I was at the dunes last week and enjoyed a beautiful calm, clear, frosty sunrise. I spent the first 45 minutes up on the high bluffs overlooking Sleeping Bear Bay and enjoyed the patterns and textures revealed by the exquisite morning light. But I have to admit I probably wasn't as attentive to the visual gifts as I should have been. It was the migrating waterfowl and shorebirds that made me stop and smile. Loons, buffleheads, mallards, Canadian geese, sandpipers, mergansers and others — their individual voices and their splashing bounced off the the flat waters of the Manitou passage.
As the sun burned off the frost on the highest ridges I skidded down through the ghost forest swale to the shoreline. From above I had noticed a slim line of white that defined the water's edge. I had assumed it was just a little ice left from the larger ridges of mid-winter. But as I got closer I noticed its crystalline nature. Beautiful shards of thin ice all stacked at the waters edge just as neatly as if someone had gently broken them and placed them piece by piece on top of one another. Another gift from the Sleeping Bear. As I made my few shots I imagined the perfect combination of events that created this construct. A perfectly still night (and I mean perfectly still) with freezing temps that allowed a thin layer of ice to form, followed by a a gentle morning breeze that raised just 5 or 6 inch swells — just enough to brake the ice and push it onshore. Or maybe it was a passing lake ship that created enough of a swell to make the miracle. I had to remember to not let my curiosity kill the moment. Whatever right combination of things made this happen, I'm grateful and I just need to accept and wonder at it's beauty.
