Four thirty-seven a.m.

That is my guess anyway. I was at the dock by 3:30 this morning to slip the lines in the dark hoping to photograph sunrise from inside of a cave on the eastern tip of Oak Island. With the first hint of dawn glowing like the embers of a campfire, I made for Quiet Cove, and sunk the anchor.

With just enough light to see by, I donned my wetsuit for the swim to the caves at the end of the point and pulled myself up onto the rock shelf, unpacked my camera, and settled in to wait. The sun will rise at 5:10 a.m. on this June day giving me long minutes alone in the dark inside the stone heart of an island.

These are the longest minutes of the day metered only by the tick-tock cadence of the waves against the point.

There is no clock aboard the Little Dipper and that is by design. Once you slip the lines and clear the breakwall, there’s no need for the mechanical cadence of clocks. Time should be measured in the slow poetry of waves and the clatter of gulls. It should be seen in the eternity of each grain of sand. Time is written everywhere in these islands, even in the rock walls of this small cave.

Geologists say that the Bayfield Group of sandstones - Orienta, Devils Island, and Chequamegon — were born of immense sediment-laden rivers flowing into the ancient Lake Superior basin some 990 million years ago. Some of those sands may be the stone bones of the ancient Appalachian Mountains, once as high as the Himalayas, ground down by the weight of time.

In the dark, I brush my fingertips across the cave wall and dream of the echo of mountains in each grain of sand loosened by my touch. The rock remembers.

I think, too, of ice: the unfathomable weight of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that compressed the stone heart of the bedrock, a weight so immense that the land, in places, is still recovering in a process known as isostatic rebound, the chest of the earth slowly rising again in a ten thousand-year inhale after the release of the ice.

And of water, the formation of ancient Glacial Lake Duluth, the predecessor of Lake Superior that began the endless conversation of waves and stone debating the virtues of constant movement versus the illusion of permanence, irresistable forces sculpting the face of immoveable objects.

The cave where I sit is just one syllable of that endless conversation, one frame in the movie of geologic time.

With the shooting star lifespan of humans, the arc of geologic time is a difficult concept for us to grasp. We see the landscape like a postcard, a snapshot. But if we could sit on a cliffside and see time pass on a geologic scale, like a movie in fast forward – hundreds of thousands of years in just a few minutes – we would see the icy tongues of glaciers flicker like lightning strikes, mountain ranges rise, crest, and settle like calming storm surf. If we could, even for an instant, see the world in geologic time, we would never see a cliff wall, or a wildflower in quite the same way again. Or, I think to myself, a sea cave.

But suddenly there is the sun. In an instant, it crests the horizon and pulls itself over the lake, shimmering. Gone are thoughts of Precambrian and Pleistocene, Mid-Continental Rift, and geomorphology. At this moment, this tick of the geologic clock we call 5:10 a.m. on June 26th, 2026 in the Apostle Islands, the sun is rising and there is only the light.

The shadows scurry to the corners. The cave fills with a warm orange glow. It is like being in a palace carved of light. As the sun plays off the swirls and pillars, flickers off the water, thoughts of time and clocks, geologic or otherwise, vanish like the shadows. For as long as I photograph, there is only the eternity of the sunlit Now.

As the sun rises, the softness of the light hardens to an edge and I prepare for the swim back to the boat. I am ready for coffee. Thoughts of distant time written in the rocks come back to me after I have crawled back aboard the Little Dipper floating in the cove.

“There is always the rock,” wrote poet William Kloefkorn, “That, first and last, to remember.”

My 67 years on earth represent a span of time just 0.0000067% of the age of the rocks in the Apostle Islands. Such time spans are all but unfathomable to the human mind.

Still, as I brush the sand from my wetsuit before sitting in the sun to warm up with coffee, I hear a soft sound in the quiet of the morning - with every grain of sand falling to the floor of the Little Dipper, there is a faint click, a sound not unlike the quiet ticking of a geologic clock. The rock remembers.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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It is said that some species of salmon find their way back to their home waters across hundreds, even thousands of miles, using a combination of the pull of the earth’s magnetic field and their sense of smell.

It smells like morning as the Little Dipper slips the confines of the Bayfield Harbor. Not that many hours ago, I was standing on the deck of a different C-Dory in different waters, thousands of miles away in Alaska. There is a euphoria to traveling, every sense peaked, every sight and sound heightened by the novelty of its newness. But there is a comfort too in that first morning back home.

Just outside the breakwall, I hesitate a moment before powering up and instead, turn off the engine to stand on the deck and take it all in. It is early morning, just passed summer solstice, and not yet sunrise. There are no other boats on the water. I turn a slow circle, savoring the morning — the harbor, the forested hills behind, the long reach of the horizons. There are gulls white as spindrift on the water, a loon silhouetted in the growing light. The sun is gathering its strength just over the humpback of Basswood Island.

There alone and quiet after the chaos of so many miles traveled, I pause, breathing in, slowing down, taking in the scent of my home waters before powering up to head into the islands for sunrise.

Every breath is like a coming home.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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They are like dreams lined up bow-to-stern and cleated, just waiting for a person to step aboard. All it would take is one step, dock to gunnel, and life would change. You would slip your hands into rubber gloves, your feet into a pair of Xtratufs (Alaskan’s favorite rubber boots), and get to work, get to fishing. Life on the sea.

It is a rainy day in Juneau, Alaska. A day to slip into a raincoat, and pair of rubber boots and walk the docks where there is a dream in every slip. With nearly 400 slips, Statter Harbor in Auke Bay is the perfect place to dream the day away — a working dock with a vast array of boats. You can picture yourself stepping on to the deck of a purse seiner set for salmon like the 59-foot Rose Lee or a gillnetter like the Daybreak or the Annie V.

You might step aboard a crabber like the Worthy that sells its catch to the long line of bucket-carrying locals lined up on the dock for Dungenese crabs ($15 per crab or $13.50 each for six or more).

Or, it might be a vessel meant more for escaping everything than for catching anything - a sailboat rigged for Alaskan gales and provisioned for the long haul. Or, a working vessel like the tug Shannon weather-beaten and wave-pounded but still floating in defiance of time and the elements.

Of course there are the mega-yachts like the 164-foot Catching Daylight with its elevator, gym, and an expansive sundeck. Or the even larger Sea Owl famous for its distinct jade-mist-green hull and fairytale-inspired interior which comes in at 203-feet and $90 million complete with its own tender dubbed the Hatchling. But those are not the lives I dream of. My dreams are more down to earth, and come without their own tender or continuous four-deck, hand-carved mahogany central staircase shaped like a magical tree, stretching from the lower deck to the sun deck. In this harbor, there are, too, the husks of dreams gone awry.

That is a part of the beauty of a dock walk. You can step from slip to slip and try on different dreams as you might a collection of rubber boots — dreams of unimaginable wealth or the freedom inherent in having virtually no money at all but all the time in the world with a boat beneath you and the horizon ahead. It could be a dream of owning your own fishing charter, or a whale watching tour boat. Each with its own ebb and flow of hopes and despairs.

Then there are the names — Gypsy Spirit, Quicksilver, Strike Two, Yolo, and Sea Bird. Names that run the gamut of emotions — Total Chaos and Butt Ugly, Chatham Mist and Perseverance and Lucky Lady.

Beyond the dreams and the wanderlust inspired by the names, there is the sheer aesthetics of a marina with its sea smells, its reflections and colors and classic lines of boat hulls. There are gulls like white commas in the sky above, the black slash of ravens, seals slinking in the reflections of the rigging below, the abstract art of boats and water and life laid out before you in numbered rows.

And the art of the sea itself painted into the salt-encrusted sea walls by the brushes of countless incoming and outgoing tides.

I walk the docks up and down, trying on life after life. What is there about life aboard this boat or that one that appeals to the traveler in me? What would I miss of what is left behind on shore? Would I be happier, more lonely, fulfilled? Would I walk the docks at other ports of call only to dream of other lives aboard those boats too?

We all make our choices. We all step ashore in our lives here or there and cleat our hopes and dreams to the port of our choosing and our own making. But there is no harm in a day spent dreaming, only to finally step back to the familiar shores of our own life again, happy to have had some time away, happy to return to our home waters where we have known we belonged all along.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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Southeast Alaska wears its moods in its weather. For the first few days of our visit, the mood was dour. The gray laid down as heavy as a wet wool blanket. Dripping weather. Long strings of fog lashed the mountain faces like drooping frowns.

Today however, the mood has changed entirely, ushering in the kind of day that postcards were meant for - the horizons chimmed with bell-shaped mountain peaks, the sky competing with the water to invent new shades of blue. There is a euphoria that comes on such days in spite of, or perhaps because of, the gray that came before. The spirit soars. Long lost sunglasses and t-shirts reappear. People smile more easily. These are the halcyon days.

A day to be spent on a boat, trolling. There is a meditative repetitiveness to trolling for salmon - the low hum of the outboard, the slow metronome of the boat’s back and forth route on the water, the heat and stillness of the air. All of it makes us sleepy and quiet, content.

How many such days does a person get in one lifetime? How many are frittered away with the endless details of chores and jobs and to-do lists? How does the brightness of such days balance the shadows and doubt inherent in any life?

Good questions, I think to myself in the silence. I should ponder all of that some day. But not today. I am a believer in the power of an examined life. Only by asking the deep questions can we learn and grow. But not every hour of every day. And certainly not on a day like today. There are lines in the water. There are mountains peeking over our shoulders and good people to share the boat with.

Such days are not meant for questioning. They are meant for lying on your back, watching the clouds, watching the tips of the rods bend like commas, signaling a pause in it all. The only question that crosses your mind is whether a fish will rise. Yes, I believe I will think about that question instead of all the rest as the boat spins for yet another lazy run of the trolling grounds.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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Some things seem very familiar here: we are adrift among wild islands ringed with sharp rocks and fringed with forests, there are bear tracks on the beach, and we are on a C-Dory. But, this time it is not the Little Dipper. These are not the Apostle Islands, and we are not on Lake Superior. As if to make that point perfectly clear, something is just now rising off our starboard side and moving quickly towards the boat: the immense dorsal fin of a male Orca.

Jill and I are away, thousands of miles to the northwest of the Apostle Islands in Juneau, Alaska aboard a C-Dory named the Edisto. Southeast Alaska is a dot-dash land and seascape spangled with over 1,100 islands, some the size of small states, others as tiny as the dot on an exclamation point. The names alone are enough to spark wanderlust — the Alexander Archipelago, Shaman Island, Battleship, and Bird. There are the huge “ABC islands” —Admiralty, Baranoff, and Chichagof — and smaller pinpoints of land with barely a handful of pointy pines and skiff-sized cobble beaches. Southeast Alaska is, it seems, as much water as land, a land of islands.

Kind of like the Apostles.

It may seem strange to be thinking about the Apostle Islands while drifting in Alaskan waters, but there is a kinship here, a kind of sisterhood of islands. And, too, I think sometimes things get clearer from a distance, even landscapes.

Many of our greatest writers did not write about the landscapes they are most famous for while in those landscapes - Hemingway’s classic Upper Michigan story Big Two-Hearted River was written in a Paris cafe. Willa Cather penned her books about the Nebraska plains ensconced in Cherry Valley, New York. That these authors could so clearly and convincingly paint their landscapes in words from such a distance is more than a measure of their creative genius. It is also, I believe, a truth that the lens of distance can bring a land into clearer focus for the mind and the imagination.

From a distance, the scruff of the mundane falls away leaving only the crisp, shining truth behind. We can feel the mist rising off the back of the Big Two-Hearted River, hear the pounding of the hooves of the antelope in the “running country” of Cather’s Great Plains more clearly, I believe, because of the clarity of distance. The authors were “away” physically but still in their chosen landscape in their hearts.

Time away from a place, too, can be an opportunity to take stock, to tally what has been gathered from that place already and rearrange it in your head and heart.

And so, we are pulling crab pots adorned with an array of sea life - sunflower sea stars and urchins and brittle stars, drifting among ribbons of fog and glaciers, and laughing out loud at the grumbling stomach bellows and belches of Stellar sea lions, a barrel-full-of-rocks-rolling-downhill kind of sound as a pod of the huge creatures lounge like furred couches on the seaside rocks.

And we are watching the dorsal fins of a pod of Orcas slice the sunlit waters like drawn daggers.

And, I am thinking about the beauty and meaning of place. Surrounded by all this life and beauty as the Edisto weaves in and out, stringing small islands like blue-green beads on the white thread of its wake, it is difficult at times not to wonder what a life dedicated to this place would look like. Islands and wilderness and water. Stories and beauty and power. In a moment of sunshine, watching the sycthing of the waters by the orca pod, I feel a kind of an ache come over me, and I think to myself “I could almost live here.”

Almost.

But even deeper down, I know I never will. For all of the kinship and connection here, there is an unbridgeable distance as well. Despite the lighthouses and hermit stories and shipwreck tales, the stories here are mostly silent to me, an outsider without the time-earned local knowledge that would bring them to life. I will never know these islands like I know the Apostles. There are too many islands in a world sequined with islands to come to know them all - each one worthy of a lifetime of attention and care. We must make a choice.

There is a sacredness in the choosing. One of the most cherished books I carry aboard the Little Dipper is a signed copy of The Island Within by my friend Richard K. Nelson, someone who, late in his life, chose a small Alaskan island not far from here to focus his life around. “[T]he particular place I’d chosen,” Nelson writes in the book, “was less important than the fact that I’d chosen a place and focused my life around it.”

Acknowledging both the slow ache of the road not taken and the satisfactions inherent in choosing, is one way that travel to a landscape far away can make you feel closer to home. Distant and exotic travel is often portrayed as the key to opening your mind to the world, and it can. But, I think to myself as the Edisto powers up to head up the channel for the boat landing, with a little reflection, it can also be the key to understanding the beauty and power of home.

And so we must choose: not whether we cease to travel but where we will come back to and call home. I choose the Apostle Islands.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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It seems a bit early in the morning to be a contrarian, but I have just never bought into the central premise of that famous line in William Wordsworth’s romantic 1807 poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills.”

Forget for a moment the anthropomorphism inherent in thinking that clouds can feel anything. Why, even if it could experience emotions, would a cloud be lonely floating “high o’re vales and hills” or even out over Oak Island this morning?

One of the most common questions I get when I speak about my trips alone into the Islands aboard the Little Dipper is “Do you ever get lonely?” Sure, there are moments when something so beautiful unfolds that I ache to share it with friends or family and I wish I could turn to someone I love and see the look on their face as the world peels back the blinds and let’s us peer into the true heart of it all. But there is nothing inherently evil in solitude. Enjoying time alone is not a sickness. In the proper measure, time alone can be fulfilling, restful, even help us draw clearer boundaries around the terrain of the self, defining who we are in this world. Wandering alone can be a contented feeling, even happy, not just a “lonely” one. Even Wordsworth himself later in the poem admits “the bliss of solitude.”

Maybe that cloud is blissing out, figuring out who it is, how it fits in to the shape of the sky around it. Maybe it just needs some time away from the crowded cloudbanks of a summer day.

As the cloud drifts out over the tip of Oak Island and beyond, I fire up the Little Dipper and begin at first to follow along in its “wandering” — a small cloud and a small boat together in the sky blue waters of this large lake. But then, I don’t. I turn away, granting the cloud its solitude and head off in my own direction to wander as happy, or contented, or just about anything other than “lonely” as a cloud” for the rest of this quiet morning.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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It is almost as if the Little Dipper is steering itself.

Early May. Early morning, the bow of the boat eases its way beyond the safety of the breakwall and almost instinctively turns north for one of the first runs of the season. Me, I have no particular destination in mind this morning, a run “just to work out the kinks” I tell myself. The Little Dipper however, seems to have other ideas and to know exactly where she’s heading. We angle towards the West Channel and power up. Apparently I’m just along for the ride.

Not far up the channel, I realize where we are heading: Quiet Cove on Oak Island.

That is not its official name. I doubt it has one, not down on any maps anyway, but then, to quote Melville, “the true places never are.” Quiet Cove is just what I call it - a pocket-sized grotto in the sandstone cliffs on the northeastern edge of Oak Island. In the years I have been exploring the islands in the Little Dipper it has become something of a touchstone, a place I return to again and again, almost instinctively, as if drawn by something as real and as invisible as what draws the needle of a compass.

First, there is the soft, shallow, and sandy bottom which makes it perhaps the easiest anchorage in the islands for a small boat like this. It is where I came early in my navigation of the learning curve of the Little Dipper to practice setting the Danforth anchor, playing with different sets in different winds. It is here that I first began to feel confident that I was biting the anchor strongly enough to be able to don my wetsuit and swim away from the boat feeling secure that it was safe in the protective arms of Quiet Cove while I went off and explored.

That freedom first brought me into the nearby caves to begin something I had long dreamed of: photographing sunrise through the archways, portraits of water, rock, and light, framing the morning in stone, a feeling of peering into the very heart of these islands.

Then there is this: one day, after working a set of photographs from the caves, I slipped back into the water expecting to swim west back towards the boat, for some reason I swam to the east towards a non-descript crack just then catching the day’s first light.

It didn’t look like much, the water was cold. I wanted the hot coffee waiting on the boat, but I was once again drawn by unknown forces, and waded through the narrow passage only as wide as my outstretched hands expecting a dead-end at any moment.

Instead, it led straight into wonder.

The passageway opened to a much bigger, more complex cave lit by the morning sun. Reflections, like silent echoes of light, danced on every wall. It was like being inside of an emerald: the Emerald Cave. I was so enthralled I hardly picked up my camera. The proper response to astonishment sometimes is silence. I hadn’t come to be astonished, of course, you never do, but I was willing. “What I want in my life,” said the poet Mary Oliver, “is to be willing to be dazzled.” Alone in that cave the first time, shivering perhaps with the cold, I let myself be dazzled.

Those kinds of memories — soft anchorages, watching the sunlight knit the morning from deep in a cave, stumbling into the wonders of such unknown beauty — are all laid down now like layers deep in my mind when I think of this place. Geologists measure time in the layers of rock - the accretion of sand grains in the slow rain of centuries. The kinds of memories I now associate with a place like Quiet Cove gather almost as slowly, and almost as deeply.

In that way, the memories are a measuring stick in the laying down of a kind of bedrock of knowing a place. I know where the anchor will hold the best, what time of year the light sinks deepest into the caves at sunrise, and where to find the fireweed counting the progress of the season like slow-fused fireworks.

When I began my search for a deeper understanding of these islands, I had no idea what measuring sticks would mark the journey but the layers of memory laid down in a place like Quiet Cove may be among them, each layer speaking not just with the beauty of the now, but also with the richness of then. No wonder I would end up here instinctively on one of the first runs of this new boating season. It is a place I feel at home. It is, “familiar,” a word that shares the same root as the word “family.”

I spin the boat to slowly tour the art gallery of the sandstone walls. At one wall, I see again a panel of abstract shapes on a cliff face. Since I first saw those figures years ago, I have tried to decide what they look like, a bit meancing, apparitions, ghostly figures in the slow dance of time. Today, however, they feel more friendly, more familiar, almost like family.

I am half-tempted to wave hello as I drift slowly by.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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I wasn’t expecting stars.

All that morning I had been restless, unsure of where to go, what to do, feeling like I was missing something. Where were the new caves I should be photographing, the undiscovered sea stacks? Where were the bear tracks in the bog? Finally, I just turned the bow of the Little Dipper towards a nameless beach, plunked the anchor and splashed ashore expecting nothing more than a walk in the sand to unwind the tangled spool of the morning.

As soon as I stepped ashore though, I noticed something: there were stars in the stones. With the sun at just the right angle, the light was dancing in constellations across the dark rocks at the edge of the water. Each stone, splashed by the small waves, shone like its own little sun. I got down on my knees, then on my belly, to get my eye as close to the sand as a beach stone. I let myself get lost in that small universe of light and stone.

Slowly, I noticed the pressure of the “next big thing” slipping away. Funny how we call the big things in our lives “milestones,” moments marked with monoliths to honor important life achievements. But not every day needs to be a milestone. Perhaps there is room for some days marked with smaller stones, sun-dappled and wave-splashed, looking for all the world like tiny stars and small enough to slip into a front pocket.

Soon, the angle of the sun shifted and the lights went out. The show was over. I got up, brushed the sand off my knees, and smiled, thinking of a line from Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan who wrote, “I do not think with words, but with small stones.”

All the way home in the Little Dipper, thinking only thoughts as small as a morning and as large as the universe, two small stones clicked quietly in my hand.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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To my eyes, it was dark. After hours of making photographs deep in the Apostle Islands Ice Caves, night had fallen, deep shadows rising along with the cold. I was about to put the camera away and begin the long walk back to the car when something my friend and National Geographic photographer Michael Melford once said came back to me: “Don’t stop shooting until your shots stop turning out.” I clicked the shutter one more time.

Technically, it may not be my best photograph but it is one that taught me an important lesson and led me to carry a camera aboard the Little Dipper: just as there are sounds we cannot hear, there is light we cannot see with only our eyes.

From that moment on, what has interested me about the art of photography is not the way the camera captures what the human eye can already see, but how a camera enables us to see what the eye cannot.

The human eye processes light at about 1/60th of a second. The camera can slow things down and turn the flow of a waterfall silky.

Or the bursting waves hitting a sea cave to curls of mist

Or the beating wings of a passing gull into see-through veils of gossamer.

A camera can also speed things up well beyond the capability of human eyes turning what would be, to us, just a blur, into a glimpse at the sharp focus and details that happen too quickly for our eyes to see, like the drops of a raging waterall,

the split second flowering of a breaking wave,

or a flash of lightning over Sand Island.

The human eye is a miracle, a wonder of mind and body that together paint the picture we call the world around us. A camera is an intricate piece of technology awaiting our instructions. The two do not “see” things the same way.

The difference is most clear when watching something like the northern lights. The question most often asked by non-photographers about the aurora is: “Did it look like that to the naked eye?” The answer, of course, is “no” and it shouldn’t. A camera, just as a paintbrush, need not only be a tool to replicate what can already be seen by the human eye. It is an aid for seeing beyond the obvious and into what can only be seen by the human soul.

Nor does a camera necessarily “distance” us from nature. Does a telescope distance an astronomer from the stars? Do binoculars distance a birder from the birds? Each is a tool for helping us see beyond the physical limits of our own eyes, just as the reading glasses some of us are using to make the letters and images of this essay more clear. Used correctly, a camera can bring us closer, make us more intimate with the stunning details of nature unseen and unseeable by the naked eye.

The act of carrying a camera, too, slows me down. It is a license to look, making it more likely that I will notice the reflection of birch trees in still water,

or the graceful lines of new ice on a quiet bay.

A camera is the perfect tool to carry aboard the Little Dipper in my search for the true heart of these islands. It teaches me to see beyond the limits of my own vision, causes me to slow down, look more closely, look again. And with that extended vision, that deepened patience, comes, at times, a deeper appreciation for, and understanding of, this place. There is more to the islands than meets the eye. Some of it, meets the camera, a lesson I learned that day in the back of the Ice Caves when I took one more photograph, one more look, and discovered a glimmer of the light we cannot see.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted).

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Sometimes, the truth just jumps right up and bites you. Just ask Ed Lane.

Ed Lane was the longest tenured keeper at a single light in the history of the Apostle Islands, serving at Michigan Island Light from 1902-1938. All those years on a remote, wild island in Lake Superior, meant that Lane had seen a lot of things in his time. Still what happened that day in 1916 was something even he could never have predicted.

Keeper Lane was used to seeing wildlife on the island. Bears occasionally rummaged nearby for food. Coyotes could sometimes be heard howling on still nights. But that day in 1916, he noticed what he called a “lynx” prowling the grounds of the lighthouse. Lane watched the animal boldly sneaking up very close to the open back door of the living quarters. Without a weapon handy, he grabbed a large stick and prepared to defend himself. The animal leapt at him, snarling, scratching, and clawing.

Lane managed to pull himself free, ran to the house, grabbed his gun, and fired, killing the animal instantly. Not one to waste anything, the keeper skinned the creature and took the pelt to City Hall on his next trip to town receiving a bounty of $6 from the County Clerk. The story of the battle of man versus cat (the cat loses) spread rapidly and quickly attracted an enterprising reporter. “Kills Lynx After Fight” was published in the Belvidere Daily Republican on March 21, 1916.

Now, although the Apostle Islands are situated at the “potential southern range limit of Lynx canadensis” or the lynx, there has never been, according to the National Park Service, a verified sighting in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

Ed Lane of Michigan Island may, however, beg to differ.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted)

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I wake with a start, sitting straight up in bed. In the dark, the claws of an awful dream are still screeching down the chalkboard of my sleep-rattled mind. For long minutes, I try to catch my breath, untangling myself from the strands of what is real and what is not.

In the dream, a nightmare really, I had never found a boat.

There was a time, a very long time, when my three a.m. dread of never finding a boat to explore the islands brought on a kind of an ache, a boatless fever felt from head to toe in a slow, persistent pressure. It was my whole body reacting to the potential of failing to ever find the right craft to carry my dreams, leaving my feet, and the soul attached to them, stuck in the mainland mud for another boating season, another year, another lifetime.

I would pester my boated friends with questions, sending them links at all hours to some rust-bucket hulk whose main attractive feature was its “for sale” sign and asking them “how about this one?” in a voice that likely cracked with desperation. They were very patient. My dreams, however, were not.

On good nights, I would lie in bed and dream of slipping the lines, feeling that first moment of free floating, the boat beneath me some amorphous conjecture of years of boat dreams backing out of the slip, its bow clearing the breakwall, that first flush of power as you ease the throttle up, the hum of the engine, the sound, like ripping cloth, of the bow slicing the water as you come up on plane, islands ticking by like the dot-dash of Morse code and you steer for the horizon that is nothing but blue and blue and blue.

On other nights, it would all turn: the lines would not uncleat, tangling in some Gordian knot of never. The engine would not start. The anchor would not raise. It would never happen. I was never going to find a boat and that was all there was to it. Land-locked and longing was all I had to look forward to.

But sometimes, things can change in a flash.

It is, I suppose, the fickle nature of human dreams that what seems to take years can come together in a split-second of luck. It was a Saturday night, late. Out of desperation, I turned to crowd sourcing, tossing a penny in the wishing well of social media, “I am looking for a boat to use in the islands,” I pleaded into the electronic abyss hoping for an echo. “Does anyone know of a boat for sale?”

Someone did.

A Facebook “friend” I had never met in real life reached out with a timid email. I could almost feel her tentative fingers on the keyboard typing out the words, “I don’t know much about boats but my neighbor told me today he was going to sell his.” At the bottom was a thumbnail picture. “Would this work?”

The picture struck like lightning. That was it. That was the boat. And it wasn’t halfway across the country or halfway to the junkyard. It was in the next town over. Even though it was late, I grabbed the phone.

The voice on the other end seemed tired, skeptical at a call this late on a weekend as if I were calling about an extended warranty on his car or to inquire about his relationship with God, but I pressed on and asked about the boat. “I was just sitting here writing up a ‘For Sale’ sign at my kitchen table,” the voice told me. “Let me save you the trouble,” I responded. “Don’t write up the sign until I can get there.”

“I’m buying your boat.”

By 10am the next day, the Little Dipper was in my driveway.

With its soft slip into my life, the dreams changed. The demons of denial, it seems, had been slayed. Now when it strikes 3 a.m. and the fever comes over me, those dreams come on softer wings. They are not nightmares of the never; they are plans of the possible, dreams of what is to come — slipping the lines, pointing the bow of the Little Dipper towards the horizon, and throttling up. This time, in my dreams and on early morning rides, the Little Dipper comes nicely up on plane. Nothing is going to stop us.

Thank goodness nightmares don’t always come to pass; but I am even more thankful that sometimes, at least, dreams really do come true.

We are headed for the islands.

(photography by Jeff Rennicke unless otherwise noted).

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It’s just water, just light. Yet some mornings it feels like something more, some synergy between these two most basic of the earth’s elements. It feels like there should be music, a symphonic score as the strings of morning light strum the still waters. At times, it is one of the most artistic collaborations in all of nature - the simple dance of water and light. You find yourself wanting to move along with it, to sway with its rhythmic motions. You feel the urge to sing or play an instrument - a flute perhaps with wavering notes of your own breath, or you look for lines of poetry to recite, the script in the cursive waves.

But sometimes, some mornings, the best and proper response is simple silence, and so that is what you take on as your part. You are an audience of one, just sitting on the silenced Little Dipper and watching, your contribution, the grateful and silent applause of your own beating heart.

— Jeff Rennicke(all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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In the dream, I died. It wasn’t like the fade-to-black at the end of an old movie, the sudden snapping off of a light switch, or even Annie Dillard’s “eyeless mask.” It was more like stepping into a painting at the museum - “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh or Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte“ and not being surprised that you did that.

(“The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh 1889, Museum of Modern Art)

The dream descended as I fell asleep on the deck of the Little Dipper on hot day anchored in a quiet cove, a lifejacket for a pillow and the slow sloshing of the waves.

It is not hard to think about death out here in the islands - fish bones like tiny ladders to nowhere in the shallows, insects whose lifespans are measured in hours not years caught in pools of black pond water, a pile of feathers each like a tiny exclamation point where a merlin took a flicker apart on the beach. There are bones in the forest green with moss and age. A black-robed raven flaps overhead and calls just once, a syllable of your name.

I think about death as much as anyone my age I suppose, which is to say a lot. Like most of us, I carry the shadows of loss on my shoulders - parents, grandparents, friends, a brother. Mostly, their memories are lit with the grace of shared time but all things have their shadows. You cannot know life without knowing death. You cannot know death without occasionally feeling the chill of its shadow, even on sunny days.

Maybe it was the chill of a passing cloud that woke me that day, I don’t know, but I shivered as I sat up on the deck, still tangled in my dream. There was none of the white winged, harp-plucking halo kind of thing in that dream of death, more like something seen moving just at the corner of your vision or in slightly slow motion. Look directly at it and it vanishes. It wasn’t cold or scary or lonely. None of that. It was just different. That’s all. Just, different.

“[T]o die is different from what any one / supposed,” Walt Whitman wrote, “and luckier.” I don’t know what death will be like. None of us do. But I do know that as the sun came back out from behind its cloud again, it was like a rebirth. The dream faded, the raven fell silent, the sun warmed my shoulders again. Birds sang. A flicker flicked through the trees. I felt the blood moving in my limbs and the rise and fall of my own breathing. I was alive, adrift on the waters of our short-lived consciousness while the wide blue-green world of life swirled around me. And I felt, there is no other word for it, lucky.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)

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It was a sound I had never heard before on the big lake, and at least for a moment a sound I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to.

May 14th, 5:01am. The maiden voyage of the Little Dipper for the 2026 season. It was a few days later than I usually splash but the boat needed some work before being launched and still was not completely ready. Still, this would be the first run. First runs are always a little nerve-wracking anyway. You need to relearn the muscle memory of running a boat. Things that by mid-season you will be doing smoothly and efficiently are a bit herky-jerky. Knots take longer to untangle. You are tentative and relearning the dance.

On top of that, there was this disconcerting sound of the wind whistling in the hole where the port window used to be, now empty as a missing tooth until I can pick up the replacement I ordered after a crack developed late last season.

So, as beautiful as it was, I was a bit on edge, one reason I like to do first runs alone, and finely tuned to every sight and sound of the morning and the boat.

And then this: a sound like a dump truck dropping marbles.

I was cruising smoothly along the western edge of an island where the water in the bay was as still as dreamless sleep. It was cold (barely 32 degrees) and dark on the light lee side of the island with sunrise still a few minutes away. Suddenly, a sound like the world was cracking around me, horrifying, grating, unimaginably loud in the dark. I throttled down.

It stopped.

I throttled up. It started.

My first thought was mechanical. What catastrophic engine failure could produce a sound straight from the depth of a boater’s hell?

As I sat running through a mental checklist of disasters, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a sparkle in the growing light. Ice. The pack ice of winter was long gone but the night had been so cold, so still that an ultra-thin layer of new morning ice crusted the bay, so thin and so dark that it was nearly invisible on the water but each time the boat moved, the hull made a sound like boots on broken glass.

The sun came up. The black ice caught the first rays and began to sparkle on the water. What had at first seemed like an impending disaster suddenly tranformed into a moment of magic. I was afloat in a bay of diamonds. With the engine off, I could hear each small ripple chattering like wind chimes in the black ice.

I sat mesmerized by it, reminded how often what seems like disaster can turn out to be miraculous. Then, slowly, almost musically in the Little Dipper its hull singing the high notes through the layer of winter’s last song, I moved out of the bay and into the silky, silent waters of the coming summer.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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At just after midnight on the morning of May 12th, there were, according to Birdcast.com, an estimated 791.9 million birds on the wing over the United States, moving north under the cover of darkness and pulling spring with them in their wings. At least that is the way I’ve always envisioned it. It turns out that may not be the right metaphor afterall.

Many years ago, as a young reader I fell in love with Edwin Way Teale’s North With the Spring. In that magical book, the almost supernaturally observant Teale spins the tale of a weaving and winding four-month,17,000 mile journey northward from Florida to the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

With each turn of the page, the cutting edge of springtime moves north with the warblers and weather and wildflowers, creating the illusion of a curtain being slowly drawn off the continent exposing the green-brushed and color-burst art of springtime beneath. Ever since, I have envisioned spring as a kind of unveling, the “curtain” being drawn back by invisible strings tethered to the wings of the passing flocks. And why not, “All things seem possible in May,” Teal writes.

But anyone who lives along the lake knows that spring in the north is not as straight as a line of geese crossing the water. It is more of a “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t” affair. The ice is gone from the lake one day, blows back in the next. Trillium in bloom today and buried in snow tomorrow. Geese, although they are capable of flying at speeds topping 60 miles an hour, faster with a strong tailwind, and could cover more than a thousand miles a day if pressed, don’t fly every day. Instead, they cover those immense distances in leaps and hops, taking extended breaks at long used stop over sites to rest and eat and wait for good flying conditions, sometimes even backtracking in retreat to await the advancing season.

Plant blooms too move northward in a kind of “green wave” rolling at a speed scientists have estimated at 13-16 miles a day, but they too are slowed by cold snaps, late snows, changes in elevation. We feel it ourselves this time of year: zipping a jacket when a cloud covers the sun, pulling it off again when the sun returns moments later.

Two steps up and one step back.

Maybe that is the metaphor in it all, a kind of dance — step up, step back — and not an inexorable straight line march at all. For, as Teale himself writes, “Spring is like life. You never grasp it entire; you touch it here, there; you know it only in parts and fragments.” And life, at least mine, rarely moves in perfectly straight lines. As with life, we remember fragments - crocus pushing through the snow, the half-heard call of geese overhead in the dark, a sudden warming beam of sun on our shoulders - and tend to overlook or forget the cold shadows and wind gusts. Memory is by definition selective.

Yet, for all the fits and starts, the geese do come, the flowers bloom. Spring makes its way north coming a little closer every day. We take in the sweet moments and then put our jackets back on, wait another day or so to launch the boat. And maybe because the season does progress less like the predictable arrival of an automated train and more like a dance, it keeps an air of mystery about itself stopping us from taking its arrival too much for granted. In that way, despite the frustrations inherent in life and the fickleness of the season, few things are as sweet as the perfect spring moment, while it lasts anyway.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)

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There are some moments that simply catch in your throat - a whisper of loneliness in the wind perhaps, an unguarded moment of regret, or maybe an upwelling of gratitude for it all almost too deep to contain between breaths.

It comes most often late in the day, most often in the nameless season between winter and the first hints of spring, times when the beaches are empty but for the hieroglyphics of gull tracks in the sand. The first shadows pooling in the foreground signal the slow slide into evening, that certain slant of light. It is the same light found in Andrew Wyeth’s paintings, certain poems by Tom Sexton, the kind of sepia feeling that lives in the dusty corners of your mind where you keep old songs half-heard on old radios playing from rooms filled with yesterdays. The sun hits just so, illuminating corners that can, most of the time, remain safely in the shadows, raising sometimes prickly questions that have gone not only unanswered but too often unasked.

It passes quickly, but not unnoticed. You shiver, as if from the cold, pull your collar up, and take the first few steps towards whatever it is that lies beyond that slanting, beautiful light.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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I blame the unicorn. Let me explain. Many years ago in a dusty used bookstore with luxuriously creaky hardwood floors, I was searching for a book called The Last Unicorn by Peter. S. Beagle, recommended by a friend. I didn’t find it. I did come up with another book by the same author, I See By My Outfit. I bought it, and with that my view of how language may be shaping or distancing the human relationship with nature began to change.

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It is among my favorite poems, “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses” by Mary Oliver from her 2014 collection “Blue Horses.”

Franz Marc’s Blue Horses

I step into the painting of the four blue horses.
I am not even surprised that I can do this.

One of the horses walks toward me.
His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm
over his blue mane, not holding on, just
commingling.
He allows me my pleasure.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.
I would rather die than explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Now all four horses have come closer,
are bending their faces toward me
as if they have secrets to tell.
I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.
If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what
could they possibly say?

— Mary Oliver

I wasn’t thinking of that poem when I set out today to track down whatever abstract shapes I could find sculpted in the last vestiges of ice still clinging to a few shaded places along the shore. I wasn’t thinking about war, or beauty, the gentle empathy of animals or my own brother who died “a young man” with a bullet in his brain.

Yet here I sit, on the sun-warmed planks of a rotting boardwalk near one of the last ice groundings of the season, tears in my eyes, spring sun slung like the arm of a friend across my shoulders, overcome at the simple, horrible, beautiful, tragic sadness and glory of it all.

The power of poetry.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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Each spring, I am startled anew at the beautiful blue, as if the winter’s ice had numbed the memory of it from my mind. And each spring, as the lake ice breaks up, I am right back to a certain childhood memory, a moment tangled up in blue.

It was a classic mid-1960’s summer road trip to “the lake” in the family station wagon loaded with leaky coolers and beach towels and brightly-colored swim fins. The air would have been laden with the smells of suntan lotion and dog breath, my mother smoking in the front seat. It was my first trip to the “big lake” as my parents called it. Other years we had gone to lakes with names like Winnebago and Echo. In my young mind this would be simply another, slightly larger, version of those. I was wrong.

Along the way, after the tousling with my brothers and sister settled down and the dog relaxed, I fell asleep to the sedating hum of the highway. I must have slept through our arrival somehow because when I finally opened my eyes, I was alone on the sun-warmed vinyl of the backseat, covered in a beach towel. No other cars next to us. Out the front window, a large sand dune rose blocking my view. There was only the soft rasp of waves and the chatter of gulls.

I crawled out and began climbing the dune which seemed immense to my little legs, slipping one step down for every two steps up so that the moment comes back to me in a kind of slow motion. When I finally crested the top, the world changed.

What spread out before me was something I had never imagined – blue-winged horizons farther than my eyes could see or my young mind imagine. A cavalcade of white caps on the water mimicked by the white commas of gulls in the sky. The immensity of it both stunned me and thrilled me. The Big Lake.

I don’t really remember the rest of that day, which surely included burnt hot dogs on the grill, burying each other in the sand, throwing endless sticks for the dog and mother yelling “be careful” each time we stepped towards the water. But I’ll never forget that moment standing alone atop the dune when I first understood in my bones the power and beauty of nature, a memory forever painted in blue.

It is that same blue that I see all these years later on so many of my journeys into the Apostle Islands aboard the Little Dipper. That rich blue of the summer sky; the darker, even richer blue of the big lake.

I know in part of my brain that the color is simply the interplay of wavelengths of light - the atmosphere scattering the sunlight streaming down to earth in all directions, the short (450-495 nm) waves of blue scattered more than longer (620-750 nm) waves of red and white making the sky seem, to our eyes at least, that classic summer blue.

But we don’t see only with our brains and so blue, like many colors, is rich in history and symbolism, letting us see it, too, with our hearts.

A recent study at the University of Maryland confirmed what others have known for decades: the most common “favorite color” in the world is blue. From “Blue Moons” to “Blue Suede Shoes,” we love the color blue. Yet, it is rare in nature, with few natural mineral sources from which to derive that heavenly color. The Egyptians created the first synthetic blue by combining silica, lime, copper, and alkali. Later, in Europe, it was found that blue textile dye could be formulated from a flowering plant known as “woad” although the process was expensive leading to the idea of “royal blue” worn only by nobility and so seen as a symbol of wealth. The lower class was stuck with browns and greens and less costly colors to produce.

Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, “The Virgin in Prayer” (1640–50), oil on canvas (National Gallery, London)

Painters too longed for the perfect blue, grinding up semi-precious stones like lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan to create an “ultramarine blue” (literally “beyond the sea”). Because of its expense, the color was most often used in commissioned works and found in many early religious paintings particularly of the Virgin Mary lending blue the symbolism of purity and holiness.

For all its symbolism of wealth and power and purity, there is a bluer side to blue - the slow ache of distant horizons, the loneliness of the hour just after sunset (what my kids refer to as “twilight blue”), the blue void in the immensity of the universe. That immensity is touchingly depicted in “The Pale Blue Dot” - a photograph of Earth created by the Voyager 1 space probe on February 14, 1990 from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. “Look again at that dot,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his book The Pale Blue Dot, “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

(photograph from the NASA collection)

Yet for all of the unfathomable distances of space and the finery of nobility or famous works of art, it is a simpler memory that comes to mind as I drift like a summer cloud on the Little Dipper these days: a long ago summer moment when a child struggled barefooted to the top of a sand dune and looked out at a world grown bigger than his young mind had ever thought possible.

In that moment, the world grew wings and those wings were blue.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted.

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Mid-April and the ice is still moving on the Bay - pieces drifting like dropped jewels skittering across the floor. It can be a hide-and-seek kind of time for a photographer with ice floes clattering up on one beach this day, that beach the next, tucked in the crook of a bay in the morning, then the wind blowing all of the ice completely out of sight by afternoon. Twist the kaleidoscope and the ice chips fall into place or disappear right before our eyes.

It is always a time of year that reminds me of the fleeting nature of nature, and the beauty of change. “All great art is about transition,” I would often tell my students in my teaching years. Beauty is in the in-between moments, the tension between what is becoming and what is ending. While we as humans tell ourselves that we long for stability, the universe is predicated on change. The only thing that stays the same is that everything changes and sometimes all we can do is make the best of whatever comes our way.

On that note, I often smile staring out at the ice chips bejeweling the bay, or drifting away and remember an exchange between the editors of the rival newspapers that once graced the cities of Ashland and Bayfield. In 1881, the Bayfield Press pointedly jabbed its rival down the bay smugly stating that while Ashland was clogged with ice, Bayfield was ice free. “And what a fix your town will be in,” the editor of the Ashland Press shot back, “no ice for mint juleps and the boys so thirsty.”

The mint julep forecast, I think to myself as the ice blows back in, is looking good this year.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)

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