Seagulls and Sovereignty - i

"Seagulls and Sovereignity" is 40 years old, written when we lived in Oostburg, Wisconsin, while I was in graduate school and Barbara was working in the bank just down the block from the house, uptown, where we lived for a couple of years. My off days were her work days, which meant I was the mom to our two kids, neither of them quite yet in school. So I took them out to the lakeshore, even in the cold of winter. This little essay appeared first in the Sunday magazine of the Milwaukee Journal all those years ago. I've been working on a memoir that uses published things to trace my life (and ours). Running this one here gives me a chance to put up Lake Michigan pictures.

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I didn't grow up on Lake Michigan, literally. My ethnic ancestors first set claims on the Lake Michigan shoreline, and they called their first American town their own "Amsterdam," hoping, perhaps, that the name would pro­vide some clear identity and maybe a touch of security in the new country. Today there is no Amsterdam, Wiscon­sin--no town, no streets, no church. When the railroads came twenty years after its founding, my ancestors' oxen lugged Amsterdam up and away from the shoreline on long tamarack boughs, setting it carefully down a mile away, close to the new shiny rails, sure that growth was in­evitable over there, adjacent to the freshly cut path of the great steam locomotive.

They were right, of course. So today, 125 years later, the shoreline belongs to people who have made their for­tunes in Milwaukee or Chicago, people whose names once seemed foreign to the Veldbooms, the Wilterdinks, and the Eernisses, the later generations of the first settlers. In 1850, the first Dutch immigrants knew nothing at all about the real estate market, so they turned their backs on the shoreline, moving west into soggy Wisconsin marshlands, where they put to use their old-country propensity for til­ing and draining the swamps and turning it all into produc­tive farmland.

So when I say I grew up on Lake Michigan, I mean I grew up close enough to hear its continuous roar through my open bedroom window, close enough to ride my 26 inch J.C. Higgins down to the beach and go skinny-dipping, one fairly comfortable mile from the sharp steeple of the Dutch Calvinist church where we all went to catechism on Saturday mornings. 

I grew up on Lake Michigan the way some people grow up on meat and potatoes. In high school we'd pair off, snuggle up in our cars at the end of the lake roads, and "park" -a wonderful teenage euphemism, today probably thought to be some kind of archaic usage. Every spring we'd seine for smelt in chest-high waders, and in the winter I remember driving old cars down miles of frozen sand. Annually there were those few golden weeks in August when Lake Michigan would warm to a tropical 68 degrees, and everyone would go in, confident that Bermuda had nothing on southwestern Wisconsin and our own big lake.

On hot summer nights we'd barefoot the wet shore, the continuous ebb and flow of lake waves as refreshing as a quart jar of icy lemonade after twenty acres of baling hay, its peaceful lapping as firm and reassuring as Christmas in a little Dutch Calvinist town. Often, it brought out the best in us, a walk like that, for you can't talk trivia when your footsteps have been forever erased a moment after you've left them. There was something there on the beach like that. Perhaps it's that kind of mystical presence that makes me say I grew up on Lake Michigan, as if she, or he, shaped me as surely as the smooth driftwood it offers up during every season of the year.

It's that kind of mystical presence I want my children to feel when I bring them to the shoreline now, years later, a time when too much of the beach is now sentried by bright yellow "No Trespassing" signs. But we go anyway, though it's the middle of winter.

Tomorrow: finis