Blue Goose ~ Day 51

July 21, 2014 ~ Superior, WI to Marquette, MI

I found the Red Mug, a coffee shop slightly below ground level with a bakery upstairs in a solid older building near the downtown. It was already very warm in the bakery but the downstairs was cool and another good local coffee shop with baked goods, sandwiches, soups and salads. Locals almost always occupy one table, discoursing on politics, weather, the markets, the news…Travelers and tourists come for their morning caffeine fix and either stay (like me) woking on a laptop or continue on their journey.

Heading east I made an unplanned decision to tour the Chaquamegon Peninsula and spent most of the day doing exactly that, lingering at The Apostle Islands National Seashore for a couple of hours.

Apostle Islands National Lakeshore - WI

There are 22 islands, and in 1970 all except Madeleine Island were designated a National Seashore. Gaylord Nelson, a former governor and then Senator was instrumental in this grand acquisition. There are still a few in-holdings, which will remain in private hands until the death of the current genration. The land cannot be willed or given away. It becomes federal property, your property and mine, at that time. There are T-shirts stating The Lake is the Boss and it is. Kayaking to the islands is a popular way of getting there, a 2-3 mile trip over open water to the nearest, and everyone is cautioned about the hazards of wind, water and hypothermia. Some of the islands have lighthouses, and in the winter, ice caves form. The peninsula is a broad inelegant jutting of land, which attracted northern Europeans, some of whom tried farming but often turned to fishing instead. There is some logging and now a well-established tourist industry. The town of Bayfield is situated on the hills rising from the shores of the Lake and has gorgeous, grand, old homes, the handsome renovated brownstone Apostle Island Visitor Center, a beautiful Carnegie Library and the usual businesses for tourists. I saw a bare-chested Native American with two long black braids, moving slowly down the sidewalk with an ice-cream cone. There is so much more acknowledgment  of the importance and reality of Native Americans nearly everywhere I visit than I remember from previous visits....books, signage, maps, historical markers….

I watched two separate groups of kayakers prepare to make the trip to Sand Island, both with a young male guide. Off they went in their 5- and 6-kayak flotillas. Some do day trips; some stay and camp a night; some paddle to other islands. There were two Coast Guard boats at the dock and NOAA printouts of the weather and wind conditions for the day. There is always history wherever one goes and here also, and I sometimes will buy book about a specific area but here, even the paperbacks were expensive. The one I really wanted was $35; I didn’t buy it and found a couple less expensive books. It was very warm but pleasant enough, making it easy to just hang out, mostly chatting with the volunteers in the VC and then watching the kayakers prepare and set off.  

Kayakers heading to Sand Island - Apostle Islands National Lakeshore - WI

Just west of Ashland, WI, is the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center situated on property that is contiguous with Whittlesley NWR. It took a while to find out exactly where the boundaries of this little refuge were but eventually, after driving on the roads near the VC, I found the NWR sign, which they all have, at a little road leading to a closed and shuttered Environmental Education Center and a few unfinished trails. It’s a work in progress involving the watersheds of three creeks running into Lake Superior which historically had been dredged and altered. The coaster brook trout, a threatened and endangered species due to habitat degradation (in this case, mostly sedimentation as a result of logging / agriculture) is the “poster species” in these creeks and Whittlesley's mission.

I thought I would sit for an hour here but lasted three minutes and then tried again on a little bridge over one of the creeks but that didn’t work either. Too hot; too many bugs, so I left and continued driving into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where I stopped in Ironwood and settled in a Walmart parking lot at a slight elevation above US2, where breezes kept things tolerable and where I had cheese and crackers and a glass of wine for dinner. I fully intended to stay there for the night but had been texting Deborah and made the decision to get to her lake cottage the next night. Which was why I drove another two hours, staying in Marquette instead. The sun slowly set off my left shoulder, a bright orange-red, discretely defined, perfect circle moving through a light gray haze. 

I used the bathroom in Walmart and noticed a sore on my foot, in addition to intense itching on my knuckles and ankles from deer fly bites…and then the sore area on my foot seemed to be spreading quickly, and I remembered a recent NPR story on a quad amputee who had had group A strep so typically got a little freaked out. I cleaned it, put some antibiotic ointment on and went to sleep but was awakened by wind at 0415 and my foot was worse and I couldn’t sleep and googled group A strep and freaked out some more and wished for daylight and the van was shaking with the wind and grocery carts were rolling around in the parking lot, and....I finally fell back asleep, waking in daylight.