Chaos and Old Night

Some kinds of beauty are soothing; the beauty of Devils Island in January will rip you open and leave you changed

Right from the start I felt off-balance. “Do you want a helmet?” they asked. A helmet? Just what were we expecting to hit that would warrant wearing a helmet? I declined and almost instantly regretted it. Very quickly it became clear that the helmets were not about us hitting anything but for protection against us being hit by the ice-sharpened blades of the winter winds out on the open lake, for that is exactly where we were heading, Lake Superior in the middle of winter, in an open boat. Little did I realize that what we would find there would forever change the way I see these islands.

For many of us, the Apostles are a fair weather destination. Say their names — Stockton, Oak, Sand, Raspberry — and the visions that come to mind are summer postcard images of blue sky, sunlit sea caves, singing sand beaches, pine-framed campsites of green boughs and starlight, one more round of s’mores.

This was nothing like that. It was January 7th, the white heart of winter, and we were heading 25 miles out to Devils Island, the northernmost tip of the spear in Apostle Islands, in an open boat, to peer into the abyss.

The idea was the brainchild of two friends who don’t necessarily want their names in a blogpost. They are experienced on the big lake, winter and summer. They know it. They love it. And, they respect it. Together they probably know the winter islands and the vagaries of lake ice as well as anyone out there, combining for a string of adventures that have brought them to the edge several times, shown them a side of these islands that few others have ever seen.

I wanted to see that side for myself.

To know a place, to really understand it, you have to seek out more than just its postcard close-up moments. You need to see it from all angles, the rough side, its unguarded raw edge. But those views come with a risk. Things get real very quickly at the edges. Edges crumble and shift beneath your feet. And the risk is not just physical: you can go to the edge, even step back, but you will not come back unchanged.

It had been a rare winter - open water deep into the season between the islands with only the calmest of bays fringed over with skim ice. We chopped through a few inches of ice to get the boat into the water at the Blackhawk Landing, shoving ice plates out of the way like panes of floating window glass with the backwash of the outboard. Slowly, we worked our way to out open water. No more ice. Only the space-black 37 degree waters of the open lake. Not another person, no other boat on the water, for more miles than we cared to count. We were alone.

Each leg of the journey was its own dance, moving slowly, stopping before each crossing to discuss whether we should go further, considering the weather, fuel, being certain were all willing to take the risk to the next level, and the next — Basswood to Hermit to Stockton to Cat, each one further out, closer to the edge, like walking on thinner and thinner ice with each step over the bottomless black water.

And then we were there, at the last land before the blue-black deep space emptiness of the open lake, the edge: Devils Island in the winter.

We cut the engine and drifted in a kind of silent awe. Ice encased the cliffside trees in ghostly shrouds of white. Unfathomable tons of ice weighing down trees that slumped over as if frozen mid-scream.

Each of us had been there dozens of times before, of course, but this was different. Gone was the soft blue of summer boat rides, the velvety warm breezes. This was like being on another planet. Everything I thought I knew about the islands skittered away like snowflakes in the gale. We all felt it, I think, moving in silence, hardly talking, and then only in whispers barely audible above the waves.

This was no postcard. This was the raw edge – the bedrock truth of this place. I felt the cut of the cold through my layers, heard the tick of ice shards against my hood like bony fingers tapping my shoulder and saying, “you don’t belong here” in a voice like the wind.

Two of us went ashore to photograph. The third idled the boat keeping just off shore, not willing to risk tying up to this icy edge.

I scrabbled among the fangs of icicles, the picks of my ice crampons (the claws upon my boots) a tentative hold to firm ground. There was a beauty here, to be sure, but it was the kind of beauty that rips you apart and makes you feel exposed and untethered leaving you with a tentative hold on courage. Fear crawls up the back of your throat, this far out on the edge.

Somewhere in the midst of near panic, I found myself thinking of one of the strangest moments in all of the writings of Henry David Thoreau, not from his famous book Walden but from a lesser known work called The Maine Woods. It is a perplexing, out-of-character passage for the normally staid Thoreau, written as he found himself lost, alone, and shrouded in fog near the summit of Mount Katahdin, the tallest peak in Maine. You can almost hear the panic rising in his throat:

“… this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature … something savage and awful though beautiful. This was Earth made out of Chaos and Old Night., Matter, vast, terrific,--not the Mother Earth that we have heard of…

There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, --to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.

I stand in awe of my body. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one--but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

That day, I glimpsed something darker in the islands and perhaps truer than anything I’d seen in all my summertime trips. I saw in Devils Island that same “Chaos and Old Night" that had spooked Thoreau. We had stepped to the edge and peered over but for all the beauty and the thrill of it, we did not belong here. I could feel it in my bones. A line had been crossed. I was secretly glad when the boat came back into view to pluck us off the icy rocks. Once back in the boat, we took one more look around to memorize the moment knowing how unlikely it was that we would ever be back here in these conditions again, and began the cold, silent journey back towards warmth and light and home. But we did not leave unchanged.

In 1757 Edmund Burke introduced the concept of the Sublime into western nature appreciation with his treatise Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. That work, according to one historian, “formally expressed the idea that terror and horror in regard to nature stemmed from exaltation, awe and delight rather than from dread and loathing, dispelling the notion that beauty in nature was seen only in the comfortable, fruitful, and well-ordered. Vast, chaotic scenery could also please.” What we saw on Devils Island certainly fits that definition but it was more than that for me, not just what I saw but how it has changed me.

That day on Devils Island I saw clearly a sharp-edged truth I had never seen before: some beauty soothes, some beauty rips you open and changes you. So many of the iconic landscapes we call beautiful, even those we would deem “soothing,” have beneath them a shadow. They are sculpted of the same kind of power we glimpsed that day on Devils Island, the kind of power that is nearly unfathomable to us as humans. The sea caves we paddle have been clawed out of solid rock by the same freeze-and-thaw cycle, the same ice chisels and pounding waves we experienced on Devils Island. The singing sand that seems so soft beneath our feet as we walk barefoot on a curve of summer beach is the bones of boulders ground nearly to dust by that power. It is all a beauty born of that “Matter, vast and terrific.” That is what had so rattled Thoreau on Mount Katahdin. We felt it too lurking in the frozen heart of Devils Island.

And now, several years later, I still see its shadow even on the sunniest of Island days, hear it in the softest lapping of waves, the clatter of an unexpected rock falling back in the throat of a sea cave. It is all “something savage and awful though beautiful.” All beauty has that edge, that reminder of the powers that lurk beneath and can set our minds so quickly spinning. “Contact! Contact! Who are we! Where are we?” I see that shadow more clearly now, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, and every time I see it, I shiver.

— Jeff Rennicke

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