Tangled in the Mist

GPS may think it has all the answers, but what is the role of mystery in our relationship with the land?

“WhooooWHOOP!” Our guide cups his hands around his mouth and bellows into the fog: “WhoooooWHOOP!” Our pod of five kayaks drifts quietly as our ears strain for the ricochet of his voice off the cliffs, any hint that we are nearing an island.

Nothing. Just the soft shhhhhh of mist against the hood of my rain jacket. Somewhere just ahead, we hope, lie the Apostle Islands.

There should be blonde sand beaches and blueberries, cliffs brushed with the white tips of waves, and pines swaying in the breeze. There should be sailboats cupped to the wind, lighthouses blinking, and fishing boats bobbing on their bow lines. But for now, there is only a curtain of gray. The islands, it seems, have vanished.

“Let’s paddle a few more minutes on this heading and check again,” the guide says, and with a stroke of his paddle disappears into the swirling fog. The rest of us point our kayaks toward the crease in the clouds and follow, paddling deeper into the mist.

It is fitting to see - or not see - the Apostles this way. For centuries, this constellation of islands seemed as much a rumor as reality. Early maps show the islands drifting in and out of existence like phantoms, changing shape and size and number with each redrawing. Twelve, one map would say. Two. Thirteen. Twenty-eight, others insisted.

Some of the confusion rests with the inaccuracies of old mapping techniques, some with the vagaries of memory. But Lake Superior itself may be at least partially to blame. Over 360 miles long, 160 miles wide, Superior is by surface area the largest lake on the planet. On such an expanse, numbering islands can be as difficult as counting clouds. Islands seem to gather and vanish like apparitions in the mist, to float above the water in certain light; to drift with the wind and in the fog.

Then too, the names have changed like autumn leaves — Stockton was Presque Isle, Basswood was once Isle Michele. Cat Island has been called everything from Texas to Hemlock to Shoe. If that weren’t enough, one island really did disappear: Little Steamboat, situated just south of where Eagle Island stands today, and obliterated in the particularly storm-tossed winter of 1890. Gone, completely, beneath the waves.

Today satellite images have nailed the islands in place. Modern GPS is so sensitive it can seemingly measure the size and placement of an island down to the width of a grain of sand on its beaches.

But what may be lost with those gains in accurate mapping? The human mind thrives on mystery. Something lies at the heart of the unknown that is both a motivator for continued exploration and discovery, and adds an extra layer of allure to the world we live in. While there can be arguments made that every corner of every map should be delineated to the greatest extent possible, every animal categorized and counted, every mystery solved, it would, to some, be a poorer world without something left to the imagination.

In his poem “To the Unseeable Animal” poet Wendell Berry writes, “That we do not know you/ is your perfection/and our hope. The darkness/ keeps us near you.”

And so too, perhaps, does a little time in the fog.

“There!” our guide hollers as the spires of a pine pokes its way through the clearing mist. Slowly, an island is materializing before our eyes - tall sandstone cliffs pockmarked by the waves, a dozen herring gulls as white as dabs of paint on a ledge. A cove, a small beach, right where the maps say they should be.

There are hoots and hollers of relief among our group, a clicking of paddles in a kind of kayaking version of “high fives.” I smile too, glad of course that we are safe. Yet, while I wouldn’t mention it out loud to our trip leader, there is a bit of a let-down too, a disappointment that would be difficult to articulate to the map makers. Lost in the fog for a time, there seemed a sharper edge to things, a quickening of the senses whetted by risk. Now, with jigsaw pieces of the map falling neatly back into place, the edges have been rounded a bit, dulled perhaps.

Once we were lost, and now we are found, as the old song goes. But still, as we turn to paddle up the now-fully clear shoreline, I am not entirely sure it is for the better. Even in the information age, there may still a place for being tangled in the mist, at least for a little while.

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

Have you been lost? Use the button below to send me a message and tell me about it.