Book: The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis

or "Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas"

I just spent 10 minutes trying to find where the cover photograph of the lighthouse was taken and wandered around www.kenscottphotography.com but without finding this particular photo. It looks like a lighthouse sitting IN Lake Michigan, but with no access, no boardwalk or pier leading out to it. It's a stunning photograph of a beacon or lighthouse against a deep grey sky with huge white spindrift nearly surrounding it and waves all around.

(The web site WAS full of wonderful photographs of the Leelanau area in northern Michigan, BTW, for anyone who loves that part of this state.)

Jerry Dennis lives up there and writes about what he knows...fishing and water. In this book, he travels as part of the crew on the Malabar, a tall-masted schooner that was bought by a gentleman from Maine and which needed to be transported there. It had been in the harbor at Traverse City, Michigan for several years and used for cruises, but had developed serious enough problems in her ferro-cement hull that some thought it should be sunk in Grand Traverse Bay and used a "divers' attraction."

Jerry meets Hajo Knuttel, the man who has agreed to supervise the repairs necessary to make the Malabar seaworthy (at least those above water; they did not go below and that was of some concern through this tale....) and then captain the boat to Maine. Jerry asks to go along and work and write about it.

It's a great adventure, leaving Traverse Bay, up under the Mackinac bridge, through Lake Huron, down the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers, through Lake Erie, over Niagara Falls (just kidding), through the Welland Canal (which allows boats to get past Niagara), into Lake Ontario to the Oswego Canal, to the Erie Canal, down the Hudson River and out into Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

Along the way and before the trip begins, Jerry writes of all sorts of Great Lakes related topics. like running up to Whitefish Point one November when he heard of a monstrous storm (just barely making it across the bridge before it was closed) and then happening upon the Edmund Fitzgerald annual reunion; he tells of crewing on the Chicago to Mackinac race; of sand dune mining; of Beaver Island and the strange James Strang; of zebra mussels and other aliens; of Hemingway; of Lake Erie, dirty, polluted and now again much much cleaner and a great fishery; and of storms and weather-watching. All the while, he also tells of the Malabar and their progress.

This is one man's story of a Great Lakes boat trip while he brings the Great Lakes into clearer focus for those of us who live near them, but even more so for those who never quite comprehend what they are until they stand on their shores or until they read a book like this one.