The one time I stood by Lake Michigan, I got tripped out because of the waves. And then I asked my dad whether the tide was coming in or going out. Except it’s a lake, so…
I should go back and see it again. Maybe this time I won’t be confused by the freakishly large lake’s weather patterns.
Which is funny because I spent so long in California, especially down by Half Moon Bay where there are HUGE waves most of the year. These are by far the biggest waves I’ve ever seen on the lake, except during huge windstorms, and I was like “Aww, look at them, they’re trying so hard!”
I don’t even know if lakes have tides. I should think at least one as big as Michigan does, but it never occurred to me to inquire.
That’s a lake?
Yep – this was taken from the southern tip of the lake, so actually kind of a narrow part. You can’t see it from the video, sadly, but I could see in person – out over the lake, on the right-hand side before I move the camera to the right, is the skyline of Chicago.
If you look at Lake Michigan on googlemaps, I caught the train along the lakeshore from Chicago southeast, and this was shot in Indiana, between Gary and Michigan City, about ninety minutes outside Chicago.
Lake Michigan is staggeringly massive. I never think about it, because I lived on the Pacific coast so I’m used to water you can’t see the opposite shore of, but for people who have a more well-defined mental image of “lake” it can be quite shocking.
Lake Michigan can be a very dangerous body of water because people think “it’s JUST a lake”. It’s more an inland sea. Rip currents can be really bad.
There are plenty of shipwrecks. The annual race to Mackinaw Island from Chicago is a test. There’s also still a Navy base – Great Lakes – that provides training.
I actually had a really interesting moment when I was down on the dunes – I know I’ve been rather cavalier about the camping portion of the trip (with, I think, a bit of justification – the entire campsite is maybe two blocks’ worth of trails, it’s a very tame site) but I am never, ever casual about the water.
I got down to the dunes but the beach at that point is quite narrow, there’s not much clearance between the steps down and the water line. I didn’t stay down there very long, just to take a few photos and the video, and as I turned to go up the steps back to the street I heard my gran in my head on the beach at Half Moon Bay telling me Never turn your back on the water.
Which really she meant for a kid who was standing IN the water, but as soon as I thought it, I turned to the side so I still had the waves in my eyesight as I shuffled up to the stairs. If you’re less than ten feet from the water, you never turn your back to it, because you just don’t know. It was really interesting that the training I had twenty, thirty years ago stuck with me.
Having spent my early childhood and most summers growing up on Lake Michigan is probably why I always had trouble with the differences between oceans, lakes, and ponds.
Since this is taken at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, I’ll add. The sand dunes around where this was taken are an entity unto themselves. So, the biggest dune in the Lakeshore, Mount Baldy, was closed a couple of years ago because it has literally been swallowing people alive. Scientists only have vague ideas about why this could be, so the park where Mount Baldy is located is closed until further notice.
AHAHAH yes and have you seen the text the National Parks put up about it:
The Mount Baldy area is closed due to hazardous conditions until further notice. Please visit the rest of the 99% of the national lakeshore that is open.
They sound THE MOST fed up about people complaining that Mount Baldy is closed, it cracks me up.
IT’S CLOSED BECAUSE IT EATS PEOPLE. PLEASE JUST WANDER FECKLESSLY AROUND THE OTHER NINETY NINE PERCENT OF OUR PARK THAT DOESN’T EAT PEOPLE.
Midwestern Gothic is never realer than at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore you guys.
this is called “Amaama to Inazuma” or “Sweetness and Lightning”
it is about a dad who is a school teacher and is trying to raise his daughter after his wife dies. one of the main things is he usually just buys her already made meals, but one of his students show’s him her mom’s restaurant and encourages him to learn how to cook
“Hi, Kent? It’s Shane. Laval-Shane. Look, I just… heard what you said last week and I wanted to say thanks. You were so cool about it. I never even felt like it was an issue.”
“Oh, right! D-man Shane. Been a while. Cool. Uh… what?”
“Just, you were so good about me being gay.”
“You’re gay? I mean, cool! Cool cool. Good to hear. Look, Shane, I gotta be honest, I had no idea. I meant me. I was fucking my liney the whole time we played.”
“You… what? You were fucking Marc?! …Did Zimms know?”
AU where Tango is a 13 year old who wished to just “skip over the gross bits of puberty and wake me up when I’m in college please” and actually got that to come true. Like 13 going on 30, but less dramatic.
This means he wakes up and it is August 1st 2015. He’s going away to school in a week or so. To play hockey. To Tango, it was the day after picture day in 7th grade. (September 2010???) Imagine all the things that have changed since then.
So he’s not dumb when he asks all the questions, he’s just trying to catch up really really really fast.
OH MY GOD I LOVE IT
But does he want to switch back to his seventh grade life?? Will he feel left out when everyone else is talking about their weird high school teachers? What about calc/stats/finite/whatever math class that’s way beyond prealgebra? Does he miss his middle school friends? How excited is he to have a smartphone instead of a flip phone?
^^ easy there, tango 2.0
there’s a reason he was my icon before I made this one
All in all Tango is pretty chill with it. As chill as he can be. He learned from various sources that he hasn’t spoken to 90% of his friends since he started high school. And those that didn’t are going to other colleges.
Tango has always been smart with math, he’d been pretty ahead of the game and got all the way to stats in 7th grade. The rest was easy to catch up with enough tutors. (Seriously, he’s a student athlete, there will be a fuckton of resources to help him succeed in whatever class he needs)
When people brought up weird high school teachers, he’d just bring up weird middle school teachers and say they were his high school teacher.
As for smartphones, he’d seen enough of them. It was 2010, the iphone was already on it’s 3GS. He hadn’t had a phone of his own, but he knew that they were on the up and up.
Things that DID surprise Tango was during their third game, one of the opposing hockey members came up to him and got all buddy buddy with him. It turns out they were good friends all throughout High School, but were scouted to different teams. “Samwell must have you working pretty hard if you didn’t have time to shoot me a text” “Yeah. Well…you know how it is” It is weird to drift away from people that you never knew.
It was harder to adjust to seeing his then 7 year old little brother be the same age that Tango was supposed to be. It seemed like just a couple of months ago Tango was the one worrying about zits and romance and locker combinations. He always thought that by this point in life, he’d be able to help his brother out. Nope. Now they’re both just kinda lost and doing their own thing.
But a great thing was that it was really easy to bond with Whiskey. He was able to put up with all the questions, and the plethora of movies he had to catch up with, and pop culture references. (”Whiskey if I send an Old Spice meme in the group chat, will they get it?” “More than the sad keanu you sent last week”)
And he doesn’t seem to make a big deal of it when he makes mistakes. Once Whiskey asked him how old he’ll be on his next birthday and he said “14″ without missing a beat. Instead of any chirps, he just said “You mean 19 right?”
“Yeah”
If he had to tell anyone about what happened, he’d tell Whiskey. But he doesn’t.
Ok but what if for Halloween Dex wears a bad blond wig and glasses and Nursey wears a white snapback and salmon shorts
OK but the best thing about that is that Ransom and Holster CANNOT figure out who they are in costume as, and it just gets funnier as the night goes on because they keep guessing wrong.
Okay but then as they get more drunk they start hyperbolically acting out scenes from Ransom and Holsters life and they keep getting more and more touchy feely and ridiculous as the night goes on.
Dex: Bro…Share a beer with me bro…
Nursey: Bro…I’m going to fucking cherish that beer with you bro..
Dex: I just..I need you to know that this is such a special fucking moment for me man…
Nursey: Bro…
Holster: Bro…Are they like….a Meme…or something?
Ransom: I don’t know man…Hey share a beer with me bro?
I like to think Jack learns some hockey things from Bitty, not just the other way around.
For instance, fighting:
So Jack’s big and strong and plays hockey and you’d expect him to be the type of guy to come off the ice with a bleeding face and bruised knuckles. And maybe he would have been, but for Bitty
Instead when the big angry opposition player starts going after Bad Bob’s “special snowflake” son he channels one of his boyfriend’s talents and just ducks
And the player’s like ??? and tries again but Jack is fast and apparently gifted at dodging punches and the guy’s getting more and more frustrated bc he really wants to punch Jack but it’s just. not. working.
The Falconers have stopped fighting due to being doubled over with laughter and the other team is too busy being confused because ?? he’s dodging??? that’s not how hockey works????
In the end the guy gives up because every time he throws a punch Jack takes to just skating backwards slightly so he’s out of reach again. It makes all the sports highlights for a fortnight. People set it to music
Jack finishes the game without a scratch
We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties – the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”
And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.
just moving along like everyone else 