I mean, Lake Michigan is big enough to be a sea. All the Great Lakes are, they’re not considered seas because they’re not all at sea level, they’re all freshwater, and they’re not directly connected to the ocean (they’re only connected through rivers and lochs)
Small lakes don’t have noticeable waves but because the Great Lakes are so big there’s enough room for the air to downdraft across it (which is also why in Michigan you get lake effect weather and so it can be a blizzard one day and 70° the next)
My grandmother, who grew up in Puerto Rico, when seeing Lake Michigan for the first time with my grandfather exclaimed, “This is not a lake, it is a sea!”
Lake Superior has tides. They’re not as dramatic as the actual ocean’s of course. But still. For every storm that kicks up 200ft spray and waves that crash over the tops of the lighthouses on the piers, there’s days when you can’t tell where the water meets the sky.
Lake Superior doesn’t have a monster, Lake Superior IS the monster.
lake superior (gichi-gami in ojibwe) has enough water in it cover both america’s in a foot of it. it contains 10% of the worlds fresh surface water! it’s 1333 ft deep!!! she’s Big
They say that she doesn’t give up her dead either.
Man living nearby all the great lakes when I first saw what Most people consider a lake, I thought it was just a super big pond kinda thing
There’s a reason why they’re called “great” lakes.
The funniest thing about growing up near the Great Lakes is watching things like this and being like, “Oh, yeah, we used to go there on field trips!”
Reblogging because Caitlin Doughty is fantastic and everyone should watch her videos
Like many, I discovered Caitlin Doughty’s work in death acceptance and funeral industry reform through her video series “Ask a Mortician.” From there I found her organization, the Order of the Good Death, and got a little obsessive.
Like many thoughtful kids, I grew up a little morbid—wanted to be a medical examiner; took too-close pictures of dead seals that washed up on beaches in Canada where my family took vacations; was over-interested in the bog bodies of northwestern Europe—and Caitlin Doughty is exactly what I wish I had had then. In her video “It Gets Better, Morbid Kids!,” she says, “People who make you feel bad about being interested in death are doing it because they are terrified of death, and they’re living half their lives closed off to the fact that death actually enhances our lives, and makes it more beautiful.” The message is directed at death-curious kids who are like I was (and, let’s be real, still am), but it applies to everyone, which is one reason I’m overexcited that Doughty has written a book.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory covers some of the same territory as Doughty’s videos, but the written format allows her to spread out—to tell more stories from her own life, for example, and to delve more deeply into death customs both ancient and current. Doughty’s work is intensely researched, with a bibliography included, and her extensive knowledge of the death practices of other cultures is one of our first entrances into what could be if the West accepted death for what it is. One of my personal favorites (and Doughty’s as well) is Tibetan sky burial, in which the body is laid out to be eaten by vultures, becoming useful in death by nourishing living things. As she explains in a video that covers the topic, “It’s one of my favorite death customs because I think it’s just beautiful. The idea of your body being taken apart and flown into the air in a million different directions is really, really powerful.” Elsewhere, Doughty describes the way the Romans of the first century used milk to wash the bones remaining among the ashes on the funeral pyre; the contemporary Japanese custom of placing the bone fragments that remain post-cremation into urns, from feet to head; the ritual of Brazil’s isolated Wari’ people, who once practiced mortuary cannibalism as a compassionate act for the person who had died; the way the Javanese wash the dead by “holding the corpse on their laps, positioned so the living are soaked in the water as well.”
These customs stand in stark contrast to Western ones. Doughty traces the transition from medieval Europeans’ relative comfort with death to the West’s current culture of death-denial. Embalming, Doughty explains, began to become popular during the Civil War, when the logistics of retrieving a soldier’s body from the battlefield were complicated by their sheer distance from their families. “The situation,” she goes on, “brought out the entrepreneurial impulses of men, who, if a family could pay, would perform a new preservative procedure called embalming—right there on the battlefield… . Defiling the body in this way was considered a sin in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, but the desire to see the face of a loved one again sometimes trumped religious ideology.” The tradition stuck, and brought about what Doughty describes as “an experience I share with thousands upon thousands of other North American children, trundling past a casket and getting this brief, waxy vision of death.” Furthermore, the early twentieth century “brought on what is known as the ‘medicalization’ of death,” by which the majority of Americans no longer passed away in their homes, but in hospitals or nursing homes.
The problem with these customs is not the customs themselves; rather, it is in their motivations—or lack thereof. Doughty writes,
Every culture has death rituals with the power to shock the uninitiated and challenge our personal web of significance … The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.
Part of this breakdown between practice and belief comes from the secularization of Western culture; Doughty points out that the “fastest-growing religion in America is ‘no religion’—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States.” It is our responsibility to create new rituals that actually mean something, that are tender and meaningful and help those who have been left in life by the people they love.
This movement, of course, would require that we accept death in the first place. “Death should be known,” Doughty writes. “Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” After all, 2.5 million people—a group Doughty calls “the necro demographic”—die each year: “We’d probably pay more attention,” she points out, “if no one died all year, and then on December 31 the entire population of Chicago suddenly dropped dead. Or Houston. Or Las Vegas and Detroit put together.” Doughty’s own experiences in acknowledging and working with death were to her “an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.”
“When you know that death is coming for you,” she writes elsewhere in the book, “the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love.” It is, in short, our built-in motivation: something we are born with that makes our birth all the more meaningful.
It is, in fact, simply human. “Some 95,000 years ago,” Doughty writes early in the book,
a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose… . We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.
And here is the crux of anthropology, the central question which divides it from primatology even as specialists cannot pinpoint the exact moment of difference: When, exactly, did humans become human? Doughty has a possible answer here. What is unique about us as humans may not be creativity, or intelligence, or tool-making, or civilization: it may be that death, that thing that happens to any animal or plant or protozoa, is something we know is coming.
Yet what is unique to all of us is also what is the same between each of us. During her first job in the death industry, Doughty remembers one day of contrasts and sameness:
One afternoon, Chris and I left the crematory in his white van and drove into Berkeley to pick up Therese Vaughn. Therese died in her own bed at age 102. Therese was born when World War I—World War I!—was still years in the future. After returning to Westwind and placing Therese’s body in the cooler, I cremated a newborn baby who had lived a mere three hours and six minutes. After cremation, Therese’s ashes and the ashes of the baby were identical in appearance, if not in quantity… .
Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone.
The quotes above are from an advance reading copy and may include some minor discrepancies.
