Lake Michigan

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - As a teenager, Steve Libert was mesmerized by a teacher's stories of the brash 17th-century French explorer La Salle, who journeyed across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi in a quest for a trade route to the Far East that he hoped would bring riches and renown. Particularly intriguing was the tale of the Griffin, a vessel that La Salle built and sailed from Niagara Falls to the shores of present-day Wisconsin before sending it back for more supplies.

When residential developers built the tony towers that now line Chicago's Sheridan Road in the 1960s, Midwestern names just wouldn't do. Sheridan Road, after all, flowed from the 28-mile sweep of Chicago's magnificent Lake Shore Drive, and there was a need to convey the same prestige that was attached to addresses along Lake Shore Drive. Developers christened the buildings, which lined the shore like sentries, with breezy names: Malibu, El Lago, Thorndale Beach, Granville Beach and Park Edgewater.

Seventeen miles out in a gray Lake Michigan dawn, fish are flying out of the hatch of the Susie Q. Mike LeClair and his crew stand at the sorting table, pulling smelt, chub, burbot and the occasional trout from the gill net. Keepers go into plastic bins; rejects disappear out the door into the charcoal-gray water. LeClair, his orange rubber coveralls glistening under the boat's electric light, pauses to feed one to a gull perched on the net hoist. He smiles - "My pal" - and nods as the bird grabs the fish from his hand.

"I just love being on the water," says Peter Gibbons-Neff, a lifelong sailor and past commodore of The Corinthian Yacht Club of Philadelphia. His love developed as a boy, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and he has sailed all over the world. He has raced in the biannual Newport-to-Bermuda Race 14 times, earlier with his father and recently with three of his children. He raced across the Atlantic, from Bermuda all the way to Copenhagen, in 17 days when in college. He now keeps his boat on the Chesapeake, near Annapolis, and sails the bay as often as he can. At 66, he's still working hard as a wealth manager, and suffers from the conscientious man's curse - "I still have not gotten out of the guilt of leaving the office.

The guidebook reasons for a September visit here seemed meager at best. The town's major annual events, the National Blueberry Festival and the Harbor Fest, had already been held (in August and June respectively), and it was too early for the annual show of fall foliage in nearby Van Buren State Park. The Michigan Maritime Museum sounded fascinating, but it alone wasn't enough to make my wife and me stare down the white-line-fever-inducing properties of a 12-hour Interstate drive from our home in Maryland.

When I was in college, I took a friend home to Indiana for the weekend to show him Lake Michigan. He had grown up at the Jersey Shore and, on the way to Indiana, made it pretty clear that some lake somewhere in the vast Middle West wasn't going to excite him much. "I'm used to the ocean," he said a bit patronizingly. Then we got to the beach in my hometown and he gazed out, amazed. "You can't see the other side," he said. "That's why," I told him, "it's called a Great Lake.

Back in Washington, reports reaching here say, the final hurdles have been cleared for agreement on national energy policy legislation. That's good news for the country and a tribute to Energy Secretary James D. Watkins and the members of Congress from both parties who have been struggling almost since the start of the Bush administration to bring this devilishly difficult task to a successful conclusion. Along with the air- and surface-transportation bills passed in 1990 and 1991, the energy bill represents an example of bipartisan cooperation.

The waters are frozen a dull gray around the red-and-white lighthouse here at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, but unlike most winters Chris Furness is not breaking through the ice to head out fishing. Instead, the fisherman is at his other job at the fire department, fretting about his bills and thinking that he and his wife may have to close the fish market that his father started and that has been a local institution for more than a quarter-century. Used to be Furness and his brother and father could fish just about year-round, hauling in thousands of pounds of Lake Michigan yellow perch, a tender, tasty delicacy favored by those who live along the lake's southern rim. But conservation officials, citing a dramatic decline in perch population in Lake Michigan, have put strict restrictions on commercial fishermen like the Furnesses.

DALLAS QUIZ TIME 1. Texas has many cities and towns located on rivers. Next to each town, write its river. a. Port Arthur --------- d. Austin ------------- b. Laredo ----------- e. Brownsville ---------- c. El Paso ----------- f. Victoria ------------ g. Waco ------------- 2. Name the Texas neighboring states that have the following features. a. White Sands National Monument ---------------- b. Ozark National Forest --------------------- c. Mississippi Delta ------------------------ d. Grand Lake of the Cherokees ----------------- e. Santa Fe National Forest -------------------- f. Indian Nation Turnpike -------------------- g. Will Rogers Turnpike --------------------- h. Lake Charles ------------------------- 3. Texas is in the Central Time Zone.

Every year, when August turns to September, my husband and I pack our car, grab our dog, and head for Lake Michigan. A deep sense of relaxation comes over me as I put my car in gear and head for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I share the narrow roads with tractor-trailers and, reaching Michigan, pass through Ann Arbor's game-day traffic without a single moan or complaint, because I know what awaits me at the end of our GPS-navigated route: inner peace. I grew up going to Ludington, Mich.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - As a teenager, Steve Libert was mesmerized by a teacher's stories of the brash 17th-century French explorer La Salle, who journeyed across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi in a quest for a trade route to the Far East that he hoped would bring riches and renown. Particularly intriguing was the tale of the Griffin, a vessel that La Salle built and sailed from Niagara Falls to the shores of present-day Wisconsin before sending it back for more supplies.

Tornado widest ever in the U.S. A tornado that swept through Oklahoma on Friday was the widest tornado in American history, the National Weather Service said Tuesday. The El Reno, Okla., tornado scraped out a damage path up to 2.6 miles wide and 16.2 miles long, a swath at points wider and longer than Manhattan. The storm broke the record held by a 2.5-mile-wide Hallam, Neb., twister in 2004. The human aftermath left by Friday's twister was painfully apparent, with at least 18 people killed in the latest massive tornado to carve through Oklahoma this spring.

ONEKAMA, MICH. - For more than a century, easy access to Lake Michigan has made Onekama a popular place for summer visitors and a refuge for boaters fleeing dangerous storms. Now, the community itself needs a rescue, from slumping lake levels that threaten its precious link to open water. The Great Lakes, the world's biggest freshwater system, are shrinking because of drought and rising temperatures, a trend that accelerated with this year's almost snowless winter and scorching summer.

"I just love being on the water," says Peter Gibbons-Neff, a lifelong sailor and past commodore of The Corinthian Yacht Club of Philadelphia. His love developed as a boy, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and he has sailed all over the world. He has raced in the biannual Newport-to-Bermuda Race 14 times, earlier with his father and recently with three of his children. He raced across the Atlantic, from Bermuda all the way to Copenhagen, in 17 days when in college. He now keeps his boat on the Chesapeake, near Annapolis, and sails the bay as often as he can. At 66, he's still working hard as a wealth manager, and suffers from the conscientious man's curse - "I still have not gotten out of the guilt of leaving the office.

Best sports city: Philadelphia, No. 2. Chicago, No. 4: Don't take our word for it. Those are the 2009 Sporting News rankings. Pittsburgh's No. 1 ranking might have been clubbed away by Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Most notorious mobster: Philadelphia, Nicky Scarfo. Chicago, Al Capone: If Chicago is so great, how come Capone spent so much time at Eastern State Penitentiary on Fairmount Avenue? Most notorious fire: Philadelhia, MOVE, 1985. Chicago, Mrs. O'Leary's cow, 1871: The cow story was a ruse, but the fire in 1871 destroyed about four square miles of the city.

The fish must have a lot of money and really good lobbyists. As a result, they've convinced a number of politicians that healthy fish are more important than healthy people. That's the only conclusion I can reach to explain the current response by the Great Lakes congressional delegation to the impending invasion of Asian carp. They are coming, no doubt about it, and bringing their insatiable hunger with them. They have moved up the waterways of the Mississippi Valley and are now poised to enter Lake Michigan.

Every year, when August turns to September, my husband and I pack our car, grab our dog, and head for Lake Michigan. A deep sense of relaxation comes over me as I put my car in gear and head for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I share the narrow roads with tractor-trailers and, reaching Michigan, pass through Ann Arbor's game-day traffic without a single moan or complaint, because I know what awaits me at the end of our GPS-navigated route: inner peace. I grew up going to Ludington, Mich.

Lake Michigan was in full view outside the limo taking Penn State's contingent to downtown Chicago for the Big Ten meetings in late July, so the old man from Brooklyn decided it was a good time to chide the young man from Schuylkill County's coal region. "You see that, Capone, they're called yachts," coach Joe Paterno said to middle linebacker Gino Capone. "You guys don't get to see them where you're from. And that's called a lake. You guys have lakes where you're from?" "I told him, 'No, Coach, we have mines filled with water.

People in this city, who like to think of themselves as tougher than other big-city dwellers when it comes to the tests of a frigid winter, had taken to lamenting Chicago's lack of "a real winter" in recent years. Longtime Chicagoans had begun recalling the freezer-locker winters of the past - the frozen Chicago River and the ice shelf built by freezing waves along Lake Michigan - with the same nostalgia that fans of the hapless Bears now harbor for onetime coach "Iron" Mike Ditka.

Ahhh, the beauties of fall in Chicago! The blizzard of vivid leaves in the parks along Lake Michigan. The fat, orange jack-o'-lanterns on the porches of Gold Coast mansions. The first scent of wood smoke from a thousand chimneys under the brilliant orb of a harvest moon. The salmon run at Lincoln Park Lagoon. The salmon run at Lincoln Park Lagoon? "This year, there are some pretty big ones coming in," Mario Rivera said, as he filed to a killing sharpness the barbs of a wicked-looking treble hook.