Don't let the bright sunshine fool ya, the breeze off the lake was brutal.

It was a cold but pretty day - good for some serious hiking. This time we headed north for Wilderness State Park, a sprawling chunk of land on Lake Michigan just west of the Mackinac Bridge. The park is aptly named. It is mostly wilderness.

After walking about two miles of beach we found a beautiful woodland trail and banged out several easy miles on the flat path. On one section we picked up the North Country Trail (NCT).

Although not as famous as the Appalachian Trail, it runs a whopping 4,800 miles from Vermont to North Dakota making it America’s longest trail. I read somewhere that only 16 people completed the entire route. Anyway, we can add the NCT to our list of grand trails that we have walked. Let’s see, 1/8 mile of the Appalachian Trail in the Smokey Mountains, and 1/8 mile of the NCT trail in Michigan. Yep, we are seasoned trail hikers. Where’s my T-shirt?

The lakeshore was stark with a grand sparse power of its own.

The road through the park was tree-tunneled, my favorite kind of road.

After walking the beach, we picked up the deep-woods Sturgeon Bay Trail.

This little pond was the result of a beaver dam blocking a small creek.

The trail broke out along the bay front. The shoreline on the bay was more protected than the lakeside and thus less stark.

Some sections of the trail were dark and thick.

Here is where we picked up the NCT.

The NCT is marked by blue blaze markings.

I was hoping to revisit Highway 119 on the return trip, but we spent too much time in the wilderness. We took the shorter Highway 31 route back. We passed through Levering, Pellston, Brutus, Alanson, Oden, Conway and the like. None were exactly QTs, but they all mixed nicely into the rural wooded background. 

There is one exception to the laid-back understated quaintness of the LP - Bay Harbor Village, west of Petoskey along Highway 31. This ostentatious corporate community was almost scary. We had seen the elaborate swanky buildings from the highway the last time we drove up to Petoskey. The corporate grounds stretch for five miles along the prime lakefront. There is the Bay Harbor Golf Course, Bay Harbor Arboretum, Bay Harbor Marina, etc. Most of these areas were gated. This time, we had to at least drive into the Bay Harbor Village community, which wasn’t gated. 

There was a shopping center, an arts center, another marina with mega yachts, hotels, condos, and rows of cookie-cutter homes. Expensive, lovely homes, but all conforming to a predetermined uniform style.

Here was the scary part. The town might not have been gated, but it was patrolled by private corporate security. It didn’t take long for a couple of shiny brand-new black SUVs with blackened windows and no signage to pick us out as non-residents. They followed us like in some kind of detective thriller movie. That gave me the creeps. They turned around when we pulled back out onto Highway 31.

The Bay Harbor Hotel.

The Bay Harbor shopping center.

The Bay Harbor condominiums.

The Bay Harbor Arts Center.

This was our last night in Central Lake. We decided to tour the town one more time. Being a Sunday evening, not much was happening. The marijuana dispensary, The Torch, was still open. Curiosity got the better of us so we went in to bend the ear of the proprietor.

I have always been intrigued with Holland’s enlightened approach to the naughty professions - prostitution and intoxicants. It doesn’t appear that mankind will ever be able to criminalize these things out of existence. Goodness knows that America has spent trillions trying to do so. By legalizing prostitution and drugs, society can at least keep the criminal element mostly out of it, keep the participants far safer, keep tabs on what goes on, and even get a cut of the action rather than spend boat loads trying to fight it. It probably is the lesser of evils. 

Mind you, the only interaction that I have had with the pot industry over the last 40 years is working with juvenile delinquents in my career as a social worker. I have seen the war on drugs in action and have worked with many of the casualties of that war. My own pot use ceased decades ago, not long after I left my own adolescence. 

Let’s not kid ourselves, pot smoke is a powerful carcinogen. Of course, if you have terminal cancer and want to smoke pot for pain relief, I’m 100% behind that. However, you don’t smoke pot brownies, so that seems to solve that problem. Do these marijuana dispensaries sell brownies?

The shop owner, I didn’t get his name so I’ll just call him Mr. Torch, turned out to be a gentle nerdy pharmacist kind of guy - certainly not your stereotypical shady back-street drug dealer. He spent a fair amount of time explaining his business to us. 

In 2018, Michigan legalized both medicinal and recreational use of marijuana, however hurdles continue to exist. It is technically illegal on the federal level, but the feds basically stay out of it. Also, it is left up to the local communities whether to allow shops like the Torch to open their doors. Central Lake held a referendum and it passed by only ONE vote, and that was after a recount.

No, brownies are not allowed to be sold in Michigan. But gummies and mints are. Whether you buy pot to smoke or the gummies or other edibles, it is all meticulously regulated and labeled. The THC content of each variety of pot is listed. The THC in the edibles are listed in milligrams. You never get surprised with dangerous additives like fentanyl. Different strains of marijuana have many other properties and all these are listed. All these elements are now being studied and some do seem to have true medicinal uses. 

As a business, the Torch seems to be a gold mine. While we were in there, two customers stopped in. One bought $300 worth of goods while the other picked up $180 worth. Both purchased their stash using their medicinal card. I really didn’t see the difference between medicinal and recreational. Why would you need or want to use a medicinal card when you can just buy it outright for recreational use? Do you think insurance covers it for medicinal purposes? Doubt that!

I noticed a couple of other things. You were supposed to sign a registry book when you entered the store. I noticed the guy before us wrote “Bam” as his name. I wrote “Zooj”. That didn’t seem to matter. Also, it was a cash-only business. Michigan doesn’t allow credit cards for pot purchases which seemed odd to me, and it seemed odd to Mr. Torch too.

All-in-all, Mr. Torch gave us a lot of interesting arguments to think about. We returned to camp to contemplate further about it over a couple of beers.

The Torch marijuana dispensary.

The store.

The edibles.

Pot buds.

Glossary of terms used for newcomers: 1) V-Jer. The name of our camper. 2) Saturn. The name of our Van. 3) Duende. Our mischievous gremlin that breaks things. 4) Tata. The good gremlin that helps us fix Duende’s dirty work. 5) The Black Hole. This is what we call Walmart because every time we go in for just a couple of items, we come out spending way more than we figured. 6) QT. Quaint Town. 7) Little Buddy. This is what we call our Dyson cordless stick vacuum.

Dave and Wanda

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