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Wednesday, April 1, 2020

The D&M Don't Come Here No More

Passenger rail service was discontinued in the early 1960s before I moved here.  Freight service was maintained until the paper mill, their last customer, closed in 1990.  The tracks in town were pretty much at street level, but they ran on a raised bed out in the country.  I'm not sure when the Greyhound quit stopping in Cheboygan, maybe the 80s or 90s.

 The West Side of town used to flood regularly every spring, but they fixed that with a project before I moved here.  The project consisted of a series of impoundments that caused the water of the Little Black River to back up into pasture land on the edge of town and released it slowly through culverts.  The East Side still gets wet from time to time, I wouldn't call it flooding, more like puddling.  The water table is pretty close to the surface most of the time, and all the septic systems require raised drain fields.  This is a picture of the intermittent marsh in front of our house and was taken about this time of year.  The house itself was built on higher ground, but we still had to haul in three feet of sand to get percolation.  The marsh almost always dries up enough by August that I can mow it to keep it from reverting to brush.  I can remember at least one year that it did not.  It must have been 2017 because this picture was taken in the spring of 2018, and it looks like it wasn't mowed the previous summer.  The water level is lower this year because we didn't have as much snow and the culverts never froze.



The State of Michigan has reported almost 10,000 cases now, and almost 400 deaths, and most of these numbers occurred after the lockdown was imposed, which is why I wondered if it was doing any good.  I suppose it would be worse if no action had been taken, but there's no way to know that now.  Most of the cases are in the southern half of the Lower Peninsula, with Detroit being the epicenter.  Today Cheboygan County reported its second case, and Emmet County had its first death.


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