The Graveyard Offshore — a stop on M-22.
Look out at that water and let me correct an impression, because it looks like a pleasant blue holiday and it is one of the most dangerous pieces of water on the continent.
Lake Michigan has no tide and no salt, which sounds friendly, but it makes up for it in other ways. It's shallow compared to an ocean, so waves build steep and fast and CLOSE together — an ocean swell rolls under a ship, but a Great Lakes sea hits it like a hammer, over and over, with no rhythm to ride. Storms come out of the northwest across four hundred miles of open water with nothing to slow them. And the freshwater is cold enough year-round to kill a swimmer in minutes.
In the age of sail this coast was a highway — hundreds of schooners hauling lumber and grain — and there was nowhere to hide. The shore you're driving is a lee shore in a west wind, which means the wind pushes you onto it, and a wooden ship driven onto a sand bar in a gale breaks up where it sits.
There are thousands of wrecks in the Great Lakes, and a good many of them are within sight of this road. The cold fresh water preserves them beautifully — no shipworm, little corrosion — so divers find schooners standing upright on the bottom with their masts still up. Boone has the story of one that came back.