As We Wander

January 31, 2025

Saginaw Bay, Lake Huron, Michigan

I’ve always had a love for the open road, whether it be on foot or by wheel. I do my best thinking while on the move and the possibilities that lie beyond the horizon have always pulled me on down the road. After recently resigning from my job of ten years- let’s call it irreconcilable differences though I prefer to imagine the universe was just telling me to pursue art full time- I needed some road therapy and a change of environment. But with somewhat limited time and even more limited resources (see that whole quitting my job part), I couldn’t go far, though I wanted to go somewhere new. 

I decided to visit Lake Huron. I’d only ever seen it in glances from a distance before, though I’ve spent time along both Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, two of its cohorts in the Great Lakes chain. Specifically, I chose Saginaw Bay, which separates the “thumb” of Michigan from the rest of the Lower Peninsula. I loaded the first park or preserve I found with direct bay access into the GPS, Quanicassee Wildlife Area, and that was that. Clearly, this wasn’t the oodles of research that photographers are often known to do. Locations, weather, angles, all those other details: it would either fall into place, or it wouldn’t. With a low-stakes outing like this, sometimes it’s more fun to go in blind. 

Morning rolled around quickly, as it always does. As it was over a five hour drive, I knew I wouldn’t make it in time for sunrise unless I was willing to forego sleep completely. I wasn’t. Perhaps still too early, at 4:30am I left Indianapolis and headed north. 

The sky was overcast under a new moon, with alternating clouds of fog and drizzle, and the streetlights shone like epiphanies through the early morning. I was nearing the Michigan line before my surroundings revealed a break from the gloom. 

A quick stop covered gas, bathroom, and a snack, then I was back to it. It’s the rhythm of the road. The miles sing by and the muse sometimes even sings back. 

Occasionally I’d scrawl a jagged sentence or two without looking on the notepad that is never far from hand. The sun rose, the sky as white as the snow that still coated the ground in many places. At a distance, the fog still obscured what the light tried to show, and it quietly swallowed up everything it could during moments of inattention. 

After countless crossroads across increasingly empty highways, eventually I arrived to find a surprise. I had expected the park to be equally empty, but the parking lot was nearly full, and people were coming and going on snowmobiles while I parked and readied my gear. At first I thought that I’d stumbled into an event in progress, but found no organization; two or three people would come roaring in from somewhere and another would head out toward the frozen bay. 

When I recieved a “good morning” from a guy packing up to leave, I stopped to ask what was going on, and why there were so many people out so early. He shot a dubious look at my cameras- a DSLR on each hip, and a GoPro strapped to my chest- as if he thought I was putting him on. His companion started snickering as soon as I said early.

“They’re fishin’,” he replied in the kind of patient tone one reserves for someone foolish like… well, me. 

With that context, it made way more sense, and what began as a noisy annoyance suddenly became something cool. They weren’t bros running snowmobile races; they were working people, adjusting to the conditions provided by nature. When I watched the next one roar down the frozen boat ramp turned runway- early for recreation, but oh so late for fishing- I had a better appreciation of what was going on. Upon returning home, I did the research that I had previously shirked and found that Saginaw Bay is ranked among the top ice fishing spots in the country, listed at the #4 spot for 2025 by FishingBooker, a major online platform. According to an article by Midland Daily News, walleye is the primary catch in the bay’s waters, and when the ice has sufficiently thickened, someone with a snowmobile could traverse as far as ten miles onto the surface to fish. 

I hiked out on a spur alongside the launch that extended a short way into the bay, and through the hazy morning I could catch the silhouettes of some fishermen on the move. Some headed further out on the ice, and some were returning; others were heading to those esoteric places that only fishers can identify. I watched until the bite of the late-January wind was too much for me and turned back to see what else I could stumble across. Before leaving the area, I took a turn around the short loop trail into the woods next to the bay. The trees all strained their bare branches toward the sky like Dante’s damned seeking succor. That’s foreshadowing you see- I noticed it, yet took no note of it. Old snow crunched under my boots, and the sky, which had continued to take bites out of the horizon all morning, was so colorless as to make the freshest snow look grimy.

On the Saginaw River, after I left the bay behind me, fishermen without engines sat in ice houses while seagulls plied the same trade, watching their own holes in the ice from which they would occasionally strike and pull out a minnow. The cold wind, still blowing, soon forced me back to the warmth of the car and onto the road. 

I’d planned on leapfrogging my way back home, stopping at several locations on the way, something I do often that gives me a chance to visit places that I likely wouldn’t have found otherwise. I selected the next target in the GPS and pulled onto the highway. 

The first snowflake didn’t raise any red flags. In fact, I laughed a little at the thought I’d had that I would get through ice-bound Michigan in January without any snowfall. Yet when a few million of its relatives suddenly followed, things got a little more dicey. Rime ice built up across the road in moments- that highway, remember, with a speed limit of 75 miles per hour. 

After a recent late-night white-knuckle ride through frozen Appalachia, I’ve had my fill of winter storms, but it’s not like I could opt out. The sky is an ambush predator, the most insidious one of them all, and it had already scattered its prey across the road, shoulders, and nearby fields. Those of us who continued did so at a crawl, trying not to draw its ire. 

I turned off the GPS, parks forgotten. My goal had changed to simply getting the hell out of there. At least my car’s thermometer showed that the temperature had come up a bit outside; hopefully as I continued to work my way south, I would break out of this dangerous weather. 

I kept driving. The temperature kept rising. The snow kept coming down. 

When the thermometer showed 40, I wondered why the ice wasn’t melting. When it hit 50, I stuck my arm out the window and assured myself that yes, it was still cold. At 60, I questioned the equipment, but that was entirely too mundane for such a situation. Once it hit 70 degrees, and nearly white-out conditions, I wondered if the environmental apocalypse had hit in earnest; at 80 degrees, I decided that it was loading the percentage of my fracturing sanity. 

Finally, when the thermometer reached 82 degrees and I still fought to keep my Jeep on the road, whatever had covered the sensor began to melt. The digits started to click back down and so too the surrealism of the scene. 

I did eventually break out of the storm and exchange rain for the snow; all that remains of it in my hometown is a few dirty lumps of cold at the roadsides, and the bases of melted snowmen. 

Though Nature may likely still have her last hurrah, winter’s hold is coming to a close here. I hear the warble of sandhill cranes daily as they begin to work their way back north, as well as the gleeful cacophony of geese. Every part of the year has its wonder, but I look forward to what I will find in these first tentative stirrings of spring. When the woods begin to wake up, I feel like I do too.

So- where to next?