White Lake, the channel, and the two beaches that aren’t private

The channel smells like diesel and cold water, and on a July afternoon it sounds like a marina arguing with itself — outboards idling, a halyard slapping an aluminum mast, some kid out on the pier at Medbery Park counting to three before he doesn’t jump. This is the seam. White Lake on one side, Lake Michigan on the other, a straight cut of water somebody dug in 1870 so lumber schooners could reach the sawmills. They dug it for money. It’s the reason any of this is here.

Start with the two lakes, because people get them confused and it matters. White Lake is the inland one — 2,571 acres, warm by August, Montague on the north shore and Whitehall on the south, fed by the White River coming down out of the Manistee National Forest. Lake Michigan is the other thing entirely. Cold. Enormous. The one people drive four hours for. The channel is the only way a boat gets from the inland water to the big one, and standing on the pier you can feel the temperature drop in the space of thirty yards.

On the Whitehall side, where the cut meets the big lake, there’s a lighthouse — the White River Light Station, cream-yellow brick, octagonal, thirty-eight feet of it, built in 1875 to keep those same schooners off the bar. The Coast Guard shut the light in 1960. It has been a museum since 1970. You climb the tower stairs, you look at the lens, you leave. Worth an hour on a day the wind is wrong for the beach.

The lake has a past it doesn’t put on the brochure. For most of a century the tanneries and a chemical plant — Hooker Electrochemical, later OxyChem — used White Lake the way a mill town uses whatever’s downhill, and by 1987 it was a federal Area of Concern, which is the government’s word for poisoned. They dredged out more than 100,000 cubic yards of bad sediment. It came off the list in 2014. Swim in it now and you would never know, which is either reassuring or the opposite, depending on how you sit with the word delisted.

Here’s the part the rental listings tend to fudge. Most of the good Lake Michigan sand around here is private — staked, posted, backed by cottages that have been in the same families since the schooners. What’s public is specific. Two places are worth the drive.

Medbery Park is the near one. The City of Montague owns 600 feet of Lake Michigan shoreline right where the channel lets out, in White River Township, at the end of Life Guard Road. It is not much of a park. A lot, restrooms with no running water, a volleyball court where you bring your own net, benches along the channel for the people who came to watch boats and nothing else. You can fish anywhere along the cut. No lifeguard — the sign says swim at your own risk, and the current means it. The beach is short and it faces the pier. It’s enough.

Meinert County Park is the better beach and the longer drive. North of town, top end of Muskegon County, 182 acres of dune the county somehow kept out of private hands. Two thousand feet of Lake Michigan frontage. Sand that squeaks under a bare heel. There’s a parabolic dune with a deck built on top of it, a campground back in the trees for anyone who wants to sleep near the water, and a creek — Little Flower Creek — running through the bottom where the herons work. The entrance is off Meinert Park Road and easy to blow past at speed. It’s quieter than the state parks south of here. People drive right by it to fight for a spot at Pere Marquette. Let them.

Come in late August or the first week of September. The inland water is still warm, the channel traffic thins the day school starts, and the Lake Michigan wind stops feeling like a dare. Book one of our Michigan cottage rentals, Driftwood Sands Retreat, close enough to the channel to walk it. For the shops and the ice cream and where to eat, the Montague guide has that, and paddling the White River down into the lake is its own story for another day.

Nobody ever brings the net. Bring one.