Do You Know the Myth of the Sleeping Bear Dunes?
This gorgeous and unique spot in northern Michigan has been one of the best kept travel secrets in America, but recently has been highlighted in many travel publications. The Dune Climb adjacent to both Lake Michigan and Glen Lake, may be the most visited part of the National Lakeshore, the site of the highest fresh water sand dunes in the Country.
What follows is a prose poem that was published by the Poetry Society of Michigan. Enjoy!
Better still, plan a visit of your own.
IN SEARCH OF SLEEPING BEAR
(Copyright Robert Tell)
At daybreak I ascend the dune.
The sand is firm and damp
and presses hard against my unsocked toes.
Each climbing step leaves shallow valleys
where my foot bears down.
Behind me, the dune descends steeply to its base.
Glen Lake, stretching to the shadowed hills,
stops my breath.
Ahead, the tan and granular mountain rises forever.
On the crest of the dune, the she-bear sleeps,
resting from her frenzied swim.
She waits and she dreams: images of flames
incinerating her wooded world
until, with nowhere else to turn,
her fangs bared in terror,
she boxes her cubs into icy Michigan, big water,
to swim and swim and swim.
But the cubs swim too slowly.
They tire and weaken.
Dreaming, she waits for a landfall that never comes.
Far out in the bay, across the blue green shipping
channel from where the sheer, eroded, wind-whipped
dunes tease the abrasive waves,
where oblivious freighters ply their cargo,
two misty islands report the watery spot
where both her dying cubs went down.
And still she dreams. Still she waits.
And hibernates. Surrounded by sand and sun
and lake and sky. I think I have found her.
For I've become the dune and the dune's become me.
And she has become the dune, and the dune's become she;
resolved to wait, and dream for all eternity.
