Cecil Bay

By David N. Duncan

Ben Davidson just wanted to be left alone. But when a lonely widow squatted on his land to hide from an abusive boyfriend and a conservation officer began harassing him, Ben found himself tangling with a local vice kingpin, a rogue cop, and a vicious killer. Set against the backdrop of a beautiful forest stressed by a drought, it all would explode in a firestorm that seemed to exact its own form of justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483655833

David N. Duncan

David N. Duncan grew up in Northern Michigan, living in the tip on the Lower Peninsula, where he has practiced as a registered nurse, paramedic, teacher, gardener, and firefighter. He lives with his wife Peggy, who is also a nurse, and their son Sam on the banks of the Carp River, which flows into Lake Michigan at Cecil Bay. They have five grown children between them. They spend their free time enjoying the natural wonders around them, serving in their church, and volunteering on the local rescue squad.

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PROLOGUE

As the fledgling United States began its thrust westward, the Northwest Territories proved to be an almost unlimited treasure of natural resources for the burgeoning growth cities where timber was the main building material. Great stands of immense white pines carpeted the northern third of America from Maine to Minnesota and it was believed that loggers would be able to cut timber for a millennium without even scratching the surface. But the demand for lumber, coupled with the inventiveness of the army of loggers, who constantly devised more efficient methods of moving logs to market, made short work of the trees that had been standing undisturbed for centuries.

By the end of Civil War the great lumber boom was almost over for Michigan and Wisconsin, though Michigan would lead the nation in lumber production until 1900. The mad race to log off North America to make way for farms and cities had begun on the Penobscot in Maine, and was destined to cut a swath all the way to the Columbia in Oregon. As the loggers swept across the continent, they left in their wake massive stumps, ghosts of towns that were thrown up almost overnight, and great trash heaps of treetops that lay drying under the hot summer sun. Thick scrub brush eventually replaced the great tracts of white pine that were gobbled up by the eastern cities to feed their insatiable appetites for lumber. The sylvan skyline was gladly traded for one of whitewashed hotels and tenements.

By the time the gnarled ax men had swarmed through Michigan like locusts leaving the forests stripped clean, they managed to cut more than 150 billion feet of white pine and fifty billion feet of hardwoods. The hundreds of sawmills along Michigan’s rivers and coastal towns spewed out enough lumber to build a boardwalk a half mile wide from New York to San Francisco. The value of her timber exceeded that of California’s Gold Rush.

Once the timber was gone, the formerly prosperous lumber towns were simply torn down and moved west with the exodus of loggers. The few villages that survived the death of the lumber industry struggled to eke a living from the thin soil left by the clear cutting along the Great Lakes. While many areas in the tip of the Lower Peninsula turned to potato farming, and the northeast shore of Lake Michigan proved to be ideal for fruit growers, most of the Upper Peninsula’s lumber towns simply vanished. They were quickly swallowed up by the lush second growth that sprang up in the spaces left by clear cutting, often vanishing entirely in a decade or two. But one obscure little town sat poised for a special kind of disaster after the incredibly dry summer of 1871.

Peshtigo, Wisconsin, situated where the borders of Michigan and Wisconsin run down together on the shore of Lake Michigan, apparently hadn’t shared in the debauchery so common among the logging towns. She was a solid little community unlike many towns that had grown up overnight, often rivaling much larger cities with their rows of saloons and brothels. As Peshtigo lay sleeping under the dull brass October sky, some of the survivors would later recall a change in the air. It was suddenly like breathing the hot, stale exhalations of someone sleeping too close to you. Then it came. An unseasonably warm wind that was hotter than a blast furnace swept down the main street. In its wake a wall of flame washed over the town scouring it of life like a hellish tidal wave.

The sickening smell of cremated people and livestock was everywhere as hundreds were mowed down by the sickle of fire that seemed to intentionally seek them out. The fire raced with a fury that quickly outpaced their futile efforts at escape. Hundreds ran into the Peshtigo River but fire continued to rain down on them, while others drowned or died of hypothermia. Some sought refuge in wells, only to be boiled alive. In one nearby town, people attempted to outrun the flames aboard a train, but even that couldn’t escape the firestorm. As the train raced across a trestle, the walls of her cars smoldered while the paint blistered and smoked on the engine. Many tried to find refuge in the shallow waters of the lake the trestle spanned, only to have their life snuffed out the instant they came up for a breath.

People were incredulous the next day when John Mulligan rode into the small town of Menominee, Michigan, on a horse that reeked of singed hair, and announced that Peshtigo had been wiped out. As a spate of relief efforts rushed from nearby towns, rescue teams found little to do. The fire had done a thorough job. They did, however, find John Leach dazedly perched on a rock, smoking his pipe after burying eleven of his children and grandchildren. The searchers heard similar stories from the handful of survivors, and found few actual bodies to bury, most having been turned to ashes, leaving only bones that were unidentifiable. Over 350 were buried in a common grave.

Ironically, Peshtigo is little remembered today. The tragedy there was overshadowed by another fire on that same day: the Great Chicago Fire. Even though almost 1,200 people died in the Peshtigo fire, the carnage was forgotten in the wake of the 250 deaths in Chicago. While the world was held spellbound by the reports of the wholesale destruction on the southern end of Lake Michigan, they missed the horrifying spectacle six days later when a body plummeted to the ground from high in a burned out tree in Peshtigo. The camp foreman apparently must have preferred death up in the tree to being trapped on the ground.

The town of Peshtigo survives today, and even has a museum dedicated to the holocaust that should have destroyed her forever. Now a website chronicles the events of that tragic day, and contains several articles surrounding the speculation that continues into the cause of the worst natural fire in the history of America.

But even though this little Wisconsin town, along with a few nearby villages, seemed to bear the brunt of nature’s retribution for the greedy destruction of the great virgin pine forests that had covered much of the eastern United States, Michigan would pay for her sins as well. Virtually the entire northern half of the Lower Peninsula was burned over when her forest cover was decimated, leaving the soil to desiccate under the summer sun. The primeval forest was replaced with a layer of brush and stumps, creating an immense tinderbox that sparked other fires that same year (1871), consuming over 2.5 million acres. Again in 1881, over a million acres burned in the thumb of the Lower Peninsula. Hikers wandering the scrubby jack pine forests today can still find the huge charred stumps standing like black steles in memory of the irreverent obliteration of Michigan’s once vast treasure of gigantic white pines.

The lessons of destruction wrought in flame and death were not lost on Michigan though. In 1887 and on into the early decades of the twentieth century, there followed the development of a vast state forest system and a widespread reforestation program. With a network of fire towers, forest rangers, and eventually a fire service that evolved into an almost paramilitary organization, Michigan’s state forests have developed into lush tracts of multispecies timberlands that are actually better habitat for birds and game than the stands of giant white pine they replaced. Today, the National Forest Service also has a firefighting system, made up of smoke jumpers, patrol planes, and firefighters that works nationwide to battle the seasonal fires that still plague most of the western U.S.

Sadly, budget cuts in the last twenty years have gutted the DNR fire control division, leaving much of the state dependant on local volunteer fire departments to fill the gap. The fire towers are all abandoned, many fire roads have become overgrown, and only a skeleton staff is left to man equipment.

But northern Michigan is again dominated by lush forests. The hundred thousand men that made up the CCC crews of the depression planted over 150 million trees in Michigan alone, as well as building seven thousand miles of roads and over two hundred bridges. Modern building methods use only a small fraction of the lumber used in the nineteenth century so that the new forests enjoy the position of a pampered recreational resource for hikers, campers, and hunters.

Now, 130 years later, the monstrous fires are all but forgotten, along with the lessons learned a hundred years ago. The desire to leave many areas in a natural state has allowed layers of dead vegetation to accumulate. The DNR’s fire division often uses controlled burns to prevent the buildup of ground debris in selected areas, mostly in the tracts of jack pines that need fire to create habitat for the endangered Kirtland’s warbler. But under the lush second growth that covers most of the state, a tinderbox of fuel steadily accumulates. Most of the small farms that used to dot the landscape have been obliterated as well. Vast tracts were planted in pine and other timber species by the CCC and by companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific. Now they are being gradually logged off to make way for the new northern migration from southern Michigan’s urban sprawl. Logging methods have changed though, and most logged areas are simply mowed down. The trees are ground up onsite and reduced to chips that make the flake board or particle board that becomes the modern, ugly vinyl-coated office furniture, leaving little of the dead trash that fed the holocausts in the past. Areas actually logged are quickly replanted, and the only real forest left is in the many state parks, forests, and designated wilderness areas, as well as the huge tracts of national forest land. Seney, a small town in the center of the Upper Peninsula, had arguably the worst reputation for debauchery of all the ephemeral logging towns that dotted Michigan. A large tract of land known as the Seney Stretch, with a dead-straight piece of Highway Twenty-eight that spans over twenty-three miles without a hint of a bend was immolated in what seemed like the last great fire in Michigan toward the end of the twentieth century. It was a wake-up call for the U.S. Forest Service that proved holocausts like those of a hundred years ago were still possible.

CHAPTER ONE

At the tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula sits the village of Mackinaw City. She was once the portal for all motorists and trains wanting to gain access to the resources and recreation of the Upper Peninsula. She became known for the immense lines of traffic that backed up forty miles south of town, waiting to board the car ferries that were the only way to get to the Upper Peninsula, and for the huge round house and railroad depot that similarly moved trains to the waiting railroad ferries. But now, Mackinaw City and her neighbor St. Ignace at the north end of the Mackinac Bridge have been transformed into luxury resort areas, with a casino in St. Ignace and literally thousands of motel rooms between the two towns. The ferries now haul hundreds of thousands of tourists to nearby Mackinac Island, where they can spend their remaining vacation budget on carriage tours, innumerable varieties of beer, or unique gifts from just about anywhere but Michigan. To the west of Mackinaw City, however, three shallow inlets—Trailsend Bay, Cecil Bay, and Big Stone Bay—form a scalloped shore line that is largely unchanged to this day. Vast tracts of land remain undeveloped, and even though this area was burned over in the 1871 firestorms, it had a second brief logging boom that cut the spruce and cedar left behind in favor of the white pine.

During the Depression a few hardy individuals carved small farms out of the woods along the few roads around Mackinaw City and the few rail lines left behind by the logging enterprises. These were merely sustenance farms that mainly grew what they needed to feed themselves and their families and buy the few necessities they couldn’t produce. After the economy began to recover, most of those who remained found work in the burgeoning tourist industry supported by the newly created middle class of auto workers from Detroit, who found themselves with vacation time, guaranteed annual wages, and other perks won by the powerful unions. The post-war boom of the fifties and sixties gave the working class generous leisure time, and the income to enjoy it.

Even though Mackinaw City thrives on tourism, most of the surrounding area is covered by swamp land that is a tangle of cedars and tag alders, with the exception of two ranges of hills, one in Wilderness Park and the other by French Farm Lake. Starting at the west end of Cecil Bay, Wilderness State Park forms a long narrow peninsula that marks the western extent of the shore, and is of one of Michigan’s largest state parks, covering over sixteen thousand acres, with many more acres of adjoining state land. Most of the area is accessible only by foot trails or gated roads closed to public traffic. During the Depression, the CCC had a camp in Wilderness Park that housed the young men from the urban areas of Michigan. For many of them it was their first taste of roughing it, and the once soft city kids became hardened men as they cut trees, burned brush, and built the narrow fire lanes that traversed the park from end to end. When they were done, the entire area was bordered with a grid of roads that would enable firefighters to quickly reach a hotspot before it could spread out of control. In addition, two fire towers stood watch over both the park and the surrounding townships. By the seventies, the towers were nearly forgotten, the one in the park long gone, while the one near the defunct village of Bliss two miles to the south was transformed into a makeshift radio tower. The fires of the past were only a faint memory, and the anachronistic Bliss fire tower was only seen as a place where impetuous teens would test their courage by scaling the hundred-foot structure.

In October of 1998, a freak wind the experts called a microburst, though you could hardly tell it from a tornado, swept by the town of Manistique in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, racing southeast across Lake Michigan and striking Wilderness State Park, where a few virgin pine and giant hemlock, as well as giant beech and maples still stood. In its wake it left hundreds of acres of the huge old growth trees flattened like a field of wheat under the blade of the reaper’s scythe. But unlike the devastation that the same storm caused to great areas of jack pines in Manistique or that of a similar storm that struck a year later fifty miles to the south, the trees in Wilderness Park were left where they fell. Because the park was designated a wilderness area, no one would harvest the millions of feet of prime lumber scattered like matchsticks over several square miles. The value of the fallen timber could have paid the budget for the park far into the next millennium. It would lie on the ground drying into tinder, slowly turning into fuel, waiting for the next drought to come to life with the first lightning bolt or carelessly thrown cigarette.

Between the Park and Mackinaw City nine miles to the east is an almost unbroken tract of swamp and brush-filled marsh with a single road bordering Lake Michigan. Other than a handful of homes at the west end, the land is devoid of roads or buildings, and forms an almost impassable tangle of fallen cedars and thick stands of alders. The rocky shore undulates in three irregular arcs forming shallow bays. Farthest west is Big Stone Bay in the center of Wilderness State Park, a popular picnic site for area schools. East of that is Cecil Bay, with a small camp store as the only evidence of the once busy village and port that used to sit on the mouth of the north-flowing Carp River. Trails End Bay, with its chaotic array of vacation homes standing shoulder to shoulder, elbowing each other for every available foot of shoreline, lies another mile to the east.

In the early part of the century, Cecil Bay even had a dance hall, and many Saturday nights would echo with revelry as the loggers and farmers rode the spur line from Carp Lake Village or the scattered farms along the line to whoop it up late into the night. But the village at the mouth of the Carp River died in flames when the sawmill burned, and now the only echo of her former wild nights comes from the drunken parties and grudgingly tolerant smelt fishermen that gather on the riverbanks each spring.

CHAPTER TWO

Unknown to most of the local residents, however, nestled in the thick cedar swamp in a peninsula just to the east of the Carp River, was a forbidding fence surrounding forty acres of the forest. The county had title to the land for several years, but someone must have decided it was better to collect property taxes off it than have it lie unused. It was too low and swampy to develop into a park, so it was quietly sold when an offer came from a local businessman. In the center of the tract sat a squat vinyl-sided concrete building looking like shoddy motel, which stared across a parking lot at a garage with four bays. The gravel drive ended at a third structure, a huge log building that sprawled across the back of the compound. Behind the lodge was another metal building, with metal canisters lined against one side. This building was surrounded by another fence over ten feet high. The top of the fence was strung with razor wire, with surveillance cameras at each corner. A winding gravel road fenced on each side was the only access, and entrance from Straits View Drive, the gravel road that looped around the square-mile tract, was gained only through a heavy motorized gate and attached guard house. No signs, save the numerous keep out, high voltage warnings gave any hint to the purpose of the little complex that had invaded the stand of thick silvered cedars surrounded by a deep green carpet of peat moss. On the gate by the guard house was a discreet plaque that read CBSC. The lone guard that sat in the tiny security shack out at the entrance knew only that the high-end cars that rolled by the guard shack with the required Cecil Bay Sportsman’s Club stickers usually contained nervous middle-aged men that were obviously used to preferential treatment. These tight-lipped, obviously wealthy and influential men that made frequent visits there reminded him of classic mob characters from the movies, although he was told they were state VIPs who wanted a little privacy and a chance to get away from their families. They spent some of their time shooting either at clay pigeons or at waterfowl over the shallow lake adjacent to the camp or racing over the narrow dirt trails on ORVs. Their evenings, however, revealed