Spirit of the Lake

 
This letterbox was originally created for the 2004 Great Lakes Letterbox Gathering held at Morraine Hills State Park, McHenry, IL on June 12, 2004. The box was replanted in its permanent spot in Michigan, with the original stamp and logbook in July 2004.

Clues…

As Sherman and his dog, Nugent, walked toward the lake, they passed the entrance to Idlewild. Sherm fondly recalled summers he had spent with his grandparents in the neighboring beach community of Winnetaska. Mindlessly he began humming the song written so many years ago by Douglas Malloch, one of Winnetaska’s renowned residents.

As they crossed through the parking lot and headed down the boardwalk toward the beach, he listened to the whisper of the wind in the trees and the clapping of the waves hitting the shoreline, and thought how fitting the words of the song, “The whisper of the forest tree, The thunder of the inland sea…” They certainly captured the spirit of the lake that stretched endlessly before him. The poet could have been standing in this very place when he so eloquently penned his tribute.

He turned and started back up the boardwalk, the words of the song still running through his mind as he headed off to hide the letterbox.

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One Tin Soldier

(the return of Billy Jack Beale)

 
Now they stood before the treasure, on the mountain dark and red,
Turned the stone and looked beneath it, “Peace on Earth was all it said.”

Clues…

On a cold and rainy evening in November, the brave one-legged soldier returned home from Virginia, after many years of seeking his great-great-grandfather’s treasure.

Several years later, he sat beside a crackling fire at the Circle R Ranch and told of the lessons he had learned — about greed and the uselessness of violence, “Listen children to a story…”

When he finished, a little boy who had been listening intently to each word of the soldier’s tale, murmured — as much a question as a statement, “But you can justify it in the end?”

The old soldier looked away, far off toward the mountains as if remembering how it had been. Quietly he answered, “There are some who say you can; I don’t.”

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