Gray Morning on the Benton Township Shore

Fog sat on Lake Michigan all morning. We took the stairway down from the bluff — there's a view deck up top, but the haze didn't leave much to view — and walked the beach, about 1,100 feet of it, sand curving into the pines at the far end. The water was flat enough that the geese offshore left wakes. A few swans farther out, white against nothing, and a ship somewhere behind them that came and went in the gray.

Boulders sit half-under in the shallows near where the stairs come down, dark humps with the water barely moving around them. The dog found something at the waterline and worked it over for a while, then trailed us back down the sand ahead of a line of paw prints.

Later we drove over to Indian River for the sturgeon sculpture — a car-sized fish up on a pile of flat stones, diamond plates down its back, whiskers of bent steel, and a small red "do not climb" sign stuck to one fin.