Black River

Onaway in July. The semi truck races on the weekend, the ground going through you every time a rig came off the line, half the county standing around in the dust. Then the long flat afternoons at Black Lake — swimming until your lips went blue, fishing off the state park shore, back to the car sunburned and starving.

Black River takes its name from the river that runs near Onaway, and that is the ground it comes out of. Grays with warmer buff running through them, the color of river rock that has been wet and dry a thousand times over. It is a quieter stone than Beach Blend, and it holds shadow better.

You can go put your hand on it. Black River faces the pedestrian tunnel at Clinch Park in Traverse City — the one that runs under Grandview Parkway and comes out onto fifteen hundred feet of sand on the bay. Cherry Festival week the whole town funnels through it, kids with towels over their shoulders, the air show going over the water. Thousands of hands every summer and northern Michigan winters in between, and it still looks like it grew there.