Dan Su?Erland:
CLASS OF 1975
Mona Shores High SchoolClass of 1975
Norton shores, MI
Grand Valley State UniversityClass of 1980
Allendale, MI
Dan's Story
August 9th, 2020
Wow, no 45th reunion. Totally bummed about that. I had been looking forward to it since 2015. I had a great time at the last reunion. I was reticent about going. Yet, when I was there in the banquet of Muskegon's very own Sherman Lanes, I felt great and happy. What a good crowd. It is easier to socialize as adults than as kids, I am thinking.
I do regret not being at previous reunions. The previous one I attended was the 20th. It was at the old Pontaluna across from the old WKBZ station. That one was okay. But the 40th was very relaxed and cheerful. Some people used nicknames that totally escaped me. Other people from the reunion were as fresh as cukes from the market. ( I made pickles today,BTW. Cukes, Dill, Garlic, Salt and cooled boiled water.) I have pictures from the past. These are of my Grandmother's 50th Reunion from Muskegon High School (1910-60) and my Mom's 50th from Muskegon High School (1938-88). The people in those pictures are having a fine time of it. I wonder what it is like to be 'blotto', 'two sheets to the wind' at age 68. I guess I'll have to find out.
Since wrote 'The Marker Pine', more of that area of Lake Michigan enbankment has slipped away. One group of wealthy and entitled individuals from GR who have lake front built a 550 foot steel wall. They are 'protected' now. That's all I got for this one. All the best to you - Dan Sutherland
PS About 3-4 months ago on a saturday I am lying in bed, thinking of coffee and listening to the NPR. The interviewee starts talking about Muskegon, White Lake, Hooker Chemical. They interviewed MSHS Class of '75 Kate Lynness! She lives in Albuquerque now and does all sorts of do-gooder work. She ran for Congress once. As Darth says: "Most impressive."
A very chipper and well informed voice comes on. (
The Marker Pine
by
Danny Sutherland
Overlooking Lake Michigan, half way between Duck Lake Channel and Pioneer Park, a dozen rods south of the McMillan Road access, the Marker Pine – a great White Pine, the State Tree of Michigan - had grown on the embankment for the better part, if not more, of two hundred years. The probable age is not stated lightly. At the time of the last high water – 1984ish –a pine half that height was cut for timber. Like the Marker Pine, this tall pine, overlooked the Big Lake. It had grown and lived on the thinnest of local soils – quartz sand. It had been buffeted by winds, endured Arctic conditions and desiccating summers. High water events - cyclical phenomenon - had done this tree in.
When the earlier unnamed pine had been felled, I took the time to count the annual growth rings. The grain was exceptionally tight. There were observations of twenty years of growth in the space of an inch. As I recall the number of rings extended back in time to the 1740’s. A time when the sole foreign language heard on the Big Lake was the Francaise of the Voyageurs and black-robed Jesuits.
The Marker Pine grew half way up the embankment, or bank. That meant one thing. Easily, with little chance for a failure of logic, that bank had not been changed by high water for at least several hundred years. When one looked at that part of the bank, one saw a micro-environment that extended back in time, undeveloped, unharried, to the Euro colonization of the area.
To its name: the Marker Pine was about twenty to thirty feet taller than the surrounding tree canopy. It was a coronet of a tree that could be seen from a mile away. When one walked on the beach - there was a time about five years ago when the beach was highly traversable – from Duck Lake Channel heading South, when one passed the blow out between Muskrat Lake and the Big Lake, there would be seen the Marker Pine. When one was walking North from Pioneer Park – a great local secret, a fine example of FDR’s CCC adventure, a true gem of a county park, heaven as a public campground – one could see the Marker Pine. From out on the lake, from what I could determine, using only hand paddled kayaks and canoes, the Marker Pine was unique and significant.
Ten years ago the water was very low. So low that wrecks, forgotten, buried by silt and time, were uncovered. In the delta of The Grand River, the SS AURORA, a mothballed wooden freighter that was burnt for insurance reasons, was uncovered. At that time there was two hundred feet of beach in front of the Marker Pine. I remember being down on the beach. I heard a high-pitched call. A bald eagle was making its rounds. It circled and rested in the top branches of the State Tree of Michigan, pinus strobus, the White Pine. That eagle was in the top branches of the Marker Pine.
At that time the Marker Pine was flush and green. Yet, its foliage was worried by the high winds, and the determined belittling of the native Sawyer Beetle, a long-horned bug. Yet the Marker Pine had that dense green that makes the white pine so good to see. In the dead of winter, the green against a sky of blue would be the color feast the optic nerves craved.
The white pine has biannual leaves. It sheds the two-year-old leaves in the fall and grows the new shoots the following year. This year, 2019, the Marker Pine was not doing well with its new growth. Yes, there was some growth, but not a healthy amount. At that time the water of the Big Lake was about ten feet away from the foot of the bank.
In my mind, my history, there had been The Crow Pine. Like the Marker Pine, it had been half way down the embankment. It was a tall and older white pine. There are home movies. The movies were taken by my father in the late nineteen forties. In those regular eight-millimeter home movies, the Crow Pine was healthy, green and had a crow’s nest and a murder of crows. It was like that until the high water of the mid-seventies. Then, like the Marker Pine, the new growth was slow to happen. There was a fatigued and barren look to the tree. The high water came. The Crow Pine died. The crows would come to perch but not to roost. The water ate away at the embankment. The Crow Pine toppled. Today, somewhere at the base of the bank, under tons of sand, the corpse of The Crow Pine is slowly returning to elemental stasis.
I saw the Marker Pine standing a week after Hallowe’en of this year. I looked at it long and hard. The bank around its base was starting to slide. It was a slow, inexorable and unstoppable crash of sand, leaves and maybe three inches of topsoil. The water level was at the base of the bank. The tree was still upright. The Marker Pine stood. It was an example of how a living thing could transcend many human generations.
When one owns a vacation property, one enters into a silent compact. The silent part is the work done when the sunshine people, the smiling and tanned and cheerful and easy friends of summer are nowhere to be found. The end of season work is the toil of action verbs: raking, digging, carrying, shoveling, throwing . . . and doing it all in seven to ten hours of daylight. Of course, the above is weather permitting. Help is rarely gotten.
Where are the girls of summer and their photogenic, idiotic boyfriends? Where are the old buddy-old pals who bring half a six-pack and a hunger that knows no end? (‘That T-Bone won’t be any good cold, Broheim! Best to let me finish it off. I noticed how small your ...Expand for more
‘fridge is. No room for leftovers, is there? Right.') Where are these happy campers when one needs to haul leaves to the woods, to put the summer furniture away, to put the covers on the appliances? Where? Would these carefree and delightful companions, the fresh blueberry crowd (‘Blueberries taste even better when I know that you picked ‘em. So glad I stopped by. Can I have another handful?’) not want a decent, manly, work out? Would they not want to work outside and with the wind in their face?
Ahhhh, the silence. It is not total as there is the sound of the water, the wind and the extended family of Le Corbeau,
I got down to the beach. Eroded, thick with washed up lumber and timber. I looked up and down the beach. I looked out to the Big Lake. There was eye high chop from an Alberta Clipper. Not a great Alberta Clipper, not like the one that took down the Big Fitz. Yet it was a storm that did take out more sand, more of the bank. I looked north. There was a hole in the canopy. I was not shocked. I was not surprised. I was saddened. The Marker Pine had fallen. The top two thirds jutted in to the lake. The waves were ripping away the branches. The surf was breaking the Marker Pine down to so much flotsam. It would become material for a future beach fire. I got as close to it as I could. The waves were battering. More of the bank fell. It was a reckless area of personal jeopardy. I got out of there.
The winds died. The water became flat. I saw that the Marker Pine had taken down a large section of the bank. Hundreds of cubic yards of sand had come away with the tree.
In my mind’s eye, I still saw the Marker Pine upright, the upper branches floating in the breeze. The needles have that light green, soft look to them. Not the dark green of a deep woods hemlock, or the near black green of the European Yews, but that soft, cloud-like green. Why is that, the softness in the White Pine?
I thought about that. I generated a conclusion that satisfied my curiosity. The needles of the white pine leaves are small and delicate. With any breeze the tree does not stop moving. Its shape is never definitive and precise. It has a cloud like quality to its image.
I wondered how long I would imagine the Marker Pine. How long into the future would it be a part of memory? Part of that answer is: How long had other once living trees been a part of my memory? Excised from the vertical world, what of the trees from the past?
Besides the Marker Pine and the aforementioned Crow Pine, there were at least two examples of trees that have stuck in my mind’s eye.
The first would be the grouping of silver maples planted on the curbing, or public way, of my childhood home on Summit Avenue in Roosevelt Park. The Silver Maple is a fast growing, water loving tree. It provides a lot of shade and stabilizes the land. It likes to get into the sewerage and foundation. The four in front of our home were planted when the house was built – mid fifties. They had grown rapidly. The trees had benefited from the poor drainage and historic fact that our precinct in ‘The Park’ had been a wetland.
Some time in the early nineties, the government of Roosevelt Park, a 640 acre city, got improvement money. Streets were to be widened, repaved, bigger storm drains, better services: IMPROVED.
Shady runs of Silver Maple were cut. We had to accept it. The trees were planted on The Public Way. That is land owned by the city, yet maintained by the landowner and enjoyed by the public. There is no contract that the landowner has any say in the permanency of the public way. The adjacent owner’s benefit is a set of personal intangibles.
My Mom and Dad had moved to the Park in 1954. Dad had a job a good mile away at a bearing factory. He brought his wife, kid and a ‘47 Plymouth. The cars would change. Another kid would fall from the stork. The silver maples would grow. Forty some years later the corner house was getting to be too much for my dad, a widower, alone with old memories. Traffic. Getting in and out of his driveway was a pain. The silver maples were gone. Dad moved to a quiet side street I did go back to visit. I did see former neighbors. One was a widower who lived across the street. I helped him with setting the braces for the two new public way trees. The neighbor lived alone. His one son and grandchildren lived nearby.
Our neighbor was a very kind and patient man. He was like an uncle to me. Helping him with those new trees turned out to be the last time I saw him. He did not live to see the tree grow large. I had always called him Mister Privacky†. His only son Steve was like a big brother to me. Around this time of year, I still think of that family.
Another tree that sticks in my mind the way the Marker Pine does is a white oak. West of us on Eastland in Roosevelt Park was the Ghezzi Property. I call it the Ghezzi Property because they were the first family I remember living there. The building is a very tight and clean brick ranch house. The exterior bricks are blonde beige. In the front yard there was a perfect, globe shaped White Oak. When one thinks of a White Oak Tree, this is the tree. It was like a cartoon oak tree. The tree had been there before the house was built. It was one of the few trees that had had the good luck of being chosen or ignored by the contractors. The Ghezzis had really spoiled the tree. They had planted hastas around the base. Hastas are such the anointment.
So, this beautiful white oak had grown there. As a kid I would gather sacks of its acorns. I would insist it was my job to raise squirrels and so on. In the morning I would look from my west-facing bedroom window. The oak would be there. The tree was lit so well by the early morning light. I think I could hear it say: ‘Good morning, Danny Boy. Ready for the day?’ In the evening it would flag off hundreds of sunsets. It was a globe of tree that was two houses down.
I moved away from the area. I came back. The oak was there. Another time after months away, I came home to stay with dad. It was dark when I hit the hay in my old bedroom. I got up the next morning, dressed, pulled the shades and my mind still had the White Oak. I thought it would be ready to say: ‘Welcome home, Danny Boy.'
It wasn’t there. It was gone. The Ghezzi family had moved in the eighties. A new family had moved in. The big cartoon oak was gone.
I do not need to close my eyes to see that tree. It’s there. Still mammoth, circular and cloud like. The silver maples stand in my mind’s eye as well. Other trees . . . the brace of white pines in the little patch of lawn between the high school parking lot and Seminole,
the trees that had been about Maple Grove School, then the Comerica Bank – I still see these trees.
One can get into car wrecks, close bars, get obsessed with the day to day. Still the memories endure. There is a term called ‘Persistence of Memory’. Memory does persist. It is not a precise reconstruction. Indeed, it can easily become weak around the edges and brittle. Like memory, space-time gets fuzzy around the edges. The tokens and badges get shop worn, inaccurate and flawed. They persist. Like hope, they take a long time to dim.
The End.
†Use Duckduckgo. Type in: Muskegon, Kinross, Privacky, Thanksgiving, 2010.
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