The Lake Where You Live

This lake country we live in includes two Great Lakes, each within a reasonable driving distance. I’m a Lake Michigan boy, but I find something even more captivating about Lake Superior.

Seen from a place on their shorelines, Superior and Michigan look much the same: restful blue, impossible to see across, waves whitecapping their way toward shore. And yet there’s an unmistakable magic about Superior, as if just by being in its presence one can feel its deeper cold, its immensity, its power.

Superior and its environs are the subject of Sue Leaf’s unfortunately titled book, “Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore” (University of Minnesota Press). I say “unfortunately” because the title, with its dour implication, hides the celebration of the big lake that lies between the covers.

Some of the chapters tell how the lake’s wave action is gradually devouring the property owned by the author’s family outside of Port Wing. Leaf tells how in the winter of 2018-19 wave erosion took down a large spruce tree that once shaded the picnic table between the lake and the family cabin.

“Tom [her husband] and I began to entertain the unthinkable, that our cabin would fall into Lake Superior in our lifetimes,” she writes. So they built a new one farther back from the shore. It is easy to empathize with the loss of treasured property to encroaching water, but that is not the main thing I took away from this book.

Leaf vividly describes historical events like the rise and fall of copper mining in the Upper Peninsula, life in the city of Ashland that she and Tom called home, places and events of interest along the lakeshore, and the features of the natural world.

One chapter is devoted to the piping plovers on an island in Chequamegon Bay: “Piping plovers have big, round heads and large, dark eyes. They scurry about the beach on bright-orange legs, poking their stubby little beaks in the sand in hopes of nabbing dinner.”

The chapter I found most captivating describes the Point to La Pointe open-water swim race from the mainland in Bayfield to Madeleine Island, a distance of about three miles. The event is held in August when Superior is at least tolerably warm, although the racers still wear wet suits. 

Tom Leaf, a competitive swimmer for half a century, is among the contestants. “It’s cool to be out there,” he’s quoted as saying. “You’re just sort of out there on your own, the lake and the sky and swimming.”

Another chapter, “The Sacred Act of Ricing,” explores the Native American tradition of plying the sloughs, beating the grains (manoomin) into canoes with sticks, and then processing the grains into table-ready condition.

Other chapters focus on the Two-Hearted River and its association with a classic short story by the late Ernest Hemingway, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. and its locks, the creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and the storms that have sunk numerous ships, most notably the iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald.

No, what I take from this book is not grief over that which is impermanent, but a simple imperative: I need to spend more time on and around Lake Superior.

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.