“Lake Michigan has sort of got a personality,” Paul Florsheim said wryly, as if describing an old friend rather than the center of a legal battle that has consumed the last year of his life. “It changes its moods all the time. I go all throughout the year, even in the bitterest part of winter, because it’s just beautiful down there. You have these ice floes, and they’re sort of like volcanoes, and the waves come crashing through these structures. It’s like another world.”
Florsheim has been walking that world, a stretch of the Lake Michigan shoreline in Shorewood, Wis., a small village north of Milwaukee, for more than 50 years, since his childhood. He walked it with his parents. He walked it when he returned to his hometown in 2008 after 30 years away. He walked it with his dog in the early mornings, before anyone else was out, in every season.
