Reports and profiles from Harbor Country Hikers’ members and friends
Member Profiles
Arthur Andersen: A Natural Legacy
Arthur Anderson, a Harbor Country Hikers director and long-time member, grew up hiking. He spent his childhood in Oak Park, Ill.—not exactly a hiker’s paradise, but his parents were members of Chicago’s legendary Prairie Club. That meant many weekends tramping through the dunes and other Prairie Club destinations. When they retired, Anderson’s parents moved to a cottage in Camp Hazelhurst, a Prairie Club compound in Harbert, Mich.
One of Anderson’s favorite memories is a hike on the Appalachian Trail, a post-college trip with his parents. “It wasn’t anything like hiking the entire trail, but we spent five days in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.” The trip left a deep impression and an appreciation of nature.
After school, Anderson went to work for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, first in Chicago, then in Milwaukee and finally in Washington, D.C., helping write INS policy. When he retired, he bought a house in Harbert, near Hazelhurst. Anderson’s brother inherited the family cottage, but Anderson remained a member of the Prairie Club and has stayed active in the group. For several years, he served on the club’s Activities Committee, helping plan the outings for which the club is famous.
Anderson’s other loves are gardening and music. Gardening led to an allotment in the Chikaming Township Park and Preserve, and eventually to involvement in township government. While tending his garden plot, it occurred to Anderson that it would be helpful if he and the other allotment holders had a voice in the Township Parks Board. He ran for the board, and lost.
But not much later, he was appointed to the board when a seat went vacant, and served until the board was disbanded recently, partly with Anderson’s support. Meanwhile, he took charge of the entire group of garden plots in the Park and Preserve. Last fall, Anderson successfully ran for the Chikaming Township Board.
Anderson began taking piano lessons at the School of American Music about eight years ago, and is still taking them. A member of the school’s board nominated him for board membership. Anderson’s status as a student, combined with previous board experience, made him an ideal candidate, the board member suggested.
Anderson was elected, and later made the school’s secretary. You can hear him play piano at one of the school’s occasional recitals. “I still get nervous playing in front of an audience,” he says.
Anderson got involved with the Hikers when he was on the parks board and worked with the Hikers to install trail markers at the Park and Preserve, the township’s signature park. A subsequent opening on the Hikers board led to his role in Hikers leadership.
Rev. Tracy Heilman: A World as We’d Like It to Be
Tracy Heilman arrived as director of the Tower Hill Camp & Retreat Center in an almost serendipitous fashion. Both Tracy and her husband are United Church of Christ (UCC) ministers, and that’s led to moves all over the country—Illinois, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Hampshire. When she and her family lived in Illinois, they visited Tower Hill often.
Their daughter chose a college in Illinois, and asked to revisit the camp en route from Montana. While there, Tracy learned that Tower Hill was looking for new leadership. She talked it over with her husband (now a part-time pastor in Watervliet), applied for the job and got it.
It’s turned out to be a great fit. “It’s a really gratifying job” she says. “I get to use my business knowledge in the operation of Tower Hill and my pastoral experience in bringing people together.”
Tracy is a member of the Hikers, and Tower Hill has hosted the group’s annual meetings and a few hikes on its rolling nature trails and beachfront. Hikers President Pat Fisher was one of the first people she met after moving to the area. “What the Hikers are doing is great—getting people outdoors, appreciating nature.”
Tower Hill is just over 100 years old. The 60 acres it occupies were donated to the Congregational Church (a predecessor of UCC) as a retreat for clergy in 1923 by the Warren Trust, run by the heirs of E.K. Warren. Warren was a successful businessman and landowner, perhaps best known for his development of featherbone, a replacement for whalebone in ladies’ corsets.
Warren was part of a pastor’s family. “He lived at a time when people with wealth gave to the common good,” Tracy notes. Warren’s other property donations include Warren Woods and Warren Dunes State Parks. Portions of his factory still exist in Three Oaks, Mich. His office building is now the Three Oaks library.
Today, Tower Hill is open year-round and hosts all kinds of groups—family reunions, retreats, day camps, Scouts—both faith-related and not. Recently, a Mormon group visited, and a group from Myanmar.
Some projects underway: Tower Hill is building a relationship with a local equestrian group, with a view to adding equestrian trails on its property. It’s also working on getting 501(c)(3) recognition, which would solidify tax-exempt status for Tower Hill’s donors.
Many of Tracy’s projects—she mentions trail development, identifying trees and tracks, team-building with kids—aim to help people make sense of their world and their experience. Her goal is to “build a world as we’d like it to be” on the 60 acres she administers in Sawyer, Mich., a world free of divisiveness and prejudice and marked by mutual respect.
Bob Vondale: Hooked on Hiking
Bob Vondale, Harbor Country Hikers vice president and board member, grew up in East Lansing, and during his college years at Michigan State he was an occasional visitor to Warren Dunes. As he was raising his family, he followed the seductive and well-worn path to local home ownership—camping in the dunes, renting in the area and finally buying a summer house in Bridgman.
In college, Bob originally set his sights on a pre-veterinarian program, but later switched to advertising. When he graduated, the economy was in a slump and the number of recruiters at Michigan State dropped. One of those recruiters was Sears, and Bob took a job as a copywriter for the retailer’s famous catalog. From copywriter, he moved to appliance buyer, then to appliance parts buyer for the entire chain. Appliance repair, Bob notes, was one of the most profitable departments at Sears, and it required lots of parts.
He stayed with the company his entire career, worked at the Sears Tower (now officially the Willis Tower, but still known as the Sears Tower by almost every Chicagoan) and, after Sears sold the landmark building, he moved with the company to Hoffman Estates in suburban Chicago. He retired nine years ago, and moved to his house in Bridgman full-time.
Bob’s been a member of the Harbor Country Hikers since 2018, just a year after the group incorporated. “I heard [Hikers President] Pat Fisher speak at one of the local libraries, went on a hike and I was hooked,” he recalls. He says he learns something new every hike and that, along with the friendly people he meets, make the hikes “just a fun day.”
He was appointed vice president by the Hikers board, following a resignation, and subsequently elected to the office at the group’s annual fall meeting. Bob’s duties include planning special events, like the recent all-day outing at Pierce Cedar Creek, and coordinating volunteer activities, among them recruiting members to serve at Fernwood’s annual light show.
Like his friend Ron Arturi (profiled below), Bob volunteers at the Berrien County animal shelter, where he walks shelter dogs two or three days a week along nearby trails. He also helps lead youngsters through the New Buffalo Schools Nature Trails as part of the Hikers’ volunteer program for the elementary school’s BASE program.
When he’s not hiking or walking dogs, you’re likely to run into Bob at local outdoor music events at venues like Dewey Cannon Park in Three Oaks, the New Buffalo Township Park, and the bandshell and River St. Joe in St. Joseph. He confesses to a lack of musical training but loves listening, especially to classic pop tunes.
Mary Burke: Going Where the Trails (and the Paint) Take Her
Mary Burke’s most memorable walk with the Hikers, though perhaps not her favorite, happened back in February 2022. The Hikers were on a stretch of old interurban right-of-way near St. Joseph. The trail was solid ice covered with a couple inches of snow, and everyone was slipping and sliding, struggling to stay upright. Mary took a tumble, but was unhurt, got up, and nearly fell again. But she finished the hike and came back for more.
A Hikers member almost from the group’s beginning, Mary lives with her husband Albert on 13 acres in Berrien Springs—and has done for the past 17 years. Like so many residents of Southwest Michigan, she grew up in Chicago and, except for brief periods in Minneapolis and Princeton, N.J., she spent her life there before moving to Michigan. Her sister and brother-in-law, already established in Michigan, persuaded her to have a look and Mary liked what she saw.
Hikers outings taught her about trail blazing and invasives, and she’s applied those lessons in her own woods, battling Russian olive, multiflora rose and other non-native species. But when she’s not waxing woodsy, Mary paints. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and her work has been widely shown. (You can check out her work at maryburkeart.com.)
Most of Mary’s large paintings—some are four by five feet—are painted in acrylics with occasional pencil or ink elements. Smaller works on paper use watercolors, gouache, crayon, pencil and pen-and-ink.
Mary’s paintings have been at the Krasl Center and the Box Factory in St. Joseph and, through ZIA and Bonfoey galleries, she’s shown internationally in Europe and South America and at the prestigious Art Miami-Basel. Her paintings are in private, corporate and museum collections, including Pillsbury Corp., the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota and the Midwest Museum of American Art in Elkhart, Ind. She’s also taught art at Shimer College, Kendall College of Art and Design, the David Adler Cultural Center and various workshop venues.
Most of Mary’s work is abstract, sometimes with figurative elements. And while nature occasionally inspires a painting, her pictures are more commonly intuitive, even accidental—“putting paint on canvas and seeing where it goes,” she says.
Mary’s favorite hiking venues? Probably not that stretch of interurban right-of-way. She likes Chikaming Township Park and Preserve and Grand Mere State Park. “But there are so many and they all have different features.”
Mark Piper: Finding Art in Nature
If you hike with the Harbor Country Hikers, it’s hard to miss Mark Piper. First, at 6ft. 4in.—just two inches shorter than the average NBA player—he could very well be the Hikers’ tallest member. Second, the Grand Beach, Mich., native carries some pretty impressive camera gear with him and uses it to take pictures of unusual, attractive or interestingly composed natural subjects along the trails. Many of those photos show up on this website or on the Hikers’ Facebook page.
Mark and his wife, Meg, moved to Grand Beach from Chicago’s western suburbs in 2021. Prior to that, they used the house—acquired from Meg’s parents—as a summer and weekend retreat. Mark, an IT executive with law firm Kirkland & Ellis, has been commuting to Chicago or working from home. With retirement now just a few months away, he plans to spend his newly acquired free time exploring the outdoors, getting involved in local charitable groups and, of course, taking pictures.
Mark’s fascination with photography started in the 1980s, when his in-laws gave him a high-end Canon SLR, back in the good old days when cameras used film. “I didn’t know anything about photography,” he says, but he took some online courses, notably a class by National Geographic photographers, with a view to developing an eye for interesting subjects and learning how to compose his pictures. Nature photography dominates his photos, but he also takes “urban landscapes” in Chicago. Natural and man-made landscapes, he says, have a lot in common.
For Mark, much of the joy of photography is that he’s always learning, both to improve his skills and to keep up with rapidly changing technology. He’s beginning to ponder ways to get his photos in front of more people—a website, perhaps, or a social media network.
Both Mark and Meg were early members of the Hikers, and are regulars now. Mark recalls attending the Hikers’ second event, at the Grand Beach Marsh, a Chikaming Open Lands property, back in 2017. “I saw an article in the newspaper advertising the hike and decided to give it a try,” he says. He particularly likes the exercise, learning more about nature, and the peaceful feeling of being outdoors that come with the Hikers’ excursions. And of course, “there are lots of things to take pictures of” along the trails and in the various habitats the Hikers visit.
Member Mark Piper Shows His Photos on New Website
Mark Piper, whose nature photos often grace this website, has created a site of his own to show his work. If some of his pictures look familiar, that may be because they were taken during Hikers’ events. In fact, Mark’s roped off a section of his site to highlight Hikers photos. The URL: markpiperphotography.com
Ron Arturi: Six Dogs and Rock ‘n’ Roll
When he was 13, in the 1960s, Ron Arturi’s uncle gave him a guitar and a chord book. Ron taught himself how to play, hooked up with garage bands in high school, and helped pay his way through college and grad school (a psych degree and an MSW) with his guitar. Although he never built a career around music, Ron never stopped playing.
Today, you might run into him singing at a wedding or playing with his latest band, Past Times, which specializes in folk rock, oldies and pop. The band will be playing at the New Buffalo Township Park, 17425 Red Arrow Highway in New Buffalo, on August 2. (The mayor of Bridgman, Mich. is the drummer.) If you made it to the Harbor Country Hikers general membership meeting last fall, you heard Ron playing campfire tunes while the rest of us made s’mores.
Ron grew up in Berwyn, Ill. and spent most of his career managing an Ace Hardware store in Chicago’s south suburbs. When he retired and moved full-time to his weekend house in Stevensville, Mich., he managed an Ace Hardware there before retiring a second time a few years ago.
If Ron’s first love is music, his second is dogs. “I’ve had dogs my whole life,” he says. Two years ago, his latest died at 14. Ron’s had pretty good luck with long-lived dogs, and he figured if he got another, it might very well outlive him. When animal control sent him a notice he needed to renew his dog’s license, he learned of a program run by Berrien County in which volunteers walk the 60-odd canines in the county shelter.
A group of perhaps a dozen volunteers spends two to three hours twice a week walking six dogs each through trails near animal control’s headquarters. Harbor Country Hikers Vice President Bob Vondale, a personal friend, also volunteers for the dog-walking program. It was Vondale who got Ron interested in the Hikers, and Ron has been a regular since. He’s also gotten involved in the Hikers’ after-school nature program for New Buffalo elementary school children.
Two things Ron loves about the Hikers: First, he says, he’s never met a nicer group of people than those he’s met on HCH hikes. There’s something about being in nature that brings out the best in people, he says. Second, he remains impressed by the number of hiking opportunities in the area’s parks and preserves. A personal favorite—Robinson Woods.
Katha Kissman: Tackling the Camino
Until she saw the Martin Sheen/Emilio Estevez film The Way in 2016, Hikers member Katha Kissman had never heard of the Camino de Santiago. A year later, she watched the film again, and decided, “I have to do this.”
The Camino de Santiago—just Camino for short—is a group of pilgrimage routes that lead to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, traditional home of the bones of St. James the Apostle. Pilgrims have been traveling the routes since the 10th century. The Camino Frances, the best-known and longest of the routes, begins in St. Jean Pied de Port in western France and runs 500 miles across northern Spain, and that’s the one Katha plans to walk.
A recently retired consultant to nonprofit groups, Katha has written several books on nonprofit management and has an impressive list of clients. But she is probably best-known in her native New Buffalo for her work with the New Buffalo Railroad Museum, of which she is a co-founder, secretary and treasurer.
Katha had originally planned to tackle the Camino in 2020, but Covid made that impossible. By 2021, Covid still made getting into Spain difficult. In 2022, Katha discovered she needed a hip replacement, and she had to postpone the pilgrimage yet another year. But 2023 is it. She’s flying to London August 23, then departing from St. Jean Pied de Port a week later.
While she waited for Covid restrictions to lift, Katha found a group of past and prospective Camino hikers called American Pilgrims on the Camino, which has a chapter in South Bend. The South Bend group hosted the national conference in 2021. Katha went and joined, and found the group a valuable source of information. More Camino content came from books, courses, You Tube videos and internet articles.
Not so long ago, walking the Camino meant uncertain sleeping arrangements and unpredictable meals. But the number of Camino travelers has exploded in recent decades: In 1985, just 690 pilgrims made their way to Santiago de Compostela. In 2022, the number was 437,507. With growth have come more conventional travel services. Katha has signed up with a tour operator called Follow the Camino, which arranges hotels along the way, meals, luggage transfers and emergency services.
Though not especially moved by the remains of St. James, Katha says she thinks there’s definitely a spiritual side to walking the Camino. “Being outdoors is always spiritual,” she comments, and notes that those who’ve made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela find spirituality in the disconnect from everyday activities and a greater appreciation for things normally taken for granted.
Katha plans to make the journey in 37 days, an average of about thirteen-and-a-half miles per day. Once she reaches Santiago de Compostela, like many pilgrims she hopes to go the extra 45 miles to Cape Finisterre, land’s end, where Spain meets the ocean. And when she returns, she promises to share her journey with her fellow Harbor Country Hikers.
Correspondence
BASE Program Participant Writes…
Dear Mr. Fisher,
I really liked when we caught frogs. It was so fun and I really liked learning about trees. Thank you for BASE hikes.
(BASE is Bison After School Enrichment, a broad after-school program at New Buffalo Elementary School that includes hikes and nature programs led the Harbor Country Hikers volunteers.)
Health Benefits from Time in the Woods
Member Jill Truitt forwarded the attached article about Forest Bathing–a practice, with Japanese origins, of immersing oneself in the woods–and the health benfits associated with it. Just as you suspected, it’s good for you. To go to the article, click here
Greetings from the Kellys in Costa Rica
World hikers Joe and Marian Kelly sent us this photo from a trek through the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. Expecting rain? Bring a leaf.
The Art of Hiking
Ed Ravine, a Hikers member and local artist, bases his watercolor landscapes on the hikes he takes, often with the Harbor Country Hikers. You can usually find him, and his wife, Sue, at the front of the line, where he’s likely scouting out locations for future paintings. Featured above is a watercolor from a recent winter hike at Warren Dunes. Ed’s work is at Local Color Gallery in Union Pier, Mich.