“Eastward ho!” The plaintive call rallies hundreds of intrepid settlers looking to leave behind (at least for a long weekend) the grimness and hardship plaguing their lives in greater Chicagoland. The caravans form as the pilgrims resolutely set forth with nothing but the clothes on their backs and in their Paravel luggage, protected from the parching, relentless springtime Midwestern sun by only the thinnest of tinting on the glass of their BMWs’ sunroofs. Oh, to escape the weight of oppression beneath which they toil, and the burdens of multimillion dollar North Shore and western suburban home ownership to which they’re tethered. In search of a better time, the SUV trains roll eastward, ever eastward. Range Rovers, adorned with only mountain bike racks, boat trailers, and the simply-crafted Illinois license plates to identify the place of their individual journey’s humble beginning, roll along, each with even more factory options than the one before. This journey is arduous, and it’s long. It can take more than two hours for a well-fueled, air conditioned Audi to wend its way along the treacherous Interstate 94 trail, carrying its determined occupants to the Indiana-Michigan borderland frontier, and beyond.
It’s late April here in Michiana Shores, upon said fabled border and the shores of mighty Lake Michigan, in a part of the world known colloquially as Harbor Country. And the Time of the Second Home Owner is nigh. We year-round inhabitants – savages, all of us – who remain here, tending our own lands, despite the ever-swelling numbers of Illinois settlers descending upon the territory, have come to dread this time; we’ve come to dread spring.
For spring marks the beginning of the annual Time of the Second Home Owner.
Many of the earlier, more courageous Illinois pioneers who had staked their claims and settled here (for two or three days each week every summer) were not just brave, they were also skilled in real estate investment-craft. By hours of backbreaking googling, and by the sweat of their SPF 40-protected brows, their strong, capable hands – made tough and calloused through years of endorsing retainer checks or signing malpractice insurance premium waivers – carved out 10-year ARMs with below prime 2-year-fixed introductory rates. Their mighty thews, hardened by endless hours of Personal Training for Body and Mind by Jacques, enabled them to wield with ease and skill the very gel pens that would protect them from the mortal dangers of contractor-hunting and construction bid negotiations, and would impress their signatures upon short term 4% bridges that would not only finance that construction of their simulated hand-hewn log cabin lakefront second homes, but would secure the services of the actual simulated hand-hewn log cabin lakefront second home builders who would raise these humble 5,000 square foot structures from the soil. Indeed, for these courageous sojourners, the way to second home ownership in Harbor Country has always been fraught with hardships and seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Yet, they persevere.
Those settlers who had managed to tame the fierce Harbor Country wilderness, wresting their newly acquired lands, through heroic rapacity coupled with peaceable real estate treaty-talking skills, from the clutches of greedy land wildcatters or unwitting-yet-savage indigenous year-round inhabitants, have flourished and prospered here. Though the Harbor Country second home owners can withstand generally no more than a long weekend at a time in this wilderness, fleeing back to their Illinois homelands before each Monday’s cock’s crow while ensconced in the comforting leather of their trusty Volvos’ saddles, they yet return. Their spirited and faithful Mercedes GLEs and Lexus GXs learn the trails and become increasingly sure-footed, pressing on, faster and faster, along the hostile yet now-familiar residential paths of the frontier, galloping at dizzying speeds past the homes of the primitive, simple “year-rounders,” as we full-time inhabitants have come to be known.
With each passing year, the dwellings that these intrepid, second home-owning frontier folk steadfastly erect through the time-honored, exhausting, backbreaking process of once-weekly video contractor/construction-monitoring, grow in size and complexity, keeping pace with their own swelling numbers here in this wilderness outpost. The ground, evidently easier to work as it edges closer to the shores of the great lake, yields larger and larger dwellings, often featuring small, filtered, bodies of clear freshwater equipped with “leaping-planks” and postioned at the rear, or “yard-back” of each dwelling. The clarion of outdoor “melody-making machines,” situated near the private, shimmering waters of each yard-back, soothes the restless spirits of the second home-owning frontier folk with the reassuring, familiar, resounding rhythms of the lands from whence they came – and these gracious pioneers munificently share these comforting, reverberating sounds, and the subdivisional atavisms they represent, with us savage year-rounders in what is evidently an effort to bestow upon us the trappings and gifts of their own superior, more advanced culture.
Although the annual Time of the Second Home Owner is comparatively short – their numbers dwindle and are nearly extinguished by autumn, and their wilderness forays generally last for no more than a few days out of each of the weeks that they’re here – the liberation of spirit they feel while in this place (finally freed from the shackles of oppressive strictures promulgated by the HOAs of their respective Illinoisian gated communities, and the tyrannical laws of that faraway place under which they’ve toiled for so long) manifests itself in what can only be described as a rapturous, collective joie de vivre. The invigorating essence of this erstwhile unspoiled place on the Indiana-Michigan border – a place where they are finally free – heartens the second home owners, imbues in each of them a certain robustness of carriage, and elicits from them the happy actions of the newly, truly liberated. Their joyous shouts and the thumping beats of the drums of their distant homelands fill the air both day and night, and mingle with the exultant whinnying of their noble Porsche and Jaguar steeds as they race along paths, which, to this point, had known only the cumbersome, diffident tread of the primitive year-rounder. Their golf carts – pack animals to their mighty SUV mounts, and used to fetch sundries from the local trading post – dot the landscape and brazenly traverse forbidden ground.
“Eastward ho!!!”
Yes, for these pioneers, the time that they are here on the Indiana-Michigan border along the shores of the mighty Lake Michigan – the annual Time of the Second Home Owner – is a joyous one. Throughout the duration of this interval, the second home owners’ gleeful presence, informed by the giddiness of their emancipation from their onerous, oppressive, collective Illinoisian existence, makes itself known far and wide. Each year at this time, we year-rounders are offered a gift by these indulgent, generous folk. And it’s a gift that’s impossible to refuse.
(Ok, so a lot of this was written as a joke. Unfortunately, I can’t say that all of it is tongue-in-cheek. There are definitely some pricks that fit this bill. But there are way more really terrific people who own second homes here and whom I consider wonderful friends. And I’m an Illinois emigrant, and former second home owner myself. Can’t forget that. I want to give special credit to Spencer Gurley Films for the fabulous featured image of a genuine, honest-to-goodness log cabin. I’ll admit that it’s sort of refreshing to see a real one.)
See you next time.
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