By Sally Eisele
I am drawn to the water. I live on a small peninsula on an inland lake and love to swim and kayak in its crystal blue water on hot summer days. I fish. I’ve been fly fishing since my early 20s, and I’ve spent countless hours over the decades wading the cold, clear streams thinking about flies and trout and the way the rippled feeding lanes might yield a clue to both. My late father thought the best way to keep his adult children coming back home was to organize a yearly charter fishing trip on Lake Michigan. It worked. So much so, that after many years of working in San Francisco and Chicago, I returned to my home state and the Great Lakes I came to love like no place else in the world.
But I don’t often think that much about the groundwater, unless I’m worried about my septic system clean out or reading another big story about the latest chemical contamination issue. And so when my longtime colleague and friend Dave Dempsey asked me to do a podcast series about groundwater, I had to think about what I even knew about the water under the ground. And I agreed to do it–not as a journalist, which is my background, or as an activist, which is not, but as a fellow Michigander with a lifelong connection of my own to the water of this state.
I thought it would be fun to do it as a different kind of trip “up north.” Not the kind of trip that millions of us take to the beaches and sunsets of the north, but a trip to the groundwater. And so that’s what this is. No breaking news here. No big call to action. Just an audio trip up north to experience the water we may not think about much that is, in fact, the lifeblood of this state, making all the rest of those wonderful trips up north even possible.
Enjoy.
Listen to Parts 1 & 2 of FLOW’s Groundwater Connection podcast on SoundCloud.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Sally Eisele is a nationally recognized public media professional with more than three decades of experience in journalism, editing, and broadcast newsroom management.
Sally’s work in public radio began in Michigan, where she worked at WKAR in Lansing and the Michigan Public Radio Network in its early years, covering politics and the environment. It includes more than a decade as managing editor at WBEZ public radio in Chicago. During that time, she reorganized the station’s news operation and led a team of reporters, editors, producers, and hosts to win many of the most prestigious national awards in American journalism.
Before that, she played a key editorial leadership role at KQED public radio in San Franscisco, where she was instrumental in the early organization of the station’s newsroom under its new all-news format in the 1990’s, was the founding senior producer of the award-winning California Report and helped guide the work that would eventually propel the station into its position now as the most listened-to public radio station in the country.
Sally now has a home in northern Michigan, where she is continuing her work as an independent writer and editor, focusing on rural issues, northern life, and the Great Lakes.
