Lake Superior Day, 2022 - Isle Royale

For the last two Lake Superior Days, I've turned this space over to my dear friend, Philip Kucera. I'm pleased to do so again.

 

The Misty Isle

Mid-July, 1971.

My wife, Judy and I left Chicago after work in Friday rush hour traffic. We'd spent days planning our trip to Lake Superior's Isle Royale National Park. An easy 13-14 hour drive to Grand Portage, Minnesota before boarding the passenger ferry Voyager...I thought.

State Highway 61 was not the road of Bob Dylan fame. We arrived at the dock 10 minutes before departure, ferry engine idling, passengers aboard – including two of my uncles from Michigan who joined us for the ride.

The first and only mate stepped ashore and helped with our gear. When I dropped the umbrella tent out of the station wagon he said with a near Canadian accent, "You're going to need a dolly to move this!"

We liked our canvas tent; you could stand up in it. Unsure if shelters would be available at the Park, it was loaded aboard.

Captain Roy Oberg, a highly respected North Shore navigator, entertained us and half dozen others with big lake tales and close-up views of the island. The ferry's twice weekly, two day clockwise circumnavigation of the place included an overnight stop at Rock Harbor.

Voyageur offloaded mail, groceries and supplies such as block ice and empty fish boxes to a handful of family fish camps en route, shuttling campers and loading freshly iced fish for mainland restaurants and markets.

The old 48 foot vessel would be retired after the end of the season, Roy said. A sixty-three foot Voyageur II replaced it, more than doubling capacity along the same route. Today that carries backpackers and sightseers in place of trout and whitefish.

At Rock Harbor Captain Oberg asked where we were staying for the night. He noted our hesitation and said, "The boy set up a berth for you folks in the ship's cabin. Grab your sleeping bags, we'll spend the night ourselves ashore." Our alarm clock the following morning was the sound, and mighty vibration, of the boat at full power heading out of the harbor.

Malone Bay on the island's south shore was where we headed. Judy and I hefted our tent to the campground where screened Adirondack style shelters stood…empty.

 

For a week we fished, ate speckled trout, hiked trails both rugged and easy. Watched moose grazing nose deep at Hay Bay, and in camp. Not a wolf was seen.

 

 

We motored a rented boat over to Wright Island for coffee with the partners of the historic Johnson/Holte fishery. Fisherfolk back then called Isle Royale 'The Rock.' They all knew it well, above and below the surface of Superior.

 

  

In 1971, we found the isle a quiet, idyllic escape from another time of war and internal conflict in America. We met only two other travelers, a father and son circumnavigating the island in a 14 foot aluminum fishing boat.

A Vietnam vet, the father told us, "We have a month to do it all."

Returning to a silent Grand Portage, we loaded our car. I turned the key, and the battery was dead. I checked the posts. It didn't help. Our fellow travelers had abandoned us for Route 61 and home. I turned to footsteps on the wooden dock and Roy Oberg's distinctive voice. "Need a jump?"

Fifty years later, last summer I sailed to Isle Royale with an old boating partner, Curt Isakson. We were aboard the Isle Royale Queen IV, a hundred passenger ferry out of Copper Harbor, Michigan, and run by generations of the Kilpela family.

We arrived to witness the explosive escalation of the Horne Wildfire...and its final quenching. Stranded with many others in the Rock Harbor area, we waited for our scheduled ferries to take us home.

This August, Curt and I will try it again, gunking about the island in an old aluminum boat ferried across by the park service Ranger III, both boats vintage 1958.

It'll be my last visit to Isle Royale, the least utilized national park in the lower 48. But it's getting crowded out there...

…and it's time to give my seat on the boat to yet another first timer.

To be continued…

Fortified

 

Fort Wilkins, Copper Harbor MI

 

This fort was established in 1844.

It was built to protect the Copper Boom interests of resource extractors and other wealth seekers against their Indian neighbors. And, I suppose, whatever other potential marauders might emerge from the scary woods.

The nation's first great mineral rush exploded in earnest near here long about 1843. Depending on who you ask, it ended sometime in '46.

That's the thing with booms. They go bust. Remember, it's not boom 'or' bust, it's "and."

About then, the nation found fresh need for soldiers to feed the war with Mexico and the soldiering business was on the rise. The copper boom having already gone bust, Fort Wilkins was abandoned in '47.

Or only three short years after there'd been a crying need for it, give or take. Just a caretaker remained.

For a brief time after the Civil War, the Army used the site to warehouse soldiers serving out what were by then pointless enlistments. It's said that made Fort Wilkins a morass of boredom relieved mostly by drunkenness.

I wouldn't know. But knowing where the thing is and a bit about men too, I shouldn't be surprised. Trust me, it was a long ways away from anywhere, then.

Hell. It's still a long ways away from most places.

In 1870, Fort Wilkins was permanently abandoned by the Feds.

Come 1923, the State of Michigan acquired the surrounding land for a park. What remained of the fort was stabilized and the place was later rebuilt by the WPA, which sturdy recreation is largely what you'll find there today. If spare original parts  remain, I don't know it.

Out of its entire one hundred seventy-eight year existence and counting, the place we call Fort Wilkins was an actual fort for less than a single decade, all told. Yet with hardly more than a passing Indian to be seen there, even today.

So there's that.

Grand Portage MN

 

For probably a couple millennia, native people's canoeing south from their summer homes toward winter hunting grounds faced 22 mi. of waterfalls and rapids on the lower Pigeon River as it rushed to Lake Superior. Early on, they blazed a trail of nearly two thirds shorter length through wilderness, upon which they seasonably transported all they owned.

This footpath was called the Great Carrying Place.

Later, voyageurs likewise needing to get from there to here used the same trail. It became the Grand Portage. Voyageurs built a fort at its terminus. They called that Fort Charlotte and it was actually at trail's end near the mouth of the Pigeon River.

Unlike the place named for that same legendary trail, which instead is located some miles south from there.

In any event, the Lake Superior fur trade flourished. During the shakeout between the Britain Empire and these still newly minted United States of really big America, the NW Company completely disassembled its summer headquarters at Grand Portage. Then they hauled it up the big lake in pieces to the Kaministiquia River, located in still safely British Ontario.

There from that same materiel, they first built now beloved Fort William. God Save the Queen.

In 1854 the U.S. signed a treaty with the Ojibwa ceding Grand Portage over to them. In 1887, the government took it back and opened the place to general development. Most of what we know of the original NW Company depot at Grand Portage comes from archeology, so at this fort there's no genuine article left, just ongoing story wedded to historic ground.

Today the land beneath Grand Portage National Monument is again Sovereign Nation. The Brits have their monument there and the good folk of MN value the last dependable tourist stop on the trail, before entering the true northern wilds of still vaguely royal Canada.

Unless you're taking the ferry from Grand Portage out to Isle Royale, that is. But that'd be a whole different story.

 

(Old) Fort William, Thunder Bay Ontario

 

Fort William's first iteration came in 1803, with the aforementioned relocation of the Fur King's headquarters, apparently taken lock stock & barrel out of Grand Portage and then rebuilt. No doubt better than ever.

Even in loyal Canada, a fort was needed to protect free if not fair trade.

This fort served its purpose well until 1821 and harder times, at which point the Hudson's Bay Company swallowed the NW Company and short-lived William was officially played out.

I imagine it as an awesome haven for the local kids. What grand notions they must have enjoyed.

In 1902 the site's last original stone structure was bulldozed by the railroad. Progress rumbled on, but cultural memory took root.

Spurred by handed down tales of a briefly proud Fort William, locals petitioned the Ontario government to recreate classic fort life somewhere safe. Fourteen miles upriver from the original site, they did.

There, a new improved Fort William was officially rechristened as "Old," presumably to avoid confusion.

Still, for all the reasons folk thought that a good idea, it turned out to be. Today this park in more or less suburban Thunder Bay is the most vibrant of half sister Grand Portage and their cousin a couple times removed, Fort Wilkins.

Alone among these three, the last time I looked First Nations people were dynamic participants and had retaken ownership of their own story. My memory of the youngish Native woman who on a sparkling summer day introduced me to the joys of popped wild rice as opposed to buttered corn remains a sustaining delight.

Geez Louise that stuff was good.

Sometimes the right land for a a good fort is where you find it. Then old times and strange sounding names don't count for as much, because they were never there.

Or if they were, are long gone and unknowable.

Shining Light on the Prairie - Full Summer

Or, taking my shots in the dark.

After sunset...

Decades ago, I went straight from wielding a 35mm Nikon F to pushing 4x5 transparency film through a Linhof. That was like graduating from a Sopwith Camel to a Spitfire.

There was no forgiving medium format transition for me.

Perspective control made the Linhof ideal for architecture, and there was no better means to shoot botanicals than large format.

Problem was, long exposure times + a fully extended bellows + even the slightest motion in the air made botanical fieldwork a really good way to waste film.

Architecture doesn't move. You know, not mostly. Almost never when I'm there, at any rate.

Shooting large format was hard enough. Failed construct being inexorably eaten by the wilderness over persnickety flowers it was.

I rarely if ever looked back.

The other evening I stepped out onto our porch overlooking the garden. I was gobsmacked by the light. I ran back in and grabbed the 21st Century Nikon, a wizard's tool if ever there was one.

Over the course of a fast fading few minutes, I worked with subtlety I'd have never dared on large format film.

As the sun also rises…

It's always been true that the best light is generally found at the edge times of day, especially during summer's high, too often harsh glare.

While digital capture's certainly mitigated that, it remains by & large true.

The morning after the sublime evening before, I awoke well before sunrise and still thinking of light, over coffee on my porch I noticed not a lick of a breeze. Apart from we early birds, the predawn world stood motionless.

I grabbed my wizard's wand and headed off to the closest prairie remnant, of late so overgrown and untended as to be all but impassable.

In rising light, I bushwhacked my way through.

Finally adept at digital capture in much the same way I was with large format film, today while out on the hoof I see better as well or better than I ever have.

That's in no small part because I can grab so much more of life on the fly, even when cast in nothing like traditionally perfect light.

And now all these decades later, when out in the field I finally get to shoot botanicals, too.

What a life.

Independence Day, 2022

 

The Barboursville Ruins

From 4x5 Transparency

Thomas Jefferson, Architect.

Still standing.

Kind of.

#fourthofjuly #foundingfathers