Pier Cove was once hailed as “the busiest port between St. Joseph and Muskegon.” Before the Civil War, Pier Cove was a bustling community and a major point for lumber distribution between Chicago and Milwaukee. With the exhaustion of the lumber supply in the late 1880s, a huge fire and the coming of the railroad, the sawmill was moved and Pier Cove diminished. But when fruit became a major shipping commodity in the 1880s, Pier Cove’s economy again grew to contain a warehouse and two piers that revived the villages. In 1899 a freeze killed much of the local harvest, and shipping at Pier Cove was reduced to passenger traffic, with commercial activity ending less than two decades later.

We walk south in silence, little breeze in our faces, no noise save for the whistle of the wind across the icy lake and the creak of barren aspen trees.

“Look,” Scooter finally says, putting his hand on my arm to slow me. “Look at the contrast.”

He points to the lake and then to the shoreline. The frozen lake makes it look as if we might be walking in Antarctica while the dunes make it seem as if we might be in the Southwest.

“Have you ever been to New Mexico?” Scooter asks, as if he’s reading my mind.

“No,” I say. “You?”

He nods. “When I was on my cross-country journey of discovery,” he says, before looking at me. “Makes being lost sound very sexy, doesn’t it?”

I laugh. “Was it?” I ask. “Not sexy, I mean, but did you find what you were looking for?”

He continues to look at me, thinking, not saying a word, for so long that I begin to feel as if I shouldn’t have asked the question.

“I did,” he finally says. “I found me.”

Scooter’s eyes soften, and he looks toward the shoreline, where large chunks of the dunes have collapsed and then refrozen, leaving breathtakingly intricate sand patterns in the steep banks.

“I think New Mexico is one of the most beautiful states in the US alongside Michigan and California,” he says. “The quick snowmelt and lake wind created these works of art.” Scooter walks toward the shoreline and runs his mitten along the dunes. From my perspective, it appears as if a monkey is scrambling for cover.

“See how these hold their shape due to the freezing temperatures? They remind me of the cliffs in New Mexico,” he says. “I toured a lot of the cliff dwellings that Pueblo people built over seven hundred years ago. Seven hundred years,” Scooter repeats, shaking his head. “We are just babies, Adie Lou, in terms of our society and history. But we think we know it all, have all the answers.” He rubs his hand over the embankment and then suddenly digs into its side, and chunks of sand collapse to the ground. “We really don’t know much of anything.”