Boone Docks

“We only go to Boone Docks if it’s an emergency!”
I hear a young father tell his son, as they walk away from the swarming line outside the infamous local hot spot.
The red, white, and blue of American flags dance. I see orange and turquoise tubes filling the round of a wire container on the street corner. In the wind the mass of cylinder foam tubes vibrate against each other and jiggle. In water they would float—summer noodles bending around arms and rib cages, hugged close.
Khaki cargoes and salmon colored flip-flops trounce the gravelly cement of small-time Glen Arbor. The village swells to quadruple its normal size when the orange globe of summer’s sun dings to announce ‘it’s time.’
Although the autumn color tour season hospitably welcomes visitors from near and far; it always seems towns such as this are truly most alive when nestled with the heavy snowfall of a northern Michigan winter—locals warm in their wood-stove heated homes—traffic trickles and finding a parking spot at Anderson’s IGA is simpler.
There is something to be said for small town life. You have just as much opportunity to get to know your neighbor as you would living in the terracotta brick of a NYC walk up. It is not as though time stands still or anything. Time travels and even flies sometimes—especially when you would simply rather live in the middle of a sixty-eight-degrees and sunny, breezy July afternoon forever if you could.
Yes, there is something to it being more about the life you make for yourself than anything—it certainly does not require a population center to create a home or enjoy a community. Maybe small towns are automatic icebreakers for the sometimes discomfort of just ‘getting to know’ people. I treasure the setting of a more rural life the proximity to nature, all around.
There’s something to be said about the art of picking taut stalks of red and green rhubarb from your garden, spending an overcast afternoon listening to records and getting pie crust lessons from your mother.
I’d say adding up all the little details which equate to a beautiful life seems much more relevant than reading your name in lights or dying a billionaire. I would prefer scraping pennies together for a hot, black coffee from the corner station and the brief visit with the owner, who has known me most of my life—and who survives, even after the tragic loss of a daughter—a young woman bludgeoned to death. His strength of perseverance a guidepost every morning’s stop.
There seems certain sourcing occurs when the mood is just so… as sunlight bends along the blue-green shoreline or midnight pools itself in the center of the lake and we glide quickly down the CSA slide naked in our summer’s best—laughing, until the cramp in our bellies sends us relaxed on our backs—floating toward shore.