A Taste of Fall at Sleeping Bear
By Laura Ann Johnson
As a parent, school starting back up after summer is a welcome change, but no one is ready for those warm beach days to end, either. We all have to get used to non-beach activities when the weather starts to cool off; we dust off our bikes, find our hiking shoes, and head out on the trails.
One day this summer, I randomly told my kids, “You can pick a bushel of apples in the National Lakeshore.”
Well, game on! Every day, they were asking me when we could go pick apples! I promised that on the first non-beach day, we could look for and pick apples. This past Saturday was the day!
We headed out with our apple picker and a sense of adventure, picking from six different trees and places! It was like our own little scavenger hunt; their eyes were glued to the windows, scanning the fields as we drove down M22 and yelling, “APPLE TREE! STOP, MOM!” I, of course, knew where to find some. Our first stop was right down from the Tweddle schoolhouse, where there was a nice row of trees right off the road.
They couldn't get out of the car fast enough and soon started fighting over who got to use the apple picker first. The rule was that we would pick one and each try it; if we liked it, we would pick a few more. Double thumbs up from everyone, and we picked a few more before moving on.
We did a circle on Aral Road and back on M22 and found a few more in some fields. Our third stop wasn't our favorite, but we did save a honeybee that tried to hitch a ride in the back of our car.
We knew there was an orchard at Port Oneida and headed back there to finish off our trip. It was really fun to make up stories of the families who planted these trees and why, what they were making from their apples, how long the apples would last them, and how they picked the apples.
I have no idea what type of apples we picked. Some we really liked and others we passed on, but we were all so grateful to be exploring our National Lakeshore in a new way, bounding through fields to these old apple trees full of beautiful fruit, willing to share their bounty with us.
We came home, and I decided to make a galette; we each picked a few apples to put in it and waited impatiently for it to cook. As a self-proclaimed pretty good baker, I can do better, but everyone loved it! Perhaps it was the big scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.
I don't know who planted those trees, or why, or if they ever imagined a family driving down M22 decades later just to pick their fruit and make up stories about them. But that's the quiet magic of this place: it keeps giving, season after season, long after the people who first cared for it are gone. This fall, I hope you find your own patch of trees – and a little adventure waiting there.