No man is an island, John Donne wrote in the seventeenth century.
He didn’t say no man could love an island.
Here’s a tale about such a man and that island, and a U.P. Ph. D. business prof determined to make it a menage a trois.
The woman, originally from Oakland County suburbs, taught college in the Keweenaw, water on three sides. Now she and the man bike across a bridge in order to be surrounded entirely by water and two nations in one of the most amazing urban parks in the continent.
In the last week, he’s returned to his old routine of biking around Belle Isle in the morning — after a four-month-long hiatus due to repeated thefts of recumbent bikes from an ostensibly secure apartment garage two miles from the island.
Just a week after “anonymous” wrote “A silver single’s sojourn into Detroit’s online matchmaking scene” in this publication venting seven months of frustration and dashed hopes in seeking a septuagenarian partner, the peninsular woman first contacted the island guy and launched a rescue mission, vowing to save him from the morass of muddled misery he’d sunk into.
She engineered a plan, measured dimensions at the bike shop and the width of his apartment doors, and is relearning to ride after twenty-some years. She squeezes his recumbent out the door most mornings, and they pedal over the MacArthur Bridge.
Belle Isle is still the same wonderland he remembered: a 982-acre retreat from urban stress in international waters, with its aquarium, conservatory, Great Lakes Museum, nature center, yacht club, and boat club, public beach — full of cyclists, walkers, people in parked cars just gazing at the water, and the skyline of two nations’ cities, giant oceangoing vessels a stone’s throw from shore, kayakers, rowers, speedboats on the river, swans, sometimes a bald eagle, and spectacular sunrises over Canada.
Of course, the same clueless state agency that for years allowed it to be a mogul’s racehorse is still mismanaging it, keeping the ten-acre concrete paddock as a police training ground, letting the old zoo grounds and buildings continue to decay, and the trees in the flooded woods continue to rot. The signage is worth a few winces: “do not feed wildlife or birds” (the DNR thinks the birds are somehow NOT wildlife!); “no glass containers or animals on the beach” (you can take your glass animals anywhere else on Belle Isle); “no parking on grass” (maybe on weed); “animals must be on six-foot leash” (even cats, snakes, and turtles?).
But even the Michigan DNR can’t ruin it. Biking there is a great gift from the U.P. prof to the man who had almost given up on his waking dream. Just the other day he asked the river for their first freighter, and then two enormous freighters squeezed upstream past them, briefly obscuring the cars on Riverside Drive in Windsor.
Do you believe in magic? It’s just over the bridge.
Subscribe to Metro Times newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
