Because Working Girls Have to Eat, Too

Vacation Dreaming

When I was very young, the word vacation meant two things. First it meant the no-school period between Memorial Day and Labor Day we knew as “summer vacation.” After vacation we returned to school in the next-higher grade. Then there was “going on vacation,” which for my family was always, every year, either riding the train or driving U.S. 30 on our way from Illinois to Ohio to visit grandparents. We didn’t rent lake cottages (let alone have one of our own) or drive out West to visit national monuments. We took the vacation that fit my parents’ budget. And my sisters and I had no complaints. We looked forward to our Ohio trips.


The summer I was 12, however, our horizons opened up considerably. My father and mother borrowed a big old heavy canvas “umbrella” tent, and we had our first family camping vacation, and our destination was the state park north of Muskegon, Michigan. It rained all week, as I recall. My mother had, it seemed, as much housework as she would have had at home. My sisters and I carried endless buckets of water and explored the campground under umbrellas. But somehow we all had a good time, and it was the beginning of an annual tradition.

One year we camped all the way down to Florida and another time as far as the Black Hills in my birth state of South Dakota. But every year there was at least one week in Michigan.

Camping is more elaborate for most families these days than the old umbrella tent our family slept in that first year. Motor homes and RVs predominate. Even tent camping has changed a lot, with lightweight tents that go up quickly and have outside frames rather than those heavy old poles that campers had to maneuver around inside when I was young. Among the more “rustic” campers there are more doing bicycle tours than when I was a kid. But one thing hasn’t changed, and that is that camping is a budget-friendly way to vacation.

The popularity of Michigan as a vacation destination is nothing new, but we’ve seen in recent years a resurgence in state residents taking vacations closer to home, as well as vacationers from neighboring Midwest states coming here rather than going farther afield. As Americans tighten their financial belts in these difficult and uncertain economic times, vacation for a lot of families is starting to look more and more like my childhood vacations. Visiting relatives and camping are coming back into vogue. And along with those simpler vacations come simple pleasures, such as walks on the beach, sitting around campfires, hiking, biking, and reading.

All this is on my mind because right here in Leelanau Township there used to be a family campground on the shore of Grand Traverse Bay. It was called Timber Shores. “Ah, you shoulda been here then!” one elderly shopkeeper used to say to me as she recalled those “glory days” of business in Northport The closing of that campground spelled the beginning of hard times for the village.


But here’s the thing. The land is still there, 450 beautiful acres with 1600 feet of pristine shoreline. In recent years two proposed developments of high-density condominiums, each plan featuring a big golf course, man-made lake and yacht basin—two developments proposed since I’ve had my bookshop in Northport—have gone nowhere. Thank heaven, I say. There are enough vacant condos on the market already. There are plenty of houses for sale, too. Real estate supply is way ahead of demand these days everywhere in the country.

But campsites? There the demand outruns the supply in our neck of the woods.

We have beautiful Leelanau State Park at the tip of the peninsula, and to the south we have the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. There are a couple of well-established private campgrounds on Lake Leelanau and one new private RV park in the county. And still more campers arrive and have to be turned away.

Many people would like to see Timber Shores returned to campground, and it’s beginning to sound very much like a live option. Supporters come from old families in the area as well as newcomers, retired people as well as those in business, all concerned that such beautiful land be preserved for public recreatioal use, all seeing the “highest, best use” in the kind of low-impact development that would benefit the area financially while welcoming families on vacation. I won’t go into the various ways the campground development might be financed or run. That remains to be seen. I will say that “continued maintenance,” cited by one opponent as an argument against the campground, spells J-O-B-S when looked at in another light. We worry how to attract young families to our area? How to keep young people from leaving when they finish school? J-O-B-S is the answer.

Do dreams come true? Might this one? If so, the economic bust that killed the condo proposals would have a happy ending for one beautiful piece of Michigan land and its nearby residents.

Reading Someone Else's Mail

I didn’t realize when I picked up the mail that a piece that should have gone into a friend’s box had inadvertently been put in ours, and before I realized the error my eye had been caught by a headline and photo: “Robinette’s Turns 100: Switch to retail helps Michigan farm last a century.” Wouldn’t you want to read the rest of the story, too? Now Robinette’s Apple Haus & Winery, the fifth generation of this concern is still, as the article notes, “clinging to the northeast edge of Grand Rapids ... while every other farm in the area has disappeared.”

It wasn’t as if I’d torn open an envelope to read a letter addressed to someone else. Fruit Grower News is a monthly tabloid, the July issue 40 pages of news and advertisements. I called our friend to say I had his mail but wanted to read a couple pieces in it, so unless he was in a big rush I’d take it back and ask the postmaster to put it in his box tomorrow morning. Here are some of the things I learned:

The Agricultural Jobs, Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act, “a legislative proposal that sought to remedy U.S. agriculture’s labor dilemma,” is probably dead in the water. Supposedly, the Administration wants a comprehensive immigration reform bill, with a single set of rules to handle immigration and labor enforcement, despite the fact (this was the editor’s point of view) that the comprehensive approach has been tried before, did not and cannot address agriculture’s unique needs, and was in its earlier guise “dragged down by baggage from other industries.”

Another way agricultural concerns have been pushed to the back burner is that funding from USDA to land-grant universities (this is from a separate article) has “been stretched to its limits by increased demands without a concurrent increase in public funding.” The Cooperative Extension service, therefore, has been cutting programs in some areas, looking for private funds in others. “Gone are the days when every county had a fruit or vegetable Extension agent who could regularly visit neighboring farms.” The financial troubles extend back into the universities and affect research, as well. Departments are shrinking, being phased out and combined with other departments under more headings. The last line of this article notes the hope that “fruit and vegetable industry partners will continue to cover more of [research] expenses,” which is not a hope that comforts me. It sounds too much like the pharmaceutical industry subsidizing drug studies and meetings of the American Psychiatric Association. Research beholding to industry cannot be fully free or objective. That last sentence is my opinion, not the FGN editor’s.

An article headlined “Agriculture must use water more efficiently” includes four general recommendations: modification to tillage practices; expanded use of cover crops; improvement in the delivery of irrigation water; and hydroponics. I’m all for cover crops. Making irrigation more efficient can’t be a bad thing, either. I’m on the fence when it comes to hydroponics, and I’ve become a little more skeptical than formerly about no-till farming. No-till, I’ve found out, is more highly reliant on herbicides, so is there really a net savings of costs to the farmer or lowered reliance on petroleum products? I don’t know enough about hydroponics to speak on the subject but am curious about chemical inputs there. After all, it takes more than water to grow healthy plants.

In the not-so-bad news category, there was no increase in losses to honeybee colonies this past year. In the surprising bad news category we learn that local farmers in some areas of the country are seeing serious drops in their farmers’ market income, with more and more vendors--not necessarily farmers--getting into the act and buyers wanting prices so low that growers can be forced to sell at a loss. The wait-and-see-but-keep-your-eye-on-it news is that climate change, specifically warming trends, may mean that some fruit and nut tree crops will have to shift further north for the winter chill these crops require.

There was much more, all of it fascinating, all of it either affecting your household grocery budget already or poised to do so in the future. I don’t understand why we are supposed to care about which movie star is divorcing or having an out-of-wedlock baby. Everyone who follows the news hears and reads about the stock market and retail business sector. Agriculture? Do you know what’s going on? Where does your food come from? Do you know?

Fruit Growers News is published by Great American Publishing in Sparta, Michigan. The articles referenced above appear in the July issue, Volume 50, Number 7.