

The trip involved a long drive that started in the pre dawn and a stop at some roadside park for a picnic breakfast.

My Mom would pack a cooler with milk, juice and those little travel boxes of breakfast cereal.

That was back when those boxes had specific perforations on them so the one side could be opened and then you could tear the wax paper bag carefully and pull it back so that it became a travel bowl that could hold milk.

We marveled at such thoughtful ingenuity on behalf of those folks at Kelloggs.

My Dad had a little propane stove to heat up water for tea or coffee.

This for my Dad, was all the camping he wanted to do.

This view on camping and of what-is-fun has rubbed off on me while the rest of my Family gathers at campgrounds every year.

We would sit at dew damp picnic tables and my Dad would moan that he forgot to bring a towel to wipe off the benches.

He never did bring a towel as he didn’t want a wet towel in the car anyway.

The invention of paper towels was a big day for him.

Breakfast done it was time for a bathroom break and washup.

The bathroom’s at Michigan Roadside stops in those days where small wooden sheds over pit toilets that were one step above an outhouse.

The disinfectant or lime or whatever was dumped into those things had a unique smell or odor all its own and without much trouble I can still smell it.

To wash up, the State of Michigan had installed a standup hand pump over a well.

We stand in line and take turns pumping the pump as someone rinsed their hands or tried to get a drink of what we called, ‘iron water.’

You would pump that handle three or four times and holding the handle you can feel the water coming up and out the pipe to splash on the concrete bed surrounding the pipe.

Breakfast over and back in the car, we would start looking out the front window for the first sign of the towers of the Mackinac Bridge.

We would start looking around Gaylord, Michigan when we were still an hour south of the Straits.

Someone would catch a glimpse of the first white steel tower of the bridge and yell, THERE IT IS, I SEE IT.

I think I would start yelling that whether I saw it or not and then say, there behind the trees.

My Dad knew a small motel that was our destination and we would stop, unload then start our day in Mackinaw City.

We would start at the Fort and the Bridge museums and see all the things we saw every year.

Lunch was always at Tyson’s Cafeteria and, for reasons I never understood, we got the famous Chicken Pot Pie.

Don’t get me wrong as they were good but Swanson’s Frozen Chicken Pies were a Saturday Lunch staple at my house and I didn’t see much of difference.

After lunch was the drive over the bridge and a trip through St. Ignace and maybe all the way up to Castle Rock with the little kids pointing out every souvenir stand and the older kids yelling TOURIST TRAP.

At some point we always, as did EVERYONE, got some fudge.

I would daydream of the day when I was rich and I would be able to buy my own half-pound slab of chocolate and holding it like a sandwich eat it all by myself.

Getting fudge was so much of a rule when visiting the Straits, that in 1976 when President Gerald Ford was on the island and went to Church with the Governor of Michigan, the Secret Service thought they were safe and moved on to the next venue.

After Church, the President and the Governor realized they HAD to get some fudge and went out a different door and the Secret Service lost the President for a while.

Luckily there were on an island.

I remember also as some sort of right-of-passage, when my Parents felt my sister’s reached the right age, that sister and my Parents leave the rest of us at the hotel and they would make a trip to the ‘Strip’ of Mackinaw City and then, that sister would pick out a silver and turquoise ring.

At least that is what is in my memory and it seems to my that my sisters wore those rings for years.

Behind it all, the parks, the restaurants, and the travel, there was this sense that where we were was a pretty special place.

The land and the water and the islands and the beaches and the rocks and the waves were integral to what made Mackinac, Mackinac.

And we knew it.

I feel that my Parents put special emphasis on the view and the beauty of the place though we might not have appreciated it at the time.

Michigan and the Great Lakes were special.

In school in the State of Michigan, 4th graders studied Michigan History.

Back then, the State celebrated Michigan Week and in school, little pamphlets of Michigan Fun Facts were passed out so us students could be ‘Michigan Minutemen’ and spout off all sorts of information about our state.

And we did!

The State motto is, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you” with a image of a man on a beach on the State Seal.

Once in a Church board meeting where the task at hand was composing the Church Mission Statement, I suggested, “If you seek a pleasant Church, look about you” and it got some traction until one of my Brothers-in-Law exposed me.

The motto on State License plates used to alternate between Winter Wonderland and Water Wonderland until someone got tired of switching and for a few years we had Winter-Water Wonderland.

The Sunday Magazine Supplement of the Grand Rapids Press was titled, Wonderland Magazine.

One time editor of the GRPress, Gerald Elliott once confided in me that of all the changes made by the GRPress, it was Wonderland the he missed the most when it was stopped.

That was the only place for local writers to be recognized he said to me with regret.

So I read with dismay the sentence, “”It’s little known to the throngs of tourists who gawp at the wonder of the Great Lakes but at the meeting point of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, a combined system that forms the largest lake in the world, there is a 70-year-old pipeline, battered and dented by dropped boat anchors.“

I knew about the pipeline I guess as it has been in the news for years.

But managed to forget it about but reading this article about all I can say it … what else can go wrong?

I remember back in the day when then Gov. Jim Blanchard, when the state was broke, looked into making Michigan a national nuclear waste site.

Someone pointed out that as the center of one of the world’s largest concentrations of freshwater, this wasn’t the best idea.

Maybe we can have that realization again.

As Mr. Milman writes, “The battle over this 70-year-old pipeline may drag on for several more years but the anxiety of the Great Lakes tribes won’t easily abate. At a recent protest event on the banks of Lake Michigan, called the Water is Life festival, banners reading “Protect the Great Lakes” and “We can’t drink oil” fluttered in the breeze of a waning summer as small knots of people gathered around a stage to listen to music and speeches.

“Anything manmade breaks, and that pipeline will break,” said Jannan Cornstalk, an Odawa woman who has organized this festival for the past five years. “And once it breaks, that’s it. Game over.”

PS – BTW the photo is the Mackinac Bridge. When it was built, David B. Steinman was appointed as the design engineer said there is a bridge that will last 100 years! That was in 1958 … tic tic itc