Steve Lewis steers his small pontoon boat slowly along the shoreline of South Bar Lake, cutting the engine every once in a while to point something out, a line of decaying logs left over from the lumber era sunk in the shallows, a wood duck’s high, distinctive squeal from somewhere in the reeds or a patch of light green foliage that will bloom into the purple flowers of an invasive plant he’s spent years trying to keep in check.
It would be easy to describe Lewis purely with a list of titles including volunteer lake biologist for the South Bar Lake Association, board member with Leelanau Clean Water, member of the Empire Area Community Center and the Empire Lions Club. But sit with him for a few hours and a different picture forms, one of someone who has spent the back half of his life trying to get himself out of the center of the story.
“It’s not about me,” he said more than once. “This servant’s heart, it’s about preserving this. That’s what it’s about.”
Lewis’s connection to the stretch of shoreline he calls home on between South Bar Lake and Lake Michigan goes back further than his own lifetime.
“Our family’s roots took hold in the sandy soil over one hundred years ago,” Lewis said.
His dad first came to Empire when he was a kid, tagging along on trips his older brother made while working for the Michigan State University football team. ‘Think leather helmet days,” Lewis said.
In 1946, his dad bought a parcel of land and built a vacation cabin not too far from where Lewis lives now six years before he was born and when Lake Michigan frontage went for $10 a foot.
Growing up downstate in Midland, Lewis described his childhood as a “safe, Leave it to Beaver life.” He spent every summer from childhood through college in Empire, fishing alone on South Bar and spending time in the village, left largely to his own devices.
“I learned to fish from a pontoon boat my dad built from empty drums he picked up at Dow Chemical in Midland,” he explained. “But it was a simple wooden rowboat on South Bar that let me explore nature all by myself.”
He would keep a journal of his catches, where he was and the bait he used. Beyond enjoying the freedom to run around Empire and explore the lake, those summers also taught him about what it means to exist in a small community and “addicted me to wanting to live here.”
Lewis studied biology at Western Michigan University with a minor in environmental science. From there he ended up in pharmaceutical sales, a career that kept him on the road for 34 years, driving about 50,000 miles a year around the state. But Empire never left his life. On Labor Day 1976, at 24, he opened the Leelanau Enterprise and found a listing for a property a few parcels down from his family’s old cabin on South Bar. At $172 a month for 10 years, he bought it and in 1978 he moved to Empire full time.
“I lived a lot of life’s lows and highs in the next 50 years,” he said. “But it’s the connection to water and nature from my youth that steered my life’s path.”
After retirement, Lewis’s stewardship work began to really take shape. Mentored by Rob Karner, who just recently retired from the Glen Lake Association, he became the South Bar Lake Association’s (SBLA) volunteer lake biologist — tracking water clarity, testing for phosphorus and spending hours in a kayak snipping and treating purple loosestrife, an invasive plant that chokes out native vegetation along the shore.
His current project is working to get an ADA compliant fishing dock on South Bar Lake, a place where kids or someone in a wheelchair could cast a line from shore.
“It’s time we give kids a chance to catch their first fish without the need of a boat,” Lewis said, adding that it’s not just about putting in a designated fishing dock but more about passing on the experience of loving the lake.
The desire to hand things down rather than hold onto them runs through nearly everything Lewis does these days. From wanting to pass his love of water and nature to his grandchildren, to striking up conversations with strangers in line at the post office, to the quieter work of educating rather than enforcing when it comes to lakeside neighbors and their shorelines. This year, he’s also working with the EACC again to stock the Empire Food Pantry, encouraging deer hunters to donate their meat by dropping it off with designated processors.
Much of that desire, he said, he owes to his wife, Linda, who he describes as his mentor in the “important human traits” such as patience, listening, letting go of gossip and grudges.
Lewis has learned to ask himself, “how can I teach others not to gossip, be better at forgiveness, or how can I be a better listener for others?” and calls himself a work in progress on all three.
Lewis lives on the narrow strip of land between two bodies of water, and has found a kind of daily liturgy in it. Sunrises over South Bar Lake and sunsets over Lake Michigan, “it’s my renewal source,” he said. He’d rather sit on a dock at first light and listen to the marsh wake up than watch the world through a phone screen.
Growing up, he bought into the old northern Michigan saying that if you weren’t born here, you’re not really a local. He’s let go of that one. These days, who does or doesn’t belong on South Bar Lake isn’t a question about people at all.
“I’m more concerned about the invasive aquatic and terrestrial plants and insects who weren’t born here,” he said. Everyone else is welcome, especially if they’re willing to slow down, look closer and maybe pull up a little purple loosestrife while they’re at it.
