The Manitou

Shore Magazine

Sailing the freshwater seas

Not long after the tall ship Manitou pushes away from the dock on West Grand Traverse Bay and points her bow toward open water, the vibrant sun forces its way through the clouds above, and Mother Nature offers us a strong northerly wind.

Heaving hand over hand, obeying command after command, the three-member crew hoists the Manitou’s sails high, and ties them so taut that barely a ripple appears in her 3,000 square feet of heavy canvas. They catch wind and she cruises forward at 12 knots. At the helm, Dave McGinnis smiles—the reaction of a captain the moment his ship finds its groove.

It’s a Friday morning in mid-September, just days before the fall equinox sheds leaves on a Midwestern summer that began late and will end soon. We are embarking on a four-day “Windjammer Cruise” from the northwest-lower Michigan tourism destination of Traverse City and to wherever the wind will take us. The guests on this weekend’s wine-tasting cruise include six middle-aged and retired couples, our aspiring sommelier and me. We sip strong coffee served in a hot pot on the port side of the ship and watch as Captain Dave and the crew practice the ancient craft of the mariner, which has been passed down through the ages.

“Stand by to tack,” Captain Dave announces as the Manitou nears the coast of the Leelanau Peninsula to the west. “Stand by to tack,” the crew dutifully responds and jumps to their battle stations. Because we’re sailing north, into a northerly wind, we have to sail at angles, west, then east, and “tack” back and forth when we near shore. This is the tortoise’s approach to the journey. We’re not moving fast. But slowly and steadily, we’ll get there.

McGinnis calls the Manitou a simple boat, without the complications of electrical or mechanical systems. “We’re trying to give people a taste of what it was like to sail on one of these boats one hundred years ago,” he says. “So simplicity is key. We don’t need generators and refrigerators and Cuisinarts on board. Her beauty is in her simplicity.”

The Manitou is a traditional gaff rig two-masted schooner, the likes of which once sailed up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States in the 1800s. She is 114 feet long, weighs 82 tons and was retrofitted with a steel hull in 1983 to preserve her lifespan. The Manitou boasts western red cedar masts, a deck made out of Douglas fir and a steering wheel of cherry wood. Put simply, she is beautiful. This vessel sailed Lake Champlain in New England until 1990 under the name Homer W. Dixon, after the uncle of the original owner. McGinnis, who had been first mate on the Dixon, brought her in 1991 through the shipping canals, 40 locks and the Great Lakes to Traverse City on behalf of the Traverse Tall Ship company, which he now owns.

Since those days, Traverse City and its surrounding counties—Leelanau, Benzie and Grand Traverse—have blossomed from a post-lumber industry backwater, known mostly for hunting and fishing, into a vibrant tourism Port of Call. The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (part of the National Park Service) on the state’s west coast, pristine beaches, rolling dunes, lush forests, inland lakes, quaint villages and boutiques, gourmet food, European chocolates, numerous wineries, bike races and cultural events draw hundreds of thousands of seasonal visitors every year.

Michael Moore put an exclamation point on this with his annual Traverse City Film Festival. And Pure Michigan’s advertising campaign targeting out-of-staters (especially in the Chicago region) with enticing videos of Michigan’s pristine nature has helped guide the state through a painful economic recession and establish tourism—more than the automobile industry—as the state’s future growth engine.

Amanda Danielson, who would lead the wine tasting on this weekend’s cruise, owns the Italian restaurant Trattoria Stella, together with her husband Paul, on the former grounds of Traverse City’s old state mental hospital. The Danielsons are among many who have taken advantage of the region’s interest in gourmet and local foods.

Originally from the Detroit area, the couple opened Stella’s six years ago with the intention of promoting local farmers and sustaining the local economy. They knew that Michigan’s geographical location on the 45th parallel—the bountiful region halfway between the Equator and the North Pole—and its abundant farmland make it the second most agriculturally diverse state in the nation, following California. They also knew they wanted to emulate southern European cuisine, where the food on your plate is never far from the farm. And they knew that with a couple dozen wineries located on nearby Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsulas, they could pair tasty, locally harvested grapes with fresh food. (Danielson is studying to take the sommelier exam.)

Since opening in 2004, Stella’s has worked with nearly sixty local farms and producers, and the summer of 2009 was their best one yet, which Danielson owes as much to tourists as to the support of the local community. “There’s a population of people here who appreciate good food from the backyard,” she explains.

This is Danielson’s third wine-themed windjammer cruise aboard the Manitou. This fall the schooner has hosted three other similar weekend trips: an astronomy tour, a folk music trip, and a chocolate and storytelling cruise (courtesy of my mom’s business, Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate, and my dad’s storytelling troupe, the Beach Bards). Captain Dave McGinnis has considered a yoga and meditation-themed cruise as well.

Danielson’s first year on board she stuck to a 45th parallel theme, with wines from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Bordeaux (France), Piedmont (Italy) and this region. In 2008 she highlighted indigenous grape varieties that grow well here, such as Riesling, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc, and compared them to grapes from Europe.

The theme this weekend would be peninsular wines—appropriate, as we sailed north between the Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsulas. Danielson had also included wines from other famous peninsulas around the world: the boot of southern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula including both Spain and Portugal, and Greece, which has developed more high-end table wines in recent years.

The weekend’s wines were paired with delicious dinners prepared on a wood stove by the Manitou’s chef, Wendy Foss. On Friday night, after we docked in Omena Bay, between the towns of Suttons Bay and Northport on the Leelanau Peninsula, Danielson began the celebration by opening a bottle of local winemaker L. Mawby’s “Sex” sparkling wine, proceeded to a white with hints of salt from Cinque Terre, Italy, wowed us with a sweet Rosé from Toscana and, finally, seduced us below deck with a delicious red table wine, where we enjoyed fresh, southern Italian cuisine of pasta cooked with clams, fresh vegetables and portabella mushrooms. The dinner was simple, yet fresh and tasty. Homemade tiramisu awaited us when we resurfaced above deck and watched the sun set over land just beginning to show the slightest hints of fall colors.

That night a crisp fall air made the Milky Way galaxy above seem all the more clear.

The wind died on Saturday, and Captain Dave needed the motor to get us around the tip of Leelanau County and over to North Manitou, in Sleeping Bear Bay, he taught us Polish drinking songs.

Without enough wind to fill the sales, Captain Dave found time to reminisce about his love for sailing as he manned the wheel. While studying photography at age 19 at an art school in New York City, the New Jersey native spent six days as a passenger on a tall ship cruise off the coast of Maine. He was instantly smitten and emptied his meager college savings to return. In 1985 McGinnis got a deckhand job on the same vessel, sailed the coast of Maine for several years and occasionally spent winters in the islands near Florida. Five years later he met the ship now called the Manitou and brought her to the freshwater seas.

“I feel very fortunate to be her caretaker,” McGinnis says. “It’s about stewardship. This boat, if she’s cared for, will certainly outlast all of us. There are boats still sailing the coast of Maine that were built in the 1870s.”

By 1995, Captain Dave and his wife Mary—who met on a boat called the Angelique—felt burned out by the shipping life and decided to take a break and return to Maine. McGinnis went to work as an assistant manager at a 30-room bed and breakfast on Penobscot Bay. But by July of that year, he recalls, watching all the schooners he had known for years sailing up and down the bay while he was chained to a desk in the lobby showed him that the shipping life was still his calling.

Perhaps he heard the words of English poet John Masefield in his mind: “I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.”

A year and a half later Dave and Mary returned to Traverse City and the Manitou, and he’s been behind the wheel ever since.

Somehow, despite the lack of winds today, by mealtime, Danielson and Foss managed to transport us from Italy across the Mediterranean Sea to the Iberian Peninsula. And on the second day we ate delicious roasted chickens with potatoes and green beans, washed down with a Portuguese Vinho Tinto, which followed a Rosé from Old Mission Peninsula and a sampling of whites from both Spain and Portugal.

That evening, the Manitou’s life raft made several trips ferrying people to North Manitou Island, an uninhabited part of the National Park, for evening strolls along the beach. According to Ojibwe legend, North Manitou and her sister island to the south were formed when two bear cubs, trailing behind their mother swimming across Lake Michigan to escape a forest fire in Wisconsin, grew tired and drowned. The great god Mishe Mokwa took pity on the cubs and turned them into the Manitou Islands. Meanwhile, sand covered the mother bear as she lay in mourning on the shore of the mainland, and her body became the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

After combing the beach for Petoskey Stones, and knowing that by mid-September Lake Michigan is warmer than the evening air, I opted to swim back to the Manitou, which rested peacefully 100 yards offshore. From a distance she appeared to be set in a painting from a bygone era, her white hull and majestic masts sharing the canvas with a vanilla sky and a shade of pink from the setting sun. Was I swimming toward a mirage? No, thankfully, she was real.

Sunday, another day without much wind, we returned to the mainland, and by evening found ourselves dining and drinking in Greece.

The Tall Ship Manitou sails four Windjammer weekend cruises in the fall. During summer she takes passengers on two-hour tours in West Grand Traverse Bay and also functions as a bed and breakfast. For information visit tallshipsailing.com or call 231.941.2000.

40 Years of Earth Day

Mindful Metropolis, April edition

Despite setbacks, and failure in Copenhagen, the modern environmental movement has reached a critical mass — especially here in Chicago.

Last Oct. 17, cabin ministers of the Maldives, an archipelago of 1,200 low-lying islands and atolls located in the Indian Ocean, took the unusual step of donning scuba gear and holding a meeting 20 feet underwater. They were led by the nation's dynamic young president, Mohamed Nasheed — a former political prisoner who was elected to office a month before Barack Obama.

The act was brilliant political theater. Communicating through hand signals, the ministers signed a document calling on world nation’s to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, to save the Maldives from disappearing under rising sea levels as a consequence of global climate change (80 percent of the country sits less than 4 feet above sea level).

Nasheed used that image — and the threat of a sovereign nation disappearing forever — as a rallying cry on behalf of those on the front lines of global climate change, particular African and low-lying island nations, during the United Nations’ COP15 Global Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.

World leaders were supposed to come together in the Danish capital and agree on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop global climate change—the greatest challenge facing our generation, if not all generations of mankind. But for anyone who hoped for a groundbreaking deal, Copenhagen was a humiliating disaster. Political squabbling between Washington, D.C., and Beijing (the world’s two biggest polluters), enormous rifts between rich nations and poor nations, disagreements over the concept of “climate debt,” Denmark’s inability to effectively mediate between sides, and ultimately the banning of civil society from the Bella Center where the meetings took place, doomed the much anticipated summit and sent environmentalists home for the holidays pessimistic about our future and with little faith in government.

Since then we’ve suffered a winter of discontent — full of gray skies, unemployment, tragic earthquakes, Tea Party spectacles, and nasty East Coast storms (which are absolutely compatible with climate change and, thus, more extreme weather). What to make, then, of another spring, and the 40th anniversary of Earth Day later this month?

We’ve come a long way, baby

Commonly observed on April 22, though its events often spill into the weekend, Earth Day was founded in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin. Nelson announced his idea for a nationwide teach-in day on the environment in speeches the previous September to a fledgling conservation group in Seattle and to a meeting of United Auto Workers. He sought to spark a grassroots outcry about environmental issues — parallel to the growing movement against the Vietnam War — that would force the Nixon administration to act.

That spring, approximately 20 million Americans rang in a new decade by gathering to protest the deterioration of the environment, oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife. The U.S. Congress passed important legislation in the wake of the first Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act and the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

By 1990, Earth Day had mobilized 200 million people in 141 countries and elevated environmental issues onto the world’s stage. Considered fringe in 1970, recycling was now a household term, if not yet a household chore. The 20th Earth Day also paved the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Then, 10 years ago, the emergence of the Internet linked activists around the world and brought together 5,000 environmental groups to celebrate the millennial Earth Day. A talking drum chain traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa, and hundreds of thousands gathered on the National Mall in our nation’s capital.

But by 2000, the environmental community was talking in earnest about a new and dangerous phenomenon—global climate change, the human industry-induced emissions of carbon gasses into the earth’s atmosphere, which cause a gradual warming of the planet, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea levels, shifting ocean currents, stronger storms, desertification of once arable lands and disappearing fresh water supplies.

Today, scientists, and most world leaders, have coalesced around the recognition that global climate change is real, and dangerous. Yet here in the United States our government has yet to legally guarantee that we will reduce emissions by 2020 or put a price on carbon — an act that would help the green energy economy grow.

A truly grassroots movement

You wouldn’t know it from watching CSPAN, or from the dismal headlines that emerged from Copenhagen in December, but the environmental movement is actually booming in American states, cities and communities, including right here in Chicago. And the Windy City’s green activists don’t expect change to come from the top (even if the commander in chief once lived amongst us), but from the bottom.

“Reducing our overall carbon footprint will require a very grassroots approach,” said Carlos Chavez, CEO of the Logan Square-based sustainability, energy and environmental consultant Green Dot Environmental. “We can’t wait for countries and organizations to come around.”

Green Dot Environmental is teaming with Conscious Planet Media to hold an Earth Day 5K Run/Walk (earthday5kchicago.com) on Saturday, April 24, which will begin at 8:30 a.m. at the northwest corner of Humboldt Park on Chicago’s northwest side, move north to Logan Square and then return through Palmer Square to the Humboldt Park boathouse. A Green Living Expo in the park will ensue, featuring music, entertainment, food, vendors and environmental education, with appearances by City Councilmen Robert Maldonado and Rey Colon, respectively, of the 26th and 35th wards.

“We created this event to bring under one roof all the elements of a healthy lifestyle—running, farmers markets, eating health and shopping locally,” summarized Chavez.

While Peter Nicholson, executive director of Foresight Design (foresightdesign.org) and founder of the Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance, appreciates the fact that hundreds of millions will officially celebrate the planet this month, he looks forward to the day when we don’t need an Earth Day: “I’m in this year-round, I don’t just drop in and drop out. It’s almost a sign of distress that we actually need to have an Earth Day.”

Nicholson hopes that, instead of merely inventing greener consumer products, we’ll undergo a culture shift in our relationship to the planet. “One of the things we talked about 10 years ago was the backlash effect. When you create something that’s more efficient, your impulse is to use it more. You might say, ‘I have a hybrid car, I can drive it twice as far’. Instead of just touting green products, we need to deal with the behavior behind them.”

For Dr. Clare Butterfield, executive director of Faith in Place (faithinplace.org), our compromised relationship to the planet represents a “human inability to see ourselves in a larger system, a part of history, the heirs of our ancestors, and the benefactors of our grandchildren. Because we aren’t willing to set limits, we take up as much space as we can.

As an “environmental concierge service,” Faith in Place helps religious organizations make connections between what their theology teaches them and their relationship to the planet. “If your faith requires that you love your brothers and sisters, that means you must reduce your carbon footprint,” said Butterfield. For example, Faith in Place helped a mosque in Bridgeview include a solar water system in its Friday prayers—the first solar-powered mosque in the country.

Veronica Kyle is Faith in Place’s liaison to African-American communities in areas ravaged by high unemployment and foreclosed homes that are in survival mode. For them, global climate change is a distant concept. “Our language is around green opportunities in the community,” said Kyle. “People aren’t making the connection between Styrofoam and the environment. But we talk about keeping materials from going into the landfill, so that another builder can take advantage of them.”

Faith in Place recently collaborated with the City of Chicago and the Delta Institute on a major weatherization project that involved local youth on the city’s west side installing weatherization kits (doorstoppers, draft stoppers, irrigated faucets) in over 400 households. Rev. Marshall Hatch from New Mt. Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church addressed the youth and called them “the first generation of new environmentalists in our community. Let this begin a journey toward conservation and understanding.”

Greener schools

No Foam Chicago (nofoamchicago.org), is pushing schools to change their wasteful habits, and seeking legislation to prod them along. Students and teachers at Chicago Public Schools still eat their lunches on harmful Styrofoam that ends up in landfills. In fact, 300,000 Styrofoam trays are wasted every day, an amount that, if stacked one on top of another, would surpass the height of the Sears Tower. No Foam Chicago is encouraging the City Council to approve a ban on Styrofoam in schools, which was proposed on Feb. 10.

No Foam Chicago’s Stacy Pfingsten pointed out that 41 Styrofoam bans have already been enacted in California, and 100 nationwide. New York City has not yet followed through on its proposed ordinance, giving Mayor Daley an opportunity to beat the Big Apple. (Daley takes pride in calling Chicago the greenest city in the nation.) No Foam Chicago will reach out to area high schools and colleges the week of Earth Day to spread information about the harmful effects of Styrofoam.

Speaking of public schools, Joey Feinstein of Climate Cycle (climatecycle.org) sees our public learning spaces as the ideal spots to install solar panels, which his organization does through funds raised during the annual Solar Schools Ride, to be held this year on May 15 at the green space adjacent to Soldier Field. Last year’s inaugural event raised nearly $70,000 through pledges. The first solar panels were installed nine months ago at the Perspectives/IIT Math & Science Academy charter school on Chicago’s South Side. More solar installations will follow at Curie Metro High School (where Climate Cycle will hold a “solarbration” on the day before Earth Day), Polaris Charter Academy and Lindblom Math and Science Academy.

“Schools give us high-visibility centerpieces,” said Feinstein. “There’s lots of traffic at schools—students, teachers and parents. And it’s about empowering youth and employing educational tools. … Additionally, schools spend more money on energy costs than they do on textbooks and computers.”

In the midst of a painful economic recession, reusing and recycling are back in style. Money is especially tight for schools, and the Glen Ellyn-based SCARCE (School Community Assistance Recycling Composting Education) program’s book rescue initiative (bookrescue.org) collects millions of books that libraries and families no longer need, just in case a needy school comes calling. Last year, SCARCE installed 18 pianos in Chicago-area schools that didn’t have them, and gave an Aurora school 130 biology books that would have cost $87 a piece, says Kay McKeen. SCARCE has even helped a local church group send books to schools in Uganda and Ghana.

Good for the environment, good for business

Even as we act locally, we shouldn’t be afraid to think globally, believes Erik Lukas, co-founder of the Rainforest Chicago Project (www.rainforestchicago.org), an effort to preserve 6,400 acres of South American rainforest — equal in size to the City of Chicago. Lukas will take the microphone after the 5K run in Humboldt Park this Earth Day weekend, and launch Rainforest Chicago together with the World Land Trust, which has dedicated over 20 years to saving rainforests and endangered species.

“I tried to think of ways to make (rainforest protection) more relevant, more tangible to people here.” He came up with the concept of preserving an amount of land equivalent to the Windy City. “Simple ideas have potential to travel fastest through the world.”

Lukas, co-founder and “chief evangelist” of Bean & Body (beanandbody.com), “the earth’s healthiest coffee,” believes that social entrepreneurs, and the business world in general, must be the instruments for environmental change. “I see more and more businesses realizing and working toward greener business practices,” he said. “From an energy perspective, the solution has to come from the marriage of socially and environmentally-responsible business practices and the environmental activism movement.”

Howard Learner, President of the Environmental Law and Policy Center (elpc.org) concurs that what’s good for the environment should also be good for business. Confronting climate change means embracing clean energy solutions that also create jobs and generate economic growth, such as wind and solar power (viewed as fringe 10 years ago, though some are now calling the Midwest “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”), and transportation solutions such as the development of a Midwest high-speed rail network. “These are smart, job-creating and economy-growing solutions to our global warming problems,” says Learner.

Whether Earth Day is celebrated every day or just once a year, it’s a time to reflect, act, and work toward a better future—for Chicago and for the Maldives. As Learner says, “Earth Day is a time to spend with friends and neighbors and talk about the solutions to our problems. Because solving our global climate problem is the political, moral and economic challenge of our generation.”

Jacob Wheeler is a freelance journalist, editor and publisher who hails from the cobblestone streets of Copenhagen and the forests of northwest-lower Michigan, where he publishes the Glen Arbor Sun (glenarborsun.com).