Sarett Nature Center and the tower over the Paw Paw

The marshes and bottomland along the Paw Paw River, just north of Benton Harbor, are a place that exists because of a friendship. In 1963, Elizabeth and William Vawter bought 130 acres of this low, wet ground and set it aside as a refuge. They named it for Lew Sarett — a poet, naturalist, and Northwestern University professor who had been William’s boyhood friend, a man who wrote his verses out in the woods and was as comfortable in a canoe as a lecture hall.

That original 130 acres has grown into more than a thousand, threaded with about eight miles of trail. The land does something unusual for southwest Michigan: it stays wet. Boardwalks carry you out over cattail marsh and across the kind of swampy ground that most trails route around, which is exactly where the herons, turtles, and warblers want to be.

The headliner is the treetop walkway. Built in 2009, it’s a 55-foot tower that lifts you out of the understory and into the canopy itself, looking out over the whole Paw Paw River valley — a flat green sweep of floodplain forest that you’d never see from the ground. In spring and summer a butterfly house holds hundreds of native butterflies, and a nature play area lets kids climb on logs and stumps instead of plastic.

For sixty years this has been the quiet anti-amusement-park of the county — no rides, no gift-shop animatronics, just a marsh, a river, and a tower to see them from. The Vawters could have done a lot of things with 130 acres of riverbottom. They turned it into a place to teach people what was already living there.