For 50 plus years Portage Bay has been our magical get-away destination, a place we run to for both delight and solace. So many memories....In the early 70's introducing our Heidi, Joel, and Beth to camping in first a tent and then a Camp Ho-tel on top of our car. (Jim and I have since graduated to a pop-up camper that always smells like summer days in Portage.)  Starry nights. Stately pines, their limbs grown gray with age. Swans swimming in an orange bay as the sun rises up and up and up. A wonderful copse of trees where our six-year-old Joey and his dad found the biggest, fattest worm that would temp all the fish in the bay. Songs sung around the campfire that made us all giggle.

We remember----

The gruff but kind campground host whose summer home was an olive-green Air Stream set on Site 9. His biology background made him the go-to guy for answers in what i think was a slight German accent about so many of the "WILD THINGS" like turtles laying eggs on the sandy dunes, his wife must have been deathly allergic to bugs, because when she visited him, and they walked around the loop, she was garbed from head to toe in long pants, long sleeves, gloves and a bee keeper's net around her head.

The young couple who pulled their house sized trailer onto the site next to ours, propped a tall tree in the fire ring, lit it then retreated to their trailer, leaving a blazing infernal to fend for itself. (We put it out.)

The time a girlfriend and I stayed in the almost empty campground, key alarm close at hand to scare off any spooky 'walkers of the night'.....or marauding bears. (Later a big bear cage was set up in the parking area close to the Ninga Aki Trail. At lease one bear was captured and transferred to a new home safely away from campers.)

Our discovery of the north bay where Eagles used to soar.

Our first sighting of an Eastern Fox snake that whipped its body into a hoop and rollled away.

And not long ago, the Marquette dads who every year bring their children (young and older) to Portage for a weekend of camping. Little heads popping up over the sand ridge, wary eyes scannning our campsite for lurking enemy. a cadre of little boys whispering about hidden booby traps. Shadowy sprites, glow sticks wrapped around arms and whirling in their bike wheels, as they rode around the campground at dusk. In the 1980''s we introduced Portage Bay to my parents, Harry and Eloise Lund, who later included descriptions of the harebells and the profusion of dwarf irises in their book MICHIGAN WILDFLOWERS.

The park has changed over the years. On June not so long ago we heard no sandhill cranes chortling, saw no squirrels skittering toward our food, and sighed over the many trees that have succumbed to the elements and old age. But we still secure our coolers under the picnic table benches in case hungry raccoon or porcupine comes calling. And every year we meet wonderful campers, and thrill at the roadsides alive with  yellow lady slippers, orange columbine, and white daisies, and the beaches blue with late summer gentians. We look forward to spring and morels, and summer as we sit around a campfire roasting hot dogs and solving the problems of the workd, and winter when we drive for five hours to walk the snowy road and eat lunch at Sherry's Port. How lucky we are to have found this green haven where we can rediscover ourselves in an otherwise chaotic world!

Pat Shaffer

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