Things that go bump in the night

My freshman year of college was spent at Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana - a Lutheran University that was, and is, some pumpkins academically and a simply great place to go.  We had a lot of student musical groups that did what are known as "run out" concerts - daytrips if you will - usually to Lutheran Churches or High Schools. 

I was part of a group that performed Bach Cantatas - 28 of us - who played instruments and/or sang in the chorus.  If you played trumpet, you did both because most of the works didn't use me.  It was great fun. We performed the music the way it was originally written and not "modernized" and of course, in German. 

In March of 1966, we traveled north of Grand Haven, Michigan, near Muskegon, and performed a special Saturday night concert and promptly got snowed in and couldn't return.  Not to worry.

Because the Great Lakes are fresh water, they freeze faster than oceans or bays and there is a pretty much constant wind from the west that pushes ice over to the Michigan shoreline. You can see it in the satellite picture.  The result, particularly in spring, are great big icebergs. So back to the story.

We were performing in a very big Lutheran church and halfway through the Pastor interrupted the concert and announced that conditions were so bad that the local authorities wanted everyone to go home right away and that the road south (back to college) was now closed - so if members of the audience could take these kids back to your homes, give them food and a place to sleep - yada yada.

It felt like a slave auction -- "I'll take those two".  "Can he cut wood for the fireplace", "Can she help with the dishes"? (before politically correct was in the picture).  Happily one church member had a cottage  right on the shore - I mean RIGHT ON THE SHORE - and trusting soul that he was, he let 4-5 of us just use it as it was where they hung out in the summer and not their main home.  We stopped a and i think the Kroger store for food (which he bought) and a good deal of beer (we were German Lutherans - it was served in our dorms anyway on weekends) and off we went.

The cabin didn't have heat but it did have a wood stove and a hot water heater so we froze for an hour, made pizzas and other stuff and drank beer....not a lot but it seemed logical. There was no TV but we could get the Chicago radio stations right across the lake and the weather reports were dire - particularly the high wind stuff. 

Where is this story going you might ask?  Icebergs. Lots of them. Breaking free from farther on out in the ice pack and heading to shore in the high winds.  They don't go far or really close but the lighthouse light caught them - big elephants floating and making sounds that scared us to death.  In the pitch black of night it sounded like the end of the world and I'll never forget it.