Superior's North Shore, Revisited – Turning South

 

True North is out there.

Way out there, beyond the curvature of a very hard Earth.

Lake Superior Provincial Park

If Pukaskwa is the wildest place I've ever visited across all of Superior, on its northern shore Lake Superior Provincial Park is my most beloved.

There, Heather and I have made lasting memories. Woven the sort of magic golden threads that sustain a spirit over the course of a long life, until life and maybe spirit too, is no more.

Like how on our first visit we were so happy to find ourselves camping just steps from the beach that we ran out into the lake and frolicked like ecstatic children in a pounding surf.

The lake lifted us up, hurled us toward shore, rolled our helpless bodies across gravel and sand, then yanked us back into its watery grasp. Over and over and over again.

We laughed like we'd live forever. Then when exhausted, we lay on the sand listening to the big lake roar beneath a glorious autumn sun. It was a fine day to be young.

What that bucolic scene up there doesn't tell you and we didn't discover until the next day is that just beyond where we'd embraced youthful abandon, lake bottom drops pretty much straight off to who the hell knows where.

Had Superior chosen to carry us away and set us loose over rolling green deep water, it's possible that one or both of us would've have drowned.

On a later trip, we sat transfixed in our comfy camp chairs on that same sand and watched a fireball cleave ink black night sky, trailing a fiery tail of sparks behind. The fireball slashed over the lake then disappeared at the western horizon, out toward where Minnesota lurked unremembered.

Having no place else in the world to go and with no ready way to get there anyway, Heather & I spent the next fifteen minutes or so waiting on the great dark wave to maybe wash us off the face of the earth and onward toward oblivion.

It didn't. So there's another true north sojourn when we didn't die.

Two of my favorite sites to photograph around all of Superior are in the park named after it.

At Pinguisibi, ancient rock seems to flow like water because it used to be molten fire.

Life clings stubbornly to the cracks.

Katherine Cove and its freshwater 'tide pools' at first light are dependably  photogenic as anywhere I've been on the lake. It doesn't matter the place is unchanging. Early morning light that falls upon it always is.

Then and there, life exists in the moment and time is made fluid by sight and sound and breath of fresh air.

And there's still ample opportunity afterwards, to explore human notions of permanency.

 

Agawa

From the relative comfort of camp, Agawa Rock is hidden away out there.

Not so far out there as the crow flies, but still. Those slopping hills aren't as gentle as they look, when you're on them.

Near the bottom of one of the hills, the Earth is cracked.

Off to the left and down still more hill is a vertical rock wall with a tiny sloping ledge hard to the freshwater sea. If the place was just more anonymous Superior shoreline, from the land you'd never guess it was there.

Yet on that wall descendants of those who first came to the place left this, for future consideration:

With red ochre on rock, these people said I am here.

And other things, too.

The ledge along Agawa Rock runs fast into the big lake. That ledge is almost always wet.

Look close and you'll see lengths of rope trailing off into the water, secured to the rock by great bolts set into it. That's so that after you've been careless and Mishipeshu grabs you, maybe you'll not end up sleeping with fishes after all.

Should the Great Lynx claim you anyway, consider that as partial payment for all the copper your ancestors removed from Superior, over which that great spirit in the water once stood guard.

Today, no one does.

In any event, at Agawa and most everywhere else along Superior's sprawling north shore, you should remember to try and not die. Because from Minnesota to the Soo is mostly what we call 'wilderness.'

By any other name that spells utter indifference to human existence and that includes you.

I suppose that indifference is why wilderness was once considered the Devil's province, and so naturally our duty to try and tame. And why today's wildest remnants that evaded taming still both awe and frighten us, when we traverse the real world as tourists.

It's said that in the Porcupine Mountains somewhere near the mouth of the Carp River is a rock art site corresponding to distant Agawa. This portion of Superior's south shore is on my home turf:

There's a great deal of open water between distant Agawa and there.

But related pictographs so far removed would speak directly to the transgenerational interrelationship of peoples and cultures across the entire Superior basin. Always a valuable concept to think on, even in historical hindsight.

Perhaps the rumored Carp River site is a bunch of hooey. Just another story in which truth/untruth is lost to the river of time, with no one alive today able to say for sure.

I stayed there once and I sure didn't find it.

Or maybe pictographs do exist at the Carp in the Porkies and those folk who best understand their meaning have for hundreds of years successfully shielded them from prying white eyes by exerting honest ownership over the larger portion of the region's human story that their enduring presence rightfully earns them.

Well, one can always dream. Superior's true North Shore is made for such.

In any event, it's now time to head farther south, toward home.

If not exactly to where the Carp and the Porcupine play, then at least in that general direction…