Epoxy

Lake Michigan

Highland Park, Illinois, USA

Also known as Michigan-Huron, Montrose Harbor, North Shore, Highland Park

On a clear Saturday morning in 1954, the lake rose eight feet in seconds and took eight people off the Chicago shore.

There had been thunderstorms hours earlier, moving southeast across the lake at better than 55 mph. The pressure jump under that squall line pushed a swell of water ahead of it toward the Michigan shore, and the swell came back. It arrived at Montrose Harbor with no warning and no weather to explain it. Roughly fifty people were standing on the breakwater. One survivor said the water rose like an elevator pushing it up.

The coroner's jury called it a seiche and an act of God. Decades later researchers reclassified it as a meteotsunami, driven by pressure and wind rather than the simple sloshing a seiche describes. Lake Michigan gets more of them than any other Great Lake.

The city's response was modest and practical. Metal cables and posts were anchored into the concrete breakwaters, so there would be something to hold.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: April 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Lake Michigan map by Keyway

How this one was made

Walnut, and not wall to wall. The dam follows the waterline about half an inch out, so the flood runs along the lake and the west side of the board stays bare wood.

The lettering is the part worth explaining. LAKE MICHIGAN and FAMILY are not engraved. They are left standing at the original surface height inside the lake cavity, so when the epoxy floods over everything and gets sanded back, the tops of the letters come up as bare walnut with blue all around them. It is the reverse of how the text usually works, and it means the letters have to be cut clean at full depth, because there is no fill to hide a ragged edge.

Two colours, but only just. The water is one pour and the compass rose is the second, filled by syringe since those points and the ring have outlines too fine to dam. The star on the west shore is left as bare engraving and takes no colour at all.