At the southern shore of a sea that isn’t salt.
Notes on New Buffalo and Harbor Country — the dunes, the weather, the long light off the lake — written from a house we keep here.
New Buffalo sits where Lake Michigan turns the corner — the first town on Michigan’s shore, and the southern end of the largest system of freshwater dunes on earth.
From above, the coast here reads like a painting in bands: pale sand, a thin line of surf, then water that moves from bottle-glass green to a blue so deep it looks like ink. From the ground it is quieter — marram grass, the tick of sand against a snow fence, old beech woods a few miles inland, and back roads that lead to orchards, vineyards and small towns with a single good bakery.
These pages are about paying attention to that place: where to walk and when, what grows here and why it matters, how Harbor Country changes from one season to the next. Everything here is somewhere we have stood, at an hour we would recommend.
From the Journal
The view from Tower Hill
On climbing the south shore’s great dune barefoot, and the long, strange quiet at the top before you run all the way down.
Evening at the harbor mouth
The breakwall, a west wind, and the twenty minutes after sunset when the lake turns the color of slate and Chicago appears on the horizon.
The coast in February
Shelf ice, empty roads, a wood fire, and the case for coming to a summer town in the one season nobody recommends.
“On the clearest evenings, Chicago rises out of the water — a faint line of towers across the lake that only makes this place feel further away.”
The Coast in Four Seasons
Most people come in July. They are missing something.
Trillium under the old beeches at Warren Woods, morels for those who know where to look, and beaches entirely your own. The lake is cold; the light is not.
Sunsets after nine, blueberries and peaches at roadside stands, and water warm enough by August to swim out past the second sandbar.
The crowds go home, the vineyards inland are picked, and the lake holds summer’s warmth well into October. The finest month, if you ask us.
Shelf ice along the shore — admired from the beach, never walked on — snow on the dunes, and a silence you can hear.
Harbor Country in Eight Places
Within half an hour of New Buffalo, the places we return to — and the hour we’d go.
Where we stay.
These notes are written, most weeks, from a house we keep in New Buffalo. The beach is a two-minute walk, and the house was made for the kind of trip this journal describes: early walks, long dinners, and very little in between.
When readers ask where to stay in Harbor Country, this is our answer. It is open to guests for part of each year.
Dispatches
Four letters a year from Harbor Country, one each season: where to walk, what’s in bloom, and when the light is best.