Sunlight Through the Maple Forest

Growing up in Michigan made me a forest girl.

From wandering the First Woods at the end of Caroline Street to setting up family tents in State Forests, I developed an affinity for trees, shade, sunlight through rippling leaves, birdsong, and the perfume of woods after rain. When I think of forests, I think of Michigan summer.

Half of Michigan is forested, 20 million acres worth, giving a home to the gray wolf, black bear, migratory songbirds, hikers, hunters, campers, and dreamers.

The oldest forests include cedars on Lake Michigan cliffs (1,400 years old), U.P. red and white pines, and the Hartwick Pines 10,000-acre park with hemlock and white and red pine, 400 years old, giving a hint of Michigan as it was being settled.

Karen Michelson Hartwick bought the more than 8,000 acres of land in 1927, including 86 acres of old-growth white pine. She donated the land to Michigan as a memorial for her husband killed in WWI.

She stipulated that the land never be logged, and that a log cabin be built to commemorate her husband, Major Edward Hartwick, and lumberjacks during the white pine logging era, 1840-1910. Tragically, a 1940 windstorm blew down 37 acres of the original trees.

After white and red pine forests, with spruce, balsam, cedar, and birch; oak-hickory forests developed, including red, white, and black oak, chestnut, hickory, white ash, black birch, sassafras, and red maple. Following in forest development are beech-maple woods—including the stunning sugar maples.

The First Woods were made of oak, beech, and maple, with a patch of sassafras. Maples grew up and down Caroline Street—sugar, silver, red—and horse chestnut, sycamore, black walnut, catalpa, a Japanese maple, and an enormous weeping willow, as well as apple, cherry, and pear trees.

And countless box elders, an unwelcome maple since every heavy rain and windstorm brought down branches or whole trees across yards, garages, and porches, sending the horrendous box elder bugs in every direction.

But forests, complete with curving shady paths, marshy patches promising trilliums in springtime, spring peepers, frogs, squirrels, and mystery are so much a part of Michigan for me, especially Michigan summer, that I miss standing inside the line of trees, having picked thimble-sized ripe blackberries, ready to explore as I dream of a cabin in the woods.

I’ve savored royal palm trees on a beach at sunset, with the breeze rattling fronds and sounding like rain. Walked paths beneath live oaks 85 years old listening to carillon bells.

Watched sand pine leaves wave against the sky from a remote Florida road, inhaled the heady fragrance of magnolia flowers, picked tangerines, and stopped to catch orange blossoms on the wind.

Yet there’s nothing like gazing into the canopy of a Michigan forest when the sun slants through the branches, frogs celebrate somewhere nearby, and the path beckons.

Whenever possible, celebrate the beauty and serenity of a Michigan forest.

The memory stays with you a lifetime.