The old rail line you can now walk: Van Buren Trail

This is a state park you could walk the whole length of and never see a parking lot or a picnic shelter — because it is a line, not a block. Van Buren Trail State Park runs about 14 miles down an old railroad bed, straight and flat the way only a rail line can be, from South Haven on the Lake Michigan coast inland to Hartford.

When the trains quit, the right-of-way stayed. That is the trade behind every rail-trail: the railroad’s loss of a route becomes a walker’s gain of one, already graded and already drained, no hills to speak of. The Department of Natural Resources took it over and now keeps it open for walking, biking, and horseback. Along the way it threads exactly the country you’d expect out here — open farm fields, stands of woods, and the low blueberry rows that southwest Michigan grows by the ton.

The surface is the catch, and it is worth knowing before you load the wrong bike. The roughly two miles closest to South Haven are paved and smooth enough for a city bike or a kid on training wheels. From there to Hartford the trail is unimproved — packed dirt, gravel, the occasional soft or rutted stretch — which is fine on a mountain bike or on foot or on a horse, and miserable on skinny road tires.

The best trick the trail has is its connections. Near South Haven it ties into a spur out to Van Buren State Park and the dunes, and into the Kal-Haven Trail, the longer crushed-stone route that runs east toward Kalamazoo. Start stitching those together and a quiet two-mile stroll turns into a day’s worth of distance, all of it off the road and away from traffic, with the Paw Paw River country sliding by on either side.