Superior's North Shore, Revisited – The Fork in the Road

 

Hurtling almost straight south from Lake Superior Provincial Park, the road gets easier with every passing mile as you leave the high rugged wilderness behind. Those complex comforts of civilization that you couldn't carry with you on the long trek up over the big lake are more readily available.

Then you reach the Soo. For me that's like hitting a rock wall at full speed.

All the worse, because I know it's coming.

 

Sault Ste. Marie, Canada

 

A drop of water fed Lake Superior by the Pigeon River near Grand Portage circa 1831 is only now being caught up in the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie.

1831!

There was no Minnesota, then. No Canada either, least not as we know it today.

But there was a City of Sault Ste. Marie.

Established in 1668, "Sault" is a French-Indian term for the impassable place where Lake Superior sends its water en masse to Lake Huron, via the Saint Mary's River.

Or maybe Sault originally meant 'jump.' Depends on who you ask.

Whichever, it's a considerable barrier to travel and trade because at the Soo the greatest of Great Lakes sits twenty-one feet higher than little cousin Huron, some miles downriver.

Before leaving Canada, there're two more stops to consider. Tucked away alongside that -

Is this:

Yeah, it's just an obscure totem nestled on lawn along a quiet street. Except the word restoration is a critical distinction.

The NW Company Headquarters at Grand Portage in Minnesota and the Fort William that later became 'Old' in Thunder Bay are strictly recreations. Historical amusement parks.

Think pirates of the Caribbean. Only with fur trappers, missionaries and mostly noble savage natives.

Not so this old Bateau, which apparently is where it was and (again, apparently) still contains authentic elements of the original lock itself.

I mean, 1798. How cool is that?

Just before crossing the border, by all means visit the Whitefish Island Indian Reserve @ St. Mary's Falls, if only to remind yourself of the wild places you've just traversed.

Whitefish Island is special, perhaps unique. A spot rich in cultural history, set amidst a resurgent natural landscape. Protected and nurtured since 1997, when the island was returned to the Batchewana First Nation People.

That's as close as you'll ever get to the 'real' Sault - inclusive historical narrative and the natural world that enabled it, combined.

After that it's off the North Shore and fast out of Canada. Happily, we needn't portage:

Sault Ste. Marie, U.S. of A.

And a glimpse of Lake Huron too.

 

You can search for clear-eyed cultural context and bits of historic authenticity on the U.S. side of the Soo, but you'll not find much of that there.

For sure, they've a 'Tower of History.' That opened in 1968 as the Shrine of the Missionaries.

Subsequently, the Tower features more history than just that. But it's still a 20th Century edifice, populated with words and a handful of artifacts that more easily celebrate rather than convey the full story of time, place and the diversity of peoples who've left lasting marks on the region.

As for authentic, this is called "The Captain's House." At the time it seemed unoccupied if not utterly abandoned. The sign on the door warns against trespass.

A little farther along:

Everything's downriver from that, all the way to Lake Huron.

One year, Heather and I rode Huron's northern shore. Admittedly that's far afield of where we're at, and a whole 'nother story to boot.

Yet on the Bruce Peninsula where the lake at one side is shallow Georgian Bay and on the other the Niagara Escarpment drops straight off to cold nowhere, while working the edge light I captured this:

What a right proper place for a couple of chairs, eh?

Anyway, I digress. Back to the Upper Peninsula, at the Soo…

Sault Ste. Marie MI's big attraction is the locks and the boats that pass through them. This remarkable feat of engineering allows great lakes freighters to squeeze along what had been an all but impassible barrier since forever.

The commercial locks at the Soo used to be on the Canadian side. They relocated to the U.S., because ours are bigger. If just barely big enough, these days.

This is also the way many invasive species slipped into Superior, often from waters on the other side of the world. Just sayin'.

Near the famous locks, Sault U.S.A. sports a carnival atmosphere. Folk come from all over to see the freighters up close. Schedules are posted. People keep track. A variety of goods and services are readily available while waiting.

Sometimes the viewing platform gets crowded. Happily, it wasn't the evening I visited.

Of course, once upon a time there were only native peoples at either side of the Sault. They fished and hunted, laughed and cried, had sex, made babies, got sick/injured/old and died.

Naturally, there's an Anishinabek burial ground located there.

A portion of that traditional gravesite is now more or less returned to Native auspices. There's a stone monument. No mature trees. No verdant paths. No wetlands. An industrial Sault looms in the background.

At least they finally got a friggin' fence.

On the brighter side, Lake Superior State has a fish hatchery. I never pass on a fish hatchery. All the little fishes and the people who look after them are awesome.

Plus, they've got an online fish cam.

Heading west from the Soo along Superior's southern shore, you'll come to Bay Mills Indian land. They call it The Land of the Pike, though of course pike live in water.

Past that and near where wildness begins again is a place named Iroquois Point. There's a lighthouse there. People like lighthouses, sort of how they like freighters. This one is well maintained.

On the lake near the light is a stone beach. To your right is the great gathering place of Superior waters, each drop having taken its sweet time migrating out of the freshwater sea.

Unless I miss my guess, to the left is the true north shore as embodied by mighty Pukaskwa and the boreal forest.

You can't see that, but it's there.

Fed up with the Iroquois riding west on the coattails of the French, on this beach in 1662 the local Anishinaabe decided to send the encroaching world a message. 

Early one morning, they fell upon the enemy's encampment.

Only two Iroquois were spared. Those were provided a canoe so to carry the Ojibwa message eastward, beyond the Sault to Lake Huron and all the way to the St. Lawrence River, as needed.

They say Iroquois bones and skulls littered the beach more than a century later. That's why even in the midst of Ojibwa land, this place is still called Iroquois Point.

Monument enough, I'd think.

 

Coda

Now we've returned to my home turf, that part of the Superior Basin I know best.

Some miles still farther west, you'll come to the Tahquamenon River of white folk Hiawatha fame, where Longfellow's powerfully poetic fake news still echoes in the touristy woods.

People like to say "hope dies last."

Maybe so, but I prefer to believe truth will outlive it.

 

*

 

The Future is out there. Way out there. Beyond the curvature of Earth.

And yet somehow, still within our collective grasp.

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…

Superior's North Shore, Revisited – True North

The Keweenaw Peninsula rises from Lake Superior somewhere out there:

Way out there, where Copper Harbor lies hidden beyond the curvature of Earth.

Back on the Trans-Canada Hwy, the next stop is as far north as Superior's shore gets. That'll be some one hundred and fourteen plus road miles north/northeast from Grand Portage, well past the reach of Minnesotan branding.

Nipigon

Sometimes, you'll hear Lake Nipigon called the 'sixth Great Lake'. It's mighty big, but I don't buy that branding either. Still, via the once mighty Nipigon River, it's Superior's largest tributary.

The river pours the region's lifeblood into the freshwater sea near a place that used to be known as 'Red Rock House,' named for a fur trading post. The town is now and presumably forevermore called Nipigon.

I knew the river by reputation before ever going anywhere near the north shore. That's where in July of 1915, a Dr. Cook caught (what's still maybe) the World's Record Brook Trout.

Regardless, it was one big brookie. The stuff of northwoods legend. That tale reached me as a young boy, hundreds of miles south on a distant prairie.

Today, you can't even see the skin mount they made of the actual fabled fish. That burnt in 1990 when the Historical Museum that housed it caught fire. But there's a replica don't 'cha know, which you'll find in the restored museum.

After passing through the small town with the river's name any number of times on my way to somewhere else, in 2012 I finally headed upriver.

Broad and wide, the Nipigon is about what you'd expect from a once wild river that's been damned. The rapids where Dr. Cook caught the famous fish have long since been swallowed by deep water, or I'd have gone all the way north just to sit under a tree next to them.

Like so many fish that start at the big lake, I made it to the first of four major dams.

Having seen more than enough, I turned tail and ran. That's the farthest north on this continent I've ever traveled.

 

Pukaskwa National Park

Established in 1978 and encompassing some 725 square miles, Pukaskwa is the wildest place I've been. Maybe, the wildest place I ever will.

There's one thin road out of Marathon that ends in a loop around a campground near Superior and a visitor center on the Pic River at Hattie's Cove. Same thin road out, northbound.

In the rest of the vast park, you're on your own.

So impressed was I after our first visit I thought a canoe trip on the White River starting in the town of White River (surprised?) and paddling through Pukaskwa's wild heart would be a most awesome way of getting to know the real place.

No doubt, it would have been that.

Except it meant 50+ miles with 21 portages along the way, over what had to be an exceptionally well-planned and trained for seven days, minimum. Because once you've traversed the wilderness and reached Superior alive (provided you did), from the mouth of the White River you've still got some miles of open water to paddle before reaching safe harbor.

In other words, should the wind be onshore at the end of the daunting, week long river journey, you're stuck there at the hard edge of nowhere for who knows how long.

Reliant on only your wits for the duration, because the canoe won't go.

In case you're wondering what that'd sound like:

Sounds a lot like like 'Hahaha, stupid canoeist' to me.

After the Bear Story, my ardor to confront unbound wilderness armed with only my wits and a canoe died a sudden death. 

Flat water turned out to be plenty magical anyway. And there's now a hydroelectric dam on what was the fully wild White River, so neither I nor the river are what we used to be.

Ah, well.

They say that among the collection of debris pictured below, if you look hard and long you'll maybe find a vintage log or two that still bears the brand of its original owner. It's said such logs remain the owner's property in perpetuity, no matter where you find them.

That's what they say.

I decided long ago that even rolling so much as an ankle at Pukaskwa wouldn't be smart, so never ventured to look. But from safe vantage, it seems like an entirely reasonable version of perpetuity to me…

I've been privileged to stand on a razor rock edge between mighty Superior and its wildest land, where both tossed me boreal forest air kisses while I gazed vaguely south beneath an brilliant sky.

That's no small thing in a life.

As is true of everywhere else along the big lake, before the trappers, loggers, miners, fisherman and other tourists, there were First Peoples.

The next town east out of formidable Pukaskwa is the birthplace of Winnie the Pooh and so much for Indian Country today. Maybe have lunch in White River.

Then when back on the road headed toward the Soo and after a few hours of a whole lot of nothing passing by you get road weary, perhaps you'll think that before white folk cleaved their way through it - leaving little islands of civilization named after rivers and where cartoon bears were born - there was no lasting culture here at all.

No matter. Voyage on and you'll soon enough be disabused.