The Story of Guppy Lake and our Family

The history of the forests of Northern Michigan is at once a tragedy and an inspiration, a cautionary tale and a beacon for the future. The site of Guppy Lake, in particular, is a thrice-ravaged land that yet preserves a placid beauty nearly extinct in many other parts of the world. The goal of the Guppy Lake Restoration Retreat is to preserve that beauty forever and share it with people of all faiths who are doing good things for the world.

By the late nineteenth century, lumbering had supplanted the fur trade as northern Michigan's most visible industry. No longer content to simply slaughter a few species with attractive fur, humans launched an assault on the forests as a whole. In that pre-tree-hugging era, the ecological destruction was swift, efficient, and nearly total. By the time Trina's great grandfather came to the area in the early twentieth century, there were essentially no old trees left in most of Michigan's northern penninsula. Trina's grandfather claimed -- perhaps with some hyperbole -- to remember standing on the hills overlooking the Au Sable river and seeing a panoramic view all the way from Lake Huron in the east to Lake Michigan in the west, with no forests remaining at all.

The death of the forest did not, of course, mean the death of the land's utility to humans. After all, even Manhattan Island remains (arguably) habitable several centuries after its deforestation. Once the pesky trees were out of the way, people could move into the area in earnest. But in those days before global warming, the frigid climate discouraged all but the hardiest of settlers, and much of the land began to heal itself, with second-growth forest gradually reaching across the state.

Underneath the forests, however, there lurked another natural resource: sand and gravel. Eons of glaciers had left Michigan a legacy of easily-accessible sand and gravel, a vital resource for the booming foundries of Flint and Detroit. Trina's family's business began when her great grandfather purchased a large sand and gravel quarry in Greenbush, Michigan, which included the present site of Guppy Lake. Great gashes were dug in the earth, quarry pits evolved into ponds, and the company grew and moved its headquarters to Chicago. Eventually, with changes to the economy, the Greenbush quarry was closed permanently. Leaving behind the hulking industrial remnants of the quarry, the company shut down and moved out. Trina's grandfather simply gave the central 30 acres, the part out family now lives on, to Fred Wilcox, the long-time foreman of the quarry. Fred, along with his wife Flossie, had come to love the special beauty of this twice-abused land.

(Strangely, Trina and I appear to have been linked to this land, in some incomprehensible way, from an early age. In 1973, decades after the quarry closed, Trina and I were both 15 years old and several people were trying to "fix us up." Trina actually missed our first scheduled meeting because she and her family were, for the first and only time in her childhood, visiting Fred and Flossie Wilcox in Greenbush. Her first visit to Guppy Lake delayed our meeting and falling in love by a week.)

Many years passed. Fred and Flossie lived off the land, stocking the old quarry with fish, hunting and gardening and living with minimal interactions with the money economy. Fred died in the 1970's, Flossie several years later, leaving no heirs or close relatives. To everyone's surprise, their will specified that the property be returned to Trina's grandfather, Ezra, who they considered its rightful owner.

Ezra was then an elderly retired businessman in Chicago, and he had no need or use for the property. He persuaded a number of relatives, including Trina's brother, to clean up the place and retrieve any family keepsakes before putting the property on the market. (And, at that point, we inherited a splendid dining room table that had been Trina's great grandfather's, but had been in Greenbush for many decades.)

The property was then sold, to a retired autoworker and his wife who had dreamed all their lives of retiring to such a northern paradise. Unfortunately, their marriage was unable to withstand the realization of their dreams. A few years passed, the husband left, another year passed, and the wife defaulted on the mortgage, which Ezra still held. So the property bounced back into the family yet again.

At this point, Ezra was dying, and had even less interest in owning a slice of Northern Michigan. Thus it came to pass that one day we received a call from him that, as it turned out, completely changed the way we wanted to organize the rest of our lives. He gave us the property as a gift. On our first visit, It took us about 5 minutes to realize that this was, quite simply, home. Our oldest daughter, Shayna, who was 5 at the time, compared it to the only other lake she really knew: "It's just like Trout Lake, only smaller. Let's call it Guppy Lake." The name stuck instantly, and we began spending as much time there as my career would allow. (And we brought Trina's great grandfather's table home again.)

In 1998, fresh from the IPO of my first company, First Virtual Holdings (now MessageMedia), we purchased the adjacent property, about 75 acres of forest with several additional ponds and a modest house. The area around Greenbush is being rapidly developed, and we had heard that a developer was looking at the property with an eye to putting in at least 17 vacation homes. Having purchased the property to save it from development, we decided to try to do something useful with it.

The new property (which had probably once been a part of the family quarry, we're not really sure) had actually been assaulted not just twice -- by loggers and quarrymen -- but a third time as well. In the 1970's, when environmental regulations meant that, for the first time, locals actually had to pay real money to get rid of their trash, some of them found this land instead. An absentee landlord failed to notice, and considerable amounts of trash found their way onto the land that we eventually purchased in 1998. By the time we bought it, several successive owners had closed off the entrances to the public and cleaned up much of the trash, but we've been cleaning up the rest ever since, warily watching for signs of anything toxic, which thankfully we've not found so far.

The Future

To me, this land clearly demonstrates not just the fragility of nature, and the harm that humans can do to it, but its resilience as well. The second-growth forest is lovely and maturing. The scars of the quarry have become ponds and hills, and even the sandiest of the hills are slowly growing a cover of vegetation. We've gotten most of the trash out. Fish, birds, and wildlife are abundant. (In 2001, we saw a bald eagle over our property for the first time. Thirteen years earlier, we had watched vainly by the Au Sable river, 30 miles away, hoping for a glimpse of the first pair of eagles to be reintroduced into Michigan's lower penninsula.)

This land will never be a wilderness, but it can come to exemplify the way people can undo much of the damage they have done to the Earth. This ecosystem can support eagles once again; it is worth cherishing and protecting.

We plan to add one building to the land -- an interfaith meeting center, built between three ponds, for people of different religions to find common cause and common ground. The Guppy Lake Restoration Retreat will take several years to get underway. For now, the emphasis is on planning, construction, fundraising, and, of course, hauling out the last of the garbage. Volunteers and donors are extremely welcome, and are encouraged to send mail to <nsb@guppylake.com>