An Old Motor and Evenings at Port Sheldon
Out to Port Sheldon Township on the Michigan side, where the old Chrysler 45 outboard is still hanging on the turquoise boat in the garage — steering cables running through wooden pulleys along the gunwales, springs and hardware all looking original. Whoever kept this thing indoors all these years did it a favor; even the chrome trim on the cowl has held up.
Toward evening I walked down through Sheldon Dunes to the water. Residents here get three neighborhood beaches and rights-of-way to reach them, which in practice means sandy lanes between cottages and a boardwalk over the dune grass. The township holds about 877 acres of critical dune area, and the flagpole up on the ridge sits on some of it. At the channel mouth the Consumers Power pipeline runs behind a chain-link fence hung with warning signs, white and enormous, aimed out at Lake Michigan.
On the Pigeon Lake side the marina boats were all in for the night. Down on the beach itself, a loose ring of plastic chairs stood around a woodpile nobody had lit yet, tire tracks looping through the sand behind them.
