I woke up this morning to a beautiful Lake Huron sunrise, strong winds, and a couple of inches of the white stuff. As I sit here at the table in my cabin, listening to a Furman football game, I’m looking out at something I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen before: snow in the foreground and the lake, with huge white caps, in the back. The wood stove in the cabin is doing an amazing job – I’m in my underwear and have cracked a window, both to cool things down a little bit and to let me hear the wind, which is constant and incredibly soothing. I played my wind game for about an hour earlier this morning, which I haven’t been able to do for several years.
Wind game: try to find a spot outside that allows me to simultaneously be in and out of the wind. I invented it as a small child in Shoreham – the perfect spot was behind the berry bush between the roots of the Elm tree in the front yard. The best spot I found today was in a Cedar Grove near the beach.
Took two fairly long walks today. The first one took me to Cheboygan Point, about a mile from here. I wandered around there for a while, then walked east on the beach back past my cabin to the edge of the park. Came back to the cabin for a lunch of chicken and dumplings, then opted to walk over to the campsite on the southern edge of the park rather than take a nap.
I’d just arrived back at the cabin after that trek when one of the rangers showed up to give me some rock salt and – you called it, Dad! – a snow shovel. I shoveled off the front of the cabin, where I have my “settin’ outside” chair, before coming back in to listen to the game. Later today, I might get enough energy to shovel off the walkway that leads to the latrine.
A bit about the cabins here at Cheboygan State Park: there are three of them, all available year-round, and all basically the same. I stayed in the Poe Reef cabin last year. This time, I’m at 14-Foot Shoals, which is about a mile further off the main road than Poe. A quarter-mile further along is Lighthouse Cabin. 14-Foot Shoals has a “porch” of sorts, which is missing in the other two cabins. It’s just a little 3-foot overhang across the front of the cabin, but it’s a great place to sit outside without being completely exposed to the elements.
Other than that, the cabins are all pretty much the same. They’re square buildings – I’d guess about 20 feet per side – with a single room under a peaked roof. Each wall has at least one window (2 on the lake-facing wall), and there is a small counter in one of the lakeside corners. Each building also has a wood stove, 4 sets of bunk beds, a table with two benches, and a number of wooden chairs. Hooks in the rafters provide a good place to hang a lantern (there is no electricity). Each cabin also has two out-buildings: a vault toilet and a large woodshed. Water is available from a hand pump outside (kind of yellow this year, but seems to taste alright), and there are two picnic tables and two firepits – one set at the forest side of the cabin and the other on the beach.
I’m sure that, during the summer, the beaches here get crowded. In late October/early November, however, I’ve had the place pretty much to myself. Yes, there are people staying in the other two cabins, but they are distant enough to not exist, basically. Solitude is what I like, and this place has it.
