Explorers avoided lightning

I was 10 that summer.
My cousin John was 11, and my cousin from Illinois was 12.
Our families had decided to spend part of our vacation together, camping in Michigan, sharing a campfire each night and having most of our meals together.
Grandfather Ronald had died that spring, so my guess is the family reunion aspect was important to my father and two of his sisters.
At any rate, for a 10-year-old it was fun to have a couple of guys about my age to hang out with.
The three of us explored the Michigan state park at Burt Lake. We hiked. We swam. And we waded.
Burt Lake stays shallow a long way from shore. At one point, we entertained the notion of walking all around the lake while staying in the water, about 100 feet from shore, but we underestimated how long that would take.
When we lost interest in the lake, a steep wooded hill captured our attention.
It rose up from the campground, away from the lake. There were no trails, and it looked like a tough climb. Just the sort of challenge to attract three cousins on an explore.
It took some doing, maybe more than one try, but eventually we made it to the top. If there was a fence there, I’ve forgotten it. But it was clear we’d reached the boundaries of the park.
And within a minute or two, it was clear we were trespassing.
In front of us stood an enormous cross, with the land before it tiered down to a group of buildings.
Clearly we’d stumbled into a religious shrine. Had we been alone, each of us probably would have turned around immediately and scooted down the steep hillside.
But two kids are braver than one. And three kids are potentially dangerous. So we kept exploring, not irreverently but with curiosity.
Then we saw the steps.
They led down from the cross, as I recall, toward the group of buildings.
One side of each step was ordinary stone or concrete. The other side was polished granite or marble.
Fascinated, we wondered aloud why the steps were like that. Then one of the cousins spotted a small sign down at the bottom of the steps.
So we hopped on down, jumping back and forth from the plain side of the step to the polished stone side as we went.
I think it was my cousin from Illinois who reached the sign first. We still hadn’t been spotted as trespassers, but our faces turned red when we read the sign.
Turns out that the plain side of the steps was for most people. The polished stone side was only to be used by the bishop when he visited the shrine for services.
We skedaddled, hurrying back up the plain side of the steps, back through the bushes and down the hill to the campground.
And all the way, we kept waiting to be struck by lightning.[[In-content Ad]]