I realize I've been blogging about the Grayling, Mich. area for two weeks straight. Between my travel and my general predilections, it keeps overshadowing other subjects that come to mind. I wouldn't write about it today except for a news item that's been making the rounds in the state media since the weekend:
From Sunday's Bay City Times:
GRAYLING - A Michigan company wants to turn 1,800 acres of state-owned land near Grayling into a $160 million family theme park called Main Street USA...Documents show the company wants to use the land to construct a theme park that would employ up to 2,000 people seasonally and 700 year-round. It could draw up to 1.7 million visitors a year.
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This hits a lot of my typical hot buttons--privatization of public land, threats to stream quality, the sprawl of industrial tourism across the quiet woods of northern Michigan. If you've followed this blog at all you can probably predict almost verbatim what I would say about this. I am concerned, but I'll lay off the outrage today, especially since this is as yet just a proposal. As one report on the controversy noted yesterday, only about 1/3 of proposed theme parks are ever built. There's hope.
I believe that in general, thinking is more useful than venting, and last night this park proposal got me thinking about change and how I react to it. Change, we're told, is a constant in life and we must learn to accept it. I agree with that, and readily recognize that beyond a certain point, clinging to familiar things is stifling and pathetic. I know that there are many changes, even negative ones, that one must live with, and I usually manage to roll with the ones that come my way, however upsetting they may be. Friendships dissolve--it hurts, but it happens; you can't control the emotions of others. You find yourself working in a postition other than the one you aspired to--the world is not obliged to endorse your ambitions. A stock market plunge guts your retirement account--what lulled you into expecting a steady shower of wealth? Peace dissolves, but wars sputter out too.
Still, I have a hard time accepting human-caused upheavals in the landscape. I'm not talking about a home here or a store there, but the kind of garish, sprawling developments that seem ever more to typify the changes in our daily environments. Megamalls. Condominum complexes the size of a small city. Amenity-rich, thousand acre getaway resorts that strongly resemble the places that the weekend refugees are supposedly getting away from. Amusement parks. I can't seem to recognize these changes as part of the usual ebb and flow of life. Forest fires, winter kills, sure, but not golf courses.
But there is a larger and still familiar pattern of change which better accomodates these big developments. Anyone with a careful eye and/or an understanding of the region's past will recognize they are not chipping away at a pristine wilderness. Any corner of northern Michigan that could be cut, dug, or tilled for a profit already has been, possibly several times. Towns form, then wither and are reclaimed by the forest. Myriad dreams of wealth, or at least of a livelihood, have left all sorts of marks on the landscape, some more indelible than others; the supposed "wilderness" of the Mason Tract offers striking examples. Today's amusement park may be tomorrow's ruin that attracts the interest of an obscure academic organizing a presemester workshop.
None of this is going to make me welcome a massive amusement park near Grayling --I'll certainly support any attempt to stall or block it--but it suggests to me that the seemingly un-natural changes in the land like it are less radical than I fear they are. If undesireable, they are at least less painful if I recognize they do not represent some unique and unparalled kind of loss. That is at least enough to stave off the priveledged enviromentalist angst that can easily devolve into self-pity. I can imagine some Tiresius of the jackpines who would shrug sympathetically and point to countless others whose attatchments to or ambitions for the north--and of everywhere else--were upended by the tides of history, or nature.
Tags: Conservation; Michigan
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