How Old is the Wind?

An Apostle Islands Postcard

Yesterday was my 66th birthday and birthdays are a good time to stop and take stock, to test yourself and where you are in your life. I did that on board the Little Dipper surrounded by the Apostle Islands.

In the test of myself against these islands, my own six decades and six years 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.

Some things around me live shooting star lives by comparison — the chickadee (two-to-three years) the dragonfly (seven to fifty-six days) just now buzzing by my head. To a butterfly (two to four weeks) or a blue jay (seven years), we humans must seem ancient. And to some things we must seem ephemeral.

It would be good to spend a birthday walking among 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. All I’ve ever wanted was to be a part of a place, to measure myself in it. And so I drift with the breeze in the Little Dipper and ask how old is the wind?

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

These Apostle Islands postcards every Sunday are an offshoot of the “Little Dipper” blog. Paid subscribers to the blog also receive an original, full-length illustrated essay delivered right to their inbox every Wednesday. Subscribe. Come along for the ride aboard the “Little Dipper.”

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