The Oakland Tribune, August 9, 1987

Up in Siskiyou mountain country, in the northwest corner of California, there is a spot known to the Karuk tribe as Kota-Mein.

In the Karuk language, Kota Mein means “center of the world.”

Like their ancestors before them, the Karuk people hike up to sacred spots like Kota-Mein, Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock to talk to the Great Spirit and to receive power.

I have never been to Kota-Mein, but I have been to Bass Lake, Mich.

If I were drawing a map of the world, its center would be at Bass Lake, just where its outlet flows into the great, blue Lake Michigan.

I have lived in California for nearly two decades, but like my forebears – my mother, her mother Toto, her mother Nana, and her mother, Grandma Harlow – I return to Bass Lake every chance I get.

I am drawn there as surely as a Michigan mosquito is drawn to the juicy ankles of anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors after dark in a Michigan summer.

Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock have been compared by their devotees to black holes in space, vortexes, whirlwinds of energy. Those spots on Earth have, it is said, the power to give the worthy pilgrim a vision of transcendence.

Last month, I left my husband behind in the Eastbay with a freezer full of spaghetti sauce and meatloaf.

The children and I boarded a Boeing 767 for a pilgrimage to Michigan. I wanted to show them my secret spots. Peter, 6, and Christina, 3, were enthusiastic.

They donned hats and mosquito netting to pick raspberries in the woods with their grandfather.

They watched the cherries being harvested. They caught a toad and inspected a patch of poison ivy.

Peter and Christina aboard a classic inner tube.

They learned to soothe their mosquito bites by wiping them with spit.

They met their great-aunt Ruth and made friends with a half-dozen second cousins, some of whom were drawn here, as we were, all the way from the West Coast.

They chased minnows in the warm, brown water of the Bass Lake outlet.

They took wet fistfuls of the creamy, miraculously clean Lake Michigan sand and let it drip off the ends of their fingers to make dainty drip castles.

They heard the story of the drip castle party their Uncle David and Aunt Alice once threw on the shores of the Pacific.

My brother and his wife, also a Midwesterner, once invited some California friends to a beach party, promising to initiate them in the intricacies of drip castle building.

They discovered, to their chagrin, that Northern California sand does not drip. The project was a flop.

Christina and Peter drift toward Lake Michigan.

When they grew sweaty, my children waded down the outlet into the Big Lake. They threw their bellies onto the breaking waves and dove for the smooth rocks buried in the sand.

Again and again, they climbed aboard a much-patched inner tube and drifted down the outlet into the Big Lake.

The hours passed.

My mother sat on a beach towel spread on the sand, watching her daughter and grandchildren. “This is life,” she sighed.

Behind her, Lake Michigan’s waves crashed noisily on the beach, just as they had crashed when I was a girl and when she was a girl and when our great-grandmothers were girls.

When I was a seventh-grader, I painted a picture of this beach in art class. Sand, grass and lake blended together in a misty – and I thought – very successful portrait of my beach.

My art teacher was displeased. “It doesn’t look real,” she said. “Too sweet.”

Before we left, I showed Peter and Christina one last secret spot – the view of the Big Lake and outlet from a high sand bluff to the north.

From this bluff, there is nothing to see but beauty. Even the human bathers, many of them grown fat on too much cherry pie and sweet corn, take on a certain grace when seen from up here.

Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

I had my Nikkormat along and, as always, I took a picture of the outlet.

The Siskiyou Indians forbid photographs of their “power sites.” When my pictures returned, I saw that, sure enough, it had happened again.

My magical spot was gone. What I held in my hands was a 3 ½ by 5-inch glossy of – just another beautiful beach.

I’ll have to go back and try it again.

© 1987  The Oakland Tribune

Lake Michigan as it is and has been for since my great-grandparents' time. You can't see across this lake. It's 118 miles wide, and all you can see is water -- all the way to the horizon. Photo C 2007 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I saw the map and burst into tears.

 It broke my heart.

Windmills, a hundred square miles of them, are being proposed for Lake Michigan – a couple miles off shore. In the lake.

Beautiful, serene, life-giving Lake Michigan.

My cousin had sent me the link to the website. She wanted me to know that Scandia Wind LLC of Sweden was proposing to build 200 off-shore wind turbines near Pentwater, Michigan – blighting what for me and for a lot of other people is the most beautiful spot on Earth: the stretch of Lake Michigan north of Grand Rapids between Ludington and Silver Lake.

If built, the Scandia Aegir Project would be the biggest off-shore wind farm in the world.

Windmills, a lot of them – at the exact spot I spent my summers as a kid. Where my father was born and is buried. Where he and my mother met. Where grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides of the family lived, reared children and died.

I’m not objecting to wind turbines. Windmills are a great source of clean, sustainable energy. I’ve seen them and they are beautiful in the way so many man-made structures are beautiful – the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station.

The Altamont Pass here in the San Francisco Bay Area is dotted with thousands of wind turbines. Every time we drive past those tall, steely towers  facing resolutely west to capture the winds coming in off the Pacific, they take my breath away. They are stunning.

But they don’t belong on – in – Lake Michigan.

I’m a seriously green person. People make fun of how green I am.

The last time my husband and I bought cars, we both opted for hybrids, at considerable extra expense. We also have those (to me awful) CFL light bulbs all over the house.

Not only that, we have five – count ‘em five – different waste cans in our kitchen, one for plastic bags, one for paper, one for bottles and cans, one for compost and one – very small can – for actual trash that can’t be recycled here in Oakland.

Every time I toss a tea bag into the compost bin, I think, I’m doing this for my planet. I’m doing it for Lake Michigan.

I know. Lake Michigan is two thousand miles from our house in Oakland. My old tea bag has no chance of ending up anywhere near Michigan, let alone in Lake Michigan.

But, I think as I so carefully send the tea bag off to be composted, that if I take care of California, hopefully, maybe, with any luck, somebody back home will take care of Lake Michigan.

My green credentials established, I will now rant and weep at the prospect of wind turbines along the coast of my beloved Lake Michigan.

There are all kinds of solid, sensible arguments against this project. The people at a citizens group called the Lake Michigan P.O.W.E.R. Coalition (Protect Our Water, Economy and Resources) have spelled them out intelligently on their website.

The sight of hundreds of wind turbines spinning on the lake can do serious damage to the local tourist industry, they point out, as well as endanger local water life, boating and fishing. And it’s not at all clear that the project will bring anything but temporary, unskilled jobs to the area.

I would say, yes we need clean energy. Yes, we need alternatives to coal, nuclear energy and foreign oil. But – is endangering and defacing Lake Michigan and turning 100 square miles of it into an industrial district the answer?

What do we mean by green, anyway?

Some will say this is just another case of NIMBY — Not in my back yard.

But Lake Michigan is not my back yard.

Lake Michigan is not a back yard.

It is a natural wonder as precious as Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Old Faithful.

It’s Nature with a capital N. It is the natural world at its most exquisite. It a vibrant, loving presence that has nourished the spirits of the people who have lived along its shores for millennia. 

It’s a place where people finish dinner and, instead of going to a movie or watching TV, walk down to the beach with their folding chairs to sit and watch the sun set – and remind themselves that they live in a world created by an extravagant God.

Whether we allow this particular – to me holy – place on earth to be violated by a 100-mile-square stand of wind turbines towering 300 feet above the lake, beautiful as those turbines can be in their own steely, graceful way, is not a subject I’m willing to debate.

Would Californians countenance a stand of wind turbines atop Half Dome or on the mountains around Lake Tahoe? Would Floridians allow them anywhere near the Florida Keys or the Everglades? For that matter, would the Swedes allow them on the beautiful lakes that wind their ways through Stockholm?

Automobiles. iPhones. Microwaves. Dishwashers. What’s the point of all that energy-consuming stuff if, once we have arrived at our destinations, texted our friends, nuked the dinner and dispatched the dirty dishes — what’s the point if there’s no beauty left in the world?

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall — Permission granted to reprint and reuse this column, with credit to Barbara Falconer Newhall and link to this website, http://BarbaraFalconerNewhall.com/  Thanks.

Below: The map that made me cry, and how the wind turbines might look from the shores of Lake Michigan.