How Old is the Wind?

What is the true test of time in a place where the rocks are 660 million years old?

I gave myself an early birthday present this year as I near my 65th birthday: the gift of perspective.

It was as calm a morning as I’ve seen in these islands, the kind when the bow of the boat seems to be slicing through molten gold as much as lake water. My friend and fellow photographer Mike DeWitt on his boat the Compromise had visited a sea stack on the north end of Stockton Island a couple weeks ago, and then returned a few days later to find it partially collapsed. The leading edge of it, a kind of diving board of stone weighing many tons, had nose dived into the lake in what must have sounded like thunder.

Before (left) After (right)

All was quiet by the time I nosed the Little Dipper up to the shattered sea stack this week. The waves had subsided but still, seeing the rubble in the water was a reminder that time moves on everywhere, with everything. There is no such thing as unchanging. These islands are more than just postcards, they are, like everywhere else, a ticking clock.

It has long been a dream of mine to see that clock tick in a kind of fast-forward, to sit on a ridge and see the world pass in geologic time — to see mountain ranges ripple and swell out of the solid rock like storm waves, to watch rivers arc across the landscape like bolts of lightning cutting canyons and then moving off to leave them echoing with the emptiness of forgotten sea shells, to sit by and watch a glacier slice a mountain in half.

The earth seems solid beneath our feet. Occasionally something comes along to shake our sense of security — the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska. There are glaciers in Greenland that move so rapidly that dogs bark at them in the dark.

But these we can understand. It is easier to see how the force of a volcano can blow the top off a mountain than it is to understand how the weight of millions of years of snowflakes, or millions of years of waves, can cut an arch.

We can understand a force that can shatter rock but not the patient persistence of a force that can make it bend under its touch. We see natural disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes as oddities, exceptions to the rule, and go back to the safe cocoon of our view that nature is unchanging. It is comforting. And, it is an illusion.

In reality, change in nature is the rule and status quo the exception. A movie of geologic time would be a lesson in that reality, as clearly as the sandstone rubble now awash beneath that Stockton Island sea stack.

Here in the Apostle Islands, a cinematic view of the earth’s history would show you the silver braids of northeastward-flowing streams laying down the sands a billion years ago that would become the Chequamegon and Orienta sandstone, the intermittent sand-flats that would become the Devils Island sandstone. During the Pleistocene, you would see glacial ice of the Vanders Lobe scooping out what would become Glacial Lake Duluth that reached even over the top of what is now Mount Ashwabay. Just under 12,000 years ago when the ice began to melt, you’d begin to see the islands slowly poking their heads out of the receding lake — Oak Island (the highest at 1,081 feet) first, then Bear, Stockton, and others. By 10,500 years ago, most of the islands would be up, appearing as if by magic, the blue cloth of the lake slowly drawn back by the passage of time.

Of course, our lives are lived on too short of a scale to see the earth as anything but a snapshot. But if we could, even for an instant, glimpse the world on a geologic time scale our sense of place would be forever shaken. We would never see a mountain, or a wildflower, in quite the same way again. Nor, I would guess, ourselves.

I am thinking about time a lot these days both because of the sea stack collapse and because this week marks my 65th birthday, and as Aldo Leopold once said, “Man brings all things to the test of himself.”

In the “test” of myself against these islands, my own six and a half decades don’t stand up so well. The sandstone cliffs I drift by are 660 million years old. There is archeological evidence placing human activity in places like the northwest side of Presque Isle at 5,270 to 4,860 years before present. I think of the towering old growth that still exists in pockets on Devils, Raspberry, and Outer Island where a single hemlock measures 44 inches in diameter at breast height and is estimated to be over 400 years old.

It would be good to spend a birthday walking among those old trees, to walk the edge of Anderson Point where the glaciers left claw marks in the rock 15,000 years ago, to see the flicker of the Michigan Island Light first lit 101 years before I was born. It would be a good day to swim in Lake Superior where a single drop of water takes 191 years to find its way to the St. Mary’s River outlet, to ask yourself, for instance, how old is the wind?

It would be good too to remember the shooting-star lifetimes of other creatures you see among the islands — the chickadee (two-to-three years) whose population can be cut by as much as 75% by a single prolonged winter cold snap, the warblers (nine years) whose fledgling has only about a 25% chance of making it to its first birthday, and knowing that the dragonfly (seven to fifty-six days) just now buzzing by your head will not live beyond the first frost.

To a butterfly (two to four weeks) or a bluejay (seven years), we humans must seem ancient. Still, it is difficult on these September mornings not to think of time and its passage, to test yourself against the things around you and signs of the changing seasons — the tips of leaves gone orange and yellow, flocks of geese (10 to 20 years) beginning to ponder their migration south, bears (twenty to thirty years) fattening up on the late-season blueberries to lay on winter fat for hibernation. If the average lifespan of a human male (72 years) were condensed to a single year, I would be in late October. There are reminders of my own mortality in every flapping wingbeat, in every colored leaf, every cut of that ancient autumn wind.

Yet, it is not regret I feel in that wind. I look back with the satisfaction of days well spent, not ahead in panic about what I’ve yet to do. I am not a bucket-list kind of person. I resist the temptation to reduce existence to a kind of experiential to-do list. But in much the same way that autumn winds well up in some an urgency to get the wood up quick and can the last of the summer’s harvest, my own sense of passing time has quickened in me my desire to sink my heart into this one place as deeply as I can with the time I have left. I want to know these islands. I want to know how old the rock is, how many seasons the loons live (twenty to thirty years), how deep the roots of the white pines go (+400 years), and how the lightning flash of my own life fits into it all.

That thought reminds me of a quote I have carried for decades in my wallet. Just before I start up the Little Dipper again and head back for the dock, I dig my wallet out of the bottom of my boat bag and find that slip of paper, as brittle as moth wings.

“World, I am your slow guest, one of the common things that moves in the sun and has close reliable friends in the earth, in the air, in the rock.” — William Stafford.

That is it. That is all I want in the “test” of myself against this landscape with any of the years I may have left, how ever long I might be in these islands.

I simply want to feel like I am home, among my “close reliable” friends. And what a gift that would be.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by Jeff Rennicke unless noted)

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Before (left) After (right)