Or is it…?

By Aubrey Ann Parker
Current Contributor

Back on July 22, Alisa Vanderberg-Haas (65) put the equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass onto the “Beautiful Benzie County” Facebook group, which has more than 12,000 followers.

“I have a favor to ask of our friends on Crystal Lake. Our family has lived on the northwest corner for 70-plus years. Our matriarch is 93, and this will be her last year in the home. Sadly, we had to give up all our boats and toys years ago, as family is now scattered across the country. I am the only family member that visits anymore, and I had an emergency situation last May that cost me the lower part of my right leg. I’m fairly high functioning, but not 100 percent. Due to this, I’m not able to swim, or even get on the beach. We’ve all grown up in and on this beautiful body of water, and now we can only sit on the deck and watch. I’m here for the next 10 days. My question: is there a kind soul with a pontoon boat that would be willing to give my mother one last evening cruise? I tried the marina, but they are booked out until August! Obviously, I’m willing to pay for gas and your time. Bless you and thank you for taking the time to read.”

What happened next was beyond Vanderberg-Haas’ wildest dreams. 

“By the time I hit ‘post,’ I swear it shocked my finger,” she laughs. “You hear the word ‘viral,’ but now I understand what ‘going viral’ really means.”

That is because her initial Facebook post garnered 385 “likes,” 130 “comments,” and 99 “shares.” But things did not stop there.

The offers began piling in; that same day, they were invited on a pontoon cruise. The next day, when Vanderberg-Haas posted a photo of her mother, Elaine Vanderberg (93), on the previous night’s ride with a huge grin on her face and the wind in her white hair, that secondary post received more than 1,200 “likes.”

And since that first fun day, the offers for boat rides—and other modes of companionship—have continued to stream in.

“We’ve gone on five boat rides, we’ve made what are sure to be lifelong friends, we’ve gone to lunch with these people, we’ve had offers to play cards. One of them texted me just today. I have a whole list of names and contact information for our new friends,” Vanderberg-Haas exclaims. “We have even found long-lost members of our family. Someone asked, ‘Are you related to Gertrude…?’ Why yes, we are…”

The Vanderberg family is originally from St. Joseph, 205 miles south of Frankfort—about a 3.5-hour drive. Andrew Vanderberg (deceased) was a steel executive out of Detroit who built a two-bedroom, one-bath cottage on Crystal Lake in the 1950s. It had a furnace but was not made for winter. 

When his son Robert (now deceased), a production manager at a metal-processing factory, married Elaine, a lab tech at the hospital in St. Joe, and they had three children—Scott (69), Alisa, and Kent (62)—Robert’s father decided it was time to add another bathroom and another bedroom, as well as a washer and dryer; there had only been a hand-crank version outside the cottage before that. 

Elaine Vanderberg—a mother of three, grandmother of five, and great-grandmother of two—has lived alone at the original family cottage since 2009, when her husband, Robert, died. (That makes 32 years that she has lived full-time on the shore of Crystal Lake, in total.) As the years passed, the family decided to sell one by one all of the various watercraft that they had, because Elaine could not drive them or service them. 

Little by little, it seemed like the summer pleasures were waning.

On top of that gradual progression, Vanderberg has had a rough couple of years, according to her daughter. She had two back-to-back heart attacks in 2020, she has had a few scary falls since then, and she “was bandaged from head to toe in June,” says her daughter.
 
“We’ve got 120 feet of lakefront property, and my mom used to swim every day, but then it got to a point where nobody was even using it,” Vanderberg-Haas says. “My mother was a person who was out in the sun and gardening. Everything that is her joy has been nipped away, all of her friends—there are all of these people who are now third, and fourth, and fifth generation of the families we knew. But most of the original people are gone now. And she looked so pale and fragile when I saw her in June. She never left the house; she opened the window just a crack. And that’s not her. She’s a strong, stubborn, Bohemian woman. She loves that lake. And I just had this thought one night, at 3 a.m. ‘We’ve been here all these years. Is there a kind-hearted soul who would take her on a boat ride, get her spirits up?’ Boy, was I shocked by the response we got. From the community. But also in my mom.”

Vanderberg-Haas now teases her mother, “You’re famous!”

She adds, “Benzie County, you definitely have our hearts. It’s going to be very, very hard when we close the doors there.”

The plan had been to move the Vanderberg matriarch to an assisted-living center “before the first snowfall.” 

“But this whole experience has changed her so greatly, now I don’t know,” Vanderberg-Haas says of her mother, who has some in-home help a few times a week. “She is stronger, healthier than I’ve seen her in years.”

They even managed to get into the water, both of them. Twice.

“She went out with her walker into the water, and I was on the dock helping her, then I got in, carefully, with my one leg,” Vanderberg laughs. “Just two old broads out there in floaties and cackling in the sun. I bet we could get mom on the diving board of our new friend’s pontoon the next time.”

After 18 days on Crystal Lake in July, Vanderberg-Haas left to go back to her home downstate. Unlike when she had returned home after her visit in June, Vanderberg-Haas was no longer worried about her mother, who now was walking on her own again, without the assistance of her walker. 

“I got her a pair of knee braces, and that has helped immensely. She says, ‘I’m walking like a kid!’ She’s walking upright, learning to listen to her boundaries and stay away from concrete steps, but she has a pep in her step again. I think she realizes that she’s going to be OK,” Vanderberg-Haas says. “The combination of the love that people have shown her, and the sun, and the blessings of the lake—it’s been a Godsend.”

As mentioned, the Vanderberg women have gone on several boat rides since that initial Facebook post a month ago.

“Everyone has a totally different experience; everyone has their own stories of their time on this lake,” Vanderberg-Haas says. “We met people who have been coming up here as long as I have—a “last man standing” that inherited the cottage that his grandfather built; women who this is their annual weekly vacation. We’ve gotten the opportunity to share everyone else’s memories on this lake, as well. You have no idea how much this meant to not just my mother but to me, but also to so many people in Benzie County who love this place, this community, this lake. I think that’s why the story has ‘gone viral,’ because it resonates.”

As someone whose only surviving grandparent is about to turn 92 in just a few days, I can tell you that this story resonated with me in ways that were unexpected. 

“Did you see that Facebook post about the older woman and the boat ride?” my best friend Christina [Harig] Steele asked me a few weeks ago. She knows that I am always looking for “feel-good” stories to run in the pages of The Betsie Current, so she tries to keep her eyes peeled and her ears open for me. 
When I responded that I did not know what she was referencing, she smiled and said, “Oh, it’s a good one.”

“Send it to me,” I responded.

After briefly glancing at the Facebook posts, I still did not understand how much this story would affect me. I sent Vanderberg-Haas a message asking if she would be open to an interview over the phone, and that conversation is still replaying itself in my brain, as we get closer to my paternal grandmother’s birthday. 

Grandma Mary [Menovske] Parker has had a rough couple of years, too; like his mother and younger brother before him, Wendell Parker spent the last few years of his life in an Alzheimer’s-inflicted haze. The Parkers had moved “Up North” from the Lansing area and spent more than four decades living full-time on West Grand Traverse Bay on Old Mission Peninsula in a house that they built in the early 1970s, when my father was a teenager. My dad, my uncle, and my aunt all grew up there; all six of us grandchildren grew up there; even a few great-grandchildren got to play in the magical waters when they were teeny-tiny.

Shortly after my grandfather’s diagnosis, though, the house on the bay was sold almost a decade ago. I honestly do not know how long it has been since my grandmother has seen the bay—really seen it. Or been in it. Much like Elaine Vanderberg, I remember Mary Parker swimming almost every day in the summer (or at least wading in to her shoulders) after having spent several hours gardening in the yard or reading in a hammock. When I was around 12 years old and we were sitting together on the deck, watching the sunset, with a cool breeze coming off the water, she told me that it was her “happy place.”

This story has given me some ideas of how I hope to spend the last bits of this particular summer with my own nonagenarian—maybe I can even convince a friend to take us out on their pontoon. 

Regardless, my hope is that this story brings clarification as to how you, dear reader, could spend the last bits of summer with your loved ones—especially the elderly.

“My mom says I swam before I walked,” Vanderberg-Haas says. “I’ve watched my children, my grandchildren; my younger brother and his three children all grow up here. And now it looks like we might get another summer here—we’ll see how she’s doing. But I have hope after all of this.”

Featured Photo Caption: Elaine Vanderberg (93) on a pontoon boat just hours after her daughter posted on Facebook asking if any kind stranger would take them boating. Photo courtesy of the Vanderberg family.