Awed by their beauty, captivated by their changes and seeing them as a window into human interaction with nature — the Great Lakes fascinate Jerry Dennis.
The noted Michigan author will spend the next year steeped in their magnificence and mystery as he conducts research for "A Watcher on the Shore.” He will spend 2008 pulling together the full-length general interest book, for which he already has a publishing contract.
Since last fall, Dennis has been living, observing, documenting and absorbing the natural and human world in chunks of two-four weeks at a time. So far he has immersed himself in Chicago, the Keweenau Peninsula, Northport Point, Elk Rapids and the Maumee Bay region of Lake Erie. By the time his research is finished before snowfall next fall, he will have visited 12 to 15 points around the inland seas.
"Some are already decided and some I'm trusting in a lot of serendipity,” said Dennis. "I've picked out some places that are of great interest to me but I'm leaving room for surprises.”
With ten books to his credit completed over the past 20 years, Dennis thought that his previous book, "The Living Great Lakes” published in 2003, said all he had to say about these beloved waters.
"But within a few months I was already starting to change that thinking,” said Dennis, who was born in Flint but grew up in Traverse City. "I was thinking of issues and places and questions.”
Dennis credits the Northwestern Michigan College's Great Lakes Water Studies Institute as the "midwife” of this book as they secured him grants that allow him to focus exclusively on the research and writing. The grants are for $50,000 over two years from the Wege Foundation, $40,000 over two years from the Great Lakes Fishery Trust and $30,000 from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
"They asked me to speak at an event they put on last year and in the course of that process I spent some time with Tim Ervin and Becky Ewing,” recalled Dennis, naming two integral people at the institute. "We got to talking and they asked what I was working on and I started describing this book. Tim said this book sounds like something that some of the state foundations ought to support.”
Reveling in the luxury of focusing on one project from start to finish, instead of a checkerboard of magazine articles and other projects to pay the bills, Dennis is now considering visiting each location throughout the seasons instead of just once.
"I may end up retracing my path four times,” noted Dennis, adding that if funding comes through, a documentary film crew from PBS working on a five-part series on the Great Lakes may join him by late summer.
Dennis is staying in homes, cabins or other dwellings when he is on the road, mixing seclusion with people time, research with activity. A disciplined worker, Dennis is up by 5:30-6 each morning, writes for a couple of hours and then goes out to explore, meet people and track down things that interest him.
"I make sure I'm not just exploring environmental stories but I'm also finding things to do at each place, like birding, fishing, canoeing, hiking,” he said. "There's a big element of fun involved.”
Besides penning a travelogue, Dennis will spend time on larger philosophical questions about nature and how our attitudes about the Great Lakes are changing. He views the Great Lakes as a lens through which readers can view larger environmental issues, the environmental movement and legislation such as the Clean Water Act of 1972.
"The Great Lakes is the place that is more beautiful that some people can believe and yet it's also one of our most environmentally degraded places, there's that interesting dichotomy,” Dennis said. "Sometimes you only have to go a few feet: you can stand at the Indiana dunes and look east and it's one of the most beautiful places on the lakes and look west to the rotting hulks of Gary, Indiana.”