Each fills a place in my heart

What’s huge to one person is just a little shaver to someone else.

As a little shaver myself, about 70 years ago, I decided that there was no larger body of water in the world than Trout Lake.

That would be the Trout Lake that fills up a good piece of the town of Boulder Junction; the Trout Lake that covers about 6.2 square miles of area, has about 16 miles of shoreline, and, not to mention, that in places it is over 100 feet in depth.

I first became acquainted with Trout Lake when I was five or six years of age. My mother, for several summers, contracted to clean on a weekly basis a large summer home and a smaller cottage on the same property overlooking the very south end of Trout Lake.

While she worked, I played. I managed about 1,000 or so concrete steps down to the lake, along whose shore I found an infinite number of wonderful things to admire and sometimes play with.

If I were quick enough, bullfrogs or leopard frogs would be careless enough to be caught by me. I would do a careful analysis of their size and fine colors, then release them back into the waters from which they came.

In late August, I would become perhaps the richest kid in the world, rich that is, as in being the sole picker of buckets full of big, ripe blackberries from bushes that grew and produced berries in abundance all along the borders of the homeowner’s property.

Ostensibly, I was supposed to be filling buckets with berries for my mother to freeze or make jam with, but I will readily admit that almost as many made it down my gullet as those that made it in the bucket.

Getting back to Trout Lake itself, it was a body of water I thought stretched out forever, not just the 3,000-plus acres it is contained in.

As I got older and my horizons broadened, I learned that there were indeed larger — much larger — lakes in the world.

One of them, Lake Superior, became my newfound treasure somewhere around the summer I turned eight, or at least thereabouts.

My first encounter with that massive body of water, indeed the largest freshwater lake in the world, showed itself to me on a family excursion which occurred one summer and included a stop at Upson Falls on the Potato River just outside Upson.

It was there that my love affair with lakes grew to include waterfalls, and since then, even up to this day, I treasure waterfalls for all that they offer to me.

Thundering roars, massive rocks and canyon walls blasted every second of every day by cascading water draw me to many waterfalls I’ve heard of and been able to visit. Upson Falls is still a favorite, though far from the largest I’ve visited.

Many of the rivers that are among my favorites thunder their way downstream to flow into Lake Superior, but others I have visited time after time flow into Lake Michigan, or are located in various other places in various states.

Last summer, for the first time in my life, I saw the Atlantic Ocean, sailed upon it for 10 days along the coasts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Iceland. I have to admit the ocean is a tad bit larger than Superior, but it is neither a lake nor will it wrestle away the title of my favorite body of water.

I have camped or at least visited every state and provincial campground along the entirety of Lake Superior’s shoreline. I have camped and deeply admired and appreciated the beauty of Lake Huron, both from Madeline Island and along the north coast of Lower Michigan.

Whether it be waterfalls on rivers flowing into the Great Lakes, or the sheer-sided cliffs along some parts of their shores, or the vast forests that grow to their edges, I have a deep sense of reverence for it all.

I have been a passenger on a small boat traversing the Soo Locks, sailing out into Lake Superior to a point where I could see the place where the mighty Edmund Fitzgerald went down.

I have climbed to the top of a long-running, tree-covered, 700-foot-high cliff overlooking Lake Superior, a piece of land which is part of Sleeping Giant Provincial Park west of Thunder Bay. The views from those cliffs only reinforce several times over how much I love that lake.

I could go on and on about the wonder that fills me each time I gaze out on a lake, be it my own Plum Lake, the once “biggest lake in the world” to me, Trout Lake, or any little 40-acre pothole lake where bluegills, perch and largemouth bass readily attack my chosen lures.

All that said, each fills a place in my heart that holds memories of a lifetime.