Beside Still Waters

Beyond the gales and the shipwreck tales, there is another, softer side to Lake Superior, one with a lot fewer exclamation points.

By all accounts, I should be dead, that is if you believe the sensational headlines that scream out the dangers of Lake Superior. Even a cursory survey of early newspaper accounts will leave you amazed that the typesetters didn’t wear out the exclamation points. In nearly every account, the waves are “Monsterous!” and “Nightmarish!” and “Gigantic!” They rise “like mountains!” and crash “like thunder!” these waves born of winds that “howl!” and “bellow!” and “shriek!”

From iconic songs that sing of the “Gales of November” to the usually staid prose of National Geographic which called Lake Superior “no place for amateurs” and “notoriously treacherous,” it is difficult to navigate an account of this lake without encountering the headwinds of hyperbole.

Don’t get me wrong. It is all true. It would be difficult to understate the power inherent in a lake 350 miles long and 160 miles wide, so immense that its outlline is visible from space. Perhaps nowhere else in freshwater on this planet can boaters come up against the gauntlet of wind and waves and cold that can be whipped up by a Lake Superior storm - waves of 28 feet have been recorded, like exclamation points in the silent testimony of the dozen shipwrecks dotting the shoals of these “Unholy Apostles.” The lake truly is “the boss” as longtime commercial fisherman Julian Nelson used to say. And it pays to respect the boss.

I watch the weather closely, pick and choose my boating days carefully, run for a lee at the first sign of trouble. All I am saying is that perhaps from time to time there may be room for another type of headline, one easier on the exclamation points but just as true: “Man goes boating on Lake Superior and doesn’t die.”

Today is one of those days. The lake on this early summer day is as smooth as blue sky, rising and falling gently as a sleeper’s breath. It is so quiet, I can hear the rustle in the wings of the curious gulls that pass overhead and the plunked notes of water dripping somewhere deep in the shadowed caves at the north end of Manitou Island.

For all the symbolism of power and destruction pent up in storm waves, calm waters too have their lessons — peace, and reflection, and calm. There is a serenity surrounding still waters. It is, after all “beside still waters” that believers are led to in the 23rd Psalm. In his famous poem “The Peace of Wild Things” poet Wendell Berry seeks out “the presence of still waters” to regain a needed tranquility and to “rest in the grace of the world.”

That same sense of calm and tranquility draws people to ponds in public parks, fountains in courtyards, and to our national parks. In fact, 72% of Americans say one of the most important reasons for preserving national parks is to provide opportunities to experience natural peace, the kind of natural peace found near calm waters.

Whle they may not make the most sensational headlines, some of my favorite moments aboard the Little Dipper have come on still waters. Like this one:

I was lying flat on my back on the bow of the Little Dipper staring straight up when I drifted beneath some overhanging branches only to find a bald eagle looking straight down at me. There was hardly a breath of wind or waves and time seemed to stretch in our shared stare. We held it so long that we accepted each other’s presence, relaxed, and nearly fell asleep in the sun.

I remember waking to the sound of wingbeats above me sometime later as the eagle lifted off the branch. It circled the boat once as if to confirm that this wasn’t a dream. In flight, a primary feather detatched from its wing, falling like a dark snowflake into the jade green waters right next to the boat. It was so quiet, I could hear the soft splash of the feather as it landed in the water, swirled, glowing in the morning light like its own, feathered exclamation point.

Lake Superior will never be a pasture pond dotted and dashed with lily pads. It is too much for that. Drifting on Lake Superior on a calm day can be like walking in the tracks of a grizzly. Even amidst the momentary calm, something powerful always lurks nearby, you can feel it tingling in the air like distant lightning. Its power and potential danger are never far from your mind, and they shouldn’t be.

But there can be a kind of grace in this lake too, moments when the wind softens and the water calms. That grace is easily overshadowed by the barage of storm-tossed headlines and exclamation points. But it is there, for those with the patience to look beyond the bombasity of the headlines, days that whisper in calm winds and still waters, days punctuated by quieter things, by eagle feathers softly falling from the sky.

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