On the Hard

Sometimes what seems like an ending is simply a beginning in disguise

A little to the starboard. No, not quite right. How about a little to port? Bring the stern back a few feet, and … a few more.

You see it on coffee mugs and t-shirts in sailing stores. It is a staple on greeting cards and an applause line of graduation speeches, that famous quote by John A. Shedd : “A boat is safe in the harbor, but then that is not what boats are built for.” They are not, it seems, built for being backed into pole barns high atop a hill overlooking Lake Superior either. Or at least judging by the maneuvering required with my less-than-stellar directions as we attempt to secure the Little Dipper in its proper place for the winter. Maybe, just maybe, I think to myself as we give one last push before she falls into her appointed spot, maybe she just isn’t ready to be “put on the hard.”

To the boater, the world can be neatly divided into two parts: the water world (lake or sea or river) where the boat beneath you dances as if a beam of light, buoyant and playful and magical, and “the hard,” that awkward, clunky, heavy-footed place where what was once magic becomes inert as a fistful of rocks. To put your boat in the water in the spring is to “splash.” To take it out at the end of the season is to put it “on the hard.” The transition, for boat and boater alike, is as sharp-edge as the language itself.

Boating in the Apostle Islands on a summer day can be anything but hard — the silky blue of the lake with that ripping cloth sound the bow makes on plane in quiet water, the soft sand swirled with lines like fingerprints beneath gunnels, the air as sweet as sips of cool clear water in between.

This summer was a long, cool drink of water — from the June days of blood-red sunrises stained by the smoke of Canadian wildfires …

… to the “ecstasy” of watching northern lights dance through the windshield as the Little Dipper drifted on waters gone an other-worldly green from the relection of the aurora …

… right before the “agony” of hitting a gill net marker buoy in the dark and spinning the prop.

There were wonderful guests who spent time with me on the Little Dipper this summer, people like watercolor artist Dale Whittaker who used the very water of Lake Superior to paint a scene of the cliffs on the eastern edge of Hermit Island …

… to peace activist and old friend John Noltner who travels the country asking others their definitions of peace and what it might take to actualize it in our increasingly polarized world through his project “A Peace of My Mind” …

And of course, there was the bear, “the bear” that chased us off a beach on Oak Island during a family picnic giving us a thrill and a story sure to be told and re-told around dinner tables at family gatherings for years to come.

But all of that is in the wake behind us now. The apples are ripe. The birds are migrating. The fleece jackets of many colors are blooming again after months of being tucked away and nearly forgotten. The boat slips are emptying out leaving me humming that line from “Autumn Fancy” a song sung up at the Big Top Chautauqua, “the boat slips are naked as a poplar tree.”

Something good is coming to an end. It feels a bit like taking down the Christmas tree. But I am not the type to mourn the passing of time as much as a person who is grateful to have had those moments in the first place, and so many others now cast in the amber of memory. I believe in seasons. I believe in both the inevitability and perhaps even the necessity of change. There is a sweetness to the memories when the moments have been well-lived. You might as well try to hold back the waves with just a cupped hand anyway.

Let them come and go when it is time. No, I don’t fear the passing of time. I don’t even fear the gill net buoys in the dark or the sudden snarl of the wind unseen around a point. My real fear if what I call the “nightmare of never” — never drifting under those northern lights miles out on the space black waters, never witnessing the flight of the swans through the fog, never seeing the way the muscles of that black bear rippled like dark currents beneath its fur as it chased us from the beach. Never having those conversations with on-board friends that open horizons in your mind like lifting fog.

Never letting go the lines from the dock and watching the bow of the Little Dipper leave the harbor and almost instinctually turn north as surely as compass needle, that’s the real fear.

It may be safer never leaving the harbor, but somewhere I read (might have been on a coffee mug) that’s not what boats were built for.

Thank you for a great season on the “Little Dipper” blog. The boat may be on the hard now but my quest for the stories, beauty, adventure, and a sense of place in these islands goes on. I will continue to publish essays and photos and stories throughout the winter, tales of the “Little Dipper: A small boat on a big lake on a quest for a sense of place in the Apostle Islands.”

I hope you will stay with me for the journey.

— Jeff Rennicke

(all photography by Jeff Rennicke unless noted)