The Grad School Diaries: To the Lighthouse

Up at the top of the Leelanau Peninsula, at the northwestern corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, stands one of the loneliest structures I’ve ever seen: the Grand Traverse Lighthouse. Built in 1858 and not automated until 1972, the lighthouse was home to at least one and frequently two keepers and their families for over a century, and even today is located in what I can only describe as being the closest to the proverbial “middle of nowhere” I’ve ever seen that didn’t involve either a desert or a mountain range. Today the lighthouse is located in the Leelanau State Park, patrolled by rangers guarded by state police officers; you can get a surprisingly good pizza twenty minutes down the main highway, and you could be in the state capitol in four hours with a fast car. But if you stand on the rocky shore just to the northeast of the main building, you could easily imagine that nothing has changed, and the continent is half-wild and filled with unknown possibilities…

It’s windy and cold today; typical for early spring at these latitudes, but it’s always a bit windswept out here on the point. The narrow piece of land we’re standing on is surrounded by Lake Michigan on three sides, and the prevailing wind is as constant as it has been on most coastal regions I have visited; if the surf was higher and the spray was saltier you could easily believe that you were standing on the shores of an ocean, not a lake. Like most landsmen, I’ve always thought of lighthouses (when I thought of them at all) as the stereotypical tall round towers that keep watch over remote areas of coastline and warn ships away from the rocks, but the shores of the Great Lakes include some of the most treacherous waters in the world, and are consequently populated with a vast collection of lights and foghorns, some even more remote than this one…

We’re spending the day out on the Peninsula, visiting the town of Northport (which has a very good café) and several other communities offering local specialties in food, drink and artwork. It’s just a day trip – we’ve both got jobs to get back to, and I’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m going to be ready for the qualifying exams at the end of this summer. But as I’ve had occasion to remember recently, it’s important to keep your priorities straight – and while I am, beyond question, one of the seventeen current scholars who have the honor to have been selected for the doctoral program in Management at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, that by itself does not define me, and never will. I am also defined by the family that has adopted me, and whose name I have, in turn, chosen to carry; by the drive to know and understand this bizarre and sometimes insane world (and the equally bizarre and insane people who live here); by an iron will and a love for telling stories; and by the love for and of the most extraordinary woman I have ever known. It’s easy to lose sight of all of that when you spend your days reading overspecialized texts in an eight-by-twelve-foot office, but I am many things, and the first of all of them was the Seeker…

And I wonder, standing here on the shore and looking up at the tower rising out of the station behind me, if the men who used to keep watch over these waters ever felt the same way. It’s a tiny domain to be master of, and yet from this place they extended civilization over an expanse larger than most human kingdoms and forces that even modern man cannot really control. Walt Whitman wrote “The Sea is a form of mockery,” and I’ve often felt that he had a point, but today I can’t help but wonder if Walt meant that ironically. We are tiny things, humans, and our life is ephemeral enough to create whole schools of philosophy on that one point alone. And yet, what we do today might still be studied by legions of other graduate students, in other tiny offices, hundreds of years from now - just as the duties of those long-vanished lighthouse keepers might have saved lives, altered the course of history, and changed the world for the better...

I’d conclude by saying that it’s just another day in Michigan, expect I’m starting to wonder if there is any such thing as “just another day…”