How many reporters does it take to count a lake?

After virtually drumming Detroit’s mayor out of office, you’d think the town’s vigilante press would let up once in a while. Nope. The ever watchful Detroit Free Press maybe thought they’d pound another nail in the coffin of this area by alleging in a May 27 story that Wayne County is nearly a lakeless patch of real estate.

Now, I never thought of Wayne County as the land o’ lakes, exactly, but when I read that story, which claimed the county where I live has only three lakes with names, I nearly spilled my coffee. Without looking at a map, I reeled off the names of Wilcox, Phoenix, Newburgh, Nankin, Waterford, Northville and Belleville — seven named lakes which I quickly confirmed on my trusty Huron-Clinton Metroparks map.

Already, that’s more than twice as many named lakes as the Free Press gave Wayne credit for and I wasn’t even started. My next stop was Bulletin No. 82 of Clifford Humphrys’ monumental “Michigan Lake Inventory”, aka “Michigan Lakes and Ponds,” the bible for us lake nuts since it was published by Michigan State University’s Department of Resource Development in 1962. Humphrys realized that lakes are very important in Michigan’s economy, and he believed that to better understand the resources, a catalog of lakes was needed. I’m lucky to own a copy, because it confirmed mu suspicion that the Free Press had rather under-estimated the number of water bodies near me.

Three lakes with names in Wayne County? How about 44?

Agreed, these are mostly not your typical tourist meccas, but lakes they are, nonetheless.

How about the Turning Basin, part of the Rouge River at Ford Motor Co.’s massive Ford Rouge plant? It’s a 30-acre lake, as I know very well, having paddled across it in a canoe. Or how about the mill pond behind the powerhouse dam at Henry Ford’s Fair Lane mansion in Dearborn?

I’m sure the Free Press wasn’t thinking of those two tailing ponds on Zug Island at the mouth of the Rouge, but lakes they are, too.

It’s not all gloomy, ugly industry, either — the Inventory records a lake named “Swimming Pool,” and its size — one-half acre.

What about the ponds at Waterworks Park?

And, of course, there’s Belleville Lake, at 1,270 acres only 10 acres shy of Oakland County’s Cass Lake at a whopping 1,280 acres.

What is this Free Press thing about “named lakes,” anyway?

First, they’re wrong not only about Wayne, but also about Macomb and Oakland. The paper claims Macomb has only three named lakes, but Humphrys’ Inventory lists 23.

I suspect the fixation on named lakes comes from the Oakland County Sheriff’s marine Division. They told the reporter Oakland has “450 named lakes.”

That’s curious, because when I covered Oakland County lakes as a beat a few years ago for the Free Press, Oakland marine deputies were claiming 450 navigable lakes.

I always wondered what they meant by “navigable.” Capable of being traveled by motorboat? By sailboat? By canoe? I suppose a chunk of tree bark floating across a lake could be said to “navigate” a waterway. In other words, the term “navigable” was as meaningless as the number — 450 — they gave me.

For the record, while the Free Press under-counted named lakes in Macomb and Wayne counties, it exaggerated their number in Oakland. By my reckoning, again based on the Humphrys Inventory, there are 408 lakes with names in Oakland.

That doesn’t mean all 408 have different names. Three lakes are called “Dollar,” two are “Cass.” There are three Cranberry Lakes and one Cranbery Lake. Three Dark Lakes, two Fish Lakes, two Clam Lakes.

The king of lake names is “Mud.” There are 14 Mud Lakes in Oakland and one Mud Pond.

Named lakes are not nearly the whole story, though. The total of lakes and ponds bigger than 1/10th acre in Oakland is 1,857, according to Humphrys. That’s right — one thousand, eight hundred fifty seven. That makes Oakland second only to the Upper Peninsula’s Iron County for total lakes. Iron County has 2,175 lakes.

Sorry, I refuse to count the names of Iron County’s lakes.

This is not news at the Free Press. I used those numbers in stories I wrote for the paper. “The Detroit Almanac,” published by the Free Press, has a section on inland lakes on pp. 144-145 that lists the top 10 Michigan lakes ranked by number of lakes and ponds and by total lake and pond acreage. I know the figures well, because I wrote that section.

The Free Press notwithstanding, Macomb and Wayne are no slouches when it comes to lakes. Macomb has 278, and Wayne has 298.

True, most of them — and this is true also of Oakland — have no monickers.

I’m still trying to decide how to count one lake in Wayne: Is it a named or an unnamed lake? What do you think?

It’s called “No Name Lagoon.”

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com