Spent all day last Sunday at Blue Lake Arts camp located on the southern edge of the Manistee national forest about an hour from home. The Manistee forest is a million acres of forest in the Lower Peninsula set aside for preservation and recreation.  I was at the camp for parent orientation for the Z-girl's summer tour of Europe with the international ballet ensemble.  Zoe was spending the day rehearsing.  The orientation consisted of a lot of pamphlets being handed out and one on one questions and answers with the tour facilitators.  I ended up with a lot of time to kill so I took a long hike around the property.  The camp is huge with a lot of well groomed trails going in all directions through the woods.  It was a beautiful fall day.
It was great wandering around and checking things out at my leisure.  I spent a lot of time at the camp's chapel because I love the building and the light was tremendous. The humble structure reminds me of that scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where they are trying to pick out the Holy Grail from amongst a shelf full of chalices. Jesus' Cup ends up being this nondescript but graceful chalice made of clay.  This chapel, although made simply and crudely, holds a spiritual power that I felt more closely than most any other grand church or cathedral I've been in. Or it might have just been the tremendous light that day.
After communing with the chapel I walked over to the camp's beach and then up a small trail through a jack pine forest.  I love jack pines. I took a wrong turn and wound up wandering around in the woods for about a half hour before coming out onto an access road I recognized from the last time I'd been up.  I came out right across the road from the local public radio station.  I listen to a show coming from the station every Friday night and sometimes on Saturdays -  "Jazz from Blue Lake with Lazaro Vega". I realized I've been listening to this show off and on for over twenty years.  Its the only jazz show this station has; the rest of its programming is classical music, opera and various NPR news programs. And Prairie Home Companion...which I loathe. I think its fitting that a classical and jazz public radio station should be tucked away on a logging road 10 miles within a million acre national forest. Lazaro Vega's winter commute to the station must be a bitch.



I wandered back to the camp's dining hall where all the other parents had gathered to wait for their kids to get done with the day's rehearsal.  No internet access so I spent the long afternoon writing two columns for the paper, 4 menus for work, fiddled with a few movie reviews and started a Christmas themed short story about a tree salesman who gets robbed. The sun was going down by the time I was to go pick up Zoe from her rehearsal.  She was bruised, battered and exhausted from rehearsing two modern dance pieces that required a lot of rolling around, jumping and falling.  Over and over all day.  She discovered the practical meaning of having a love hate relationship with something.