My Watermark is the Les Cheneaux Watershed, Lake Huron.

When I was a kid, we’d swim on a channel between two islands, and when we’d get to the other side, we’d pull bloodsuckers off our legs. We don’t see bloodsuckers anymore. We’d also swim across this 100-foot wide channel and we’d see clams about 3-inch in diameter. They were clams that we could open and play with; I don’t think they were a kind you’d have a clam chowder with, but those are gone. The Crawdads are gone. The fireflies are gone. The bees are pretty much gone. And a lot of the butterflies are gone. We don’t see this stuff anymore, and it’s sad to see it go.

I still see people having fun on the water, but there’s not as much respect for the environment as there was years ago.