Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit


June 15 [Carp River to Pictured Rocks]

June 15

It was cold and windy again, although the trees were doing a pretty good job of keeping most of the wind up and away, but I could see them swaying around and hear them creaking.

Aric must have woken up in the night because he'd put clothes back on, and even so he was kind of burrowed under the covers.

If I was a unicorn, I could have started a fire so that he'd have something to warm up to, but the best I could do was stack the wood, and he'd be able to do that better than me anyway. So I pulled the covers all the way up instead and snuggled against him.

He put his arm around me and pulled me in a little bit. If it was this chilly and windy in June, they must have been freezing in the back of Winston on Spring Break. No wonder he'd said that he had to snuggle with Angela and David.

When he came out from under the covers, he peered out the window at the overcast sky and said that it was perfect Upper Peninsula weather. Then he kissed me and said that he was going to get a fire started and make breakfast for us, and he opened the tailgate and got out of Winston.

I helped him by getting the breakfast supplies and the metal grate that he had that went over the fire, then he had me watch the fire while he went off to pee but maybe he didn't trust me with fire, because he didn't go any further than the edge of our campsite.

I reminded him not to face upwind, or he'd be sorry.

We had oatmeal and coffee again. Aric said that was the only easy thing to cook for breakfast, and it didn't make any dishes. I didn't mind; it was nice to have a routine to start the day.

He said we were going to go north today, and we were going to stop somewhere very special for lunch, but first we would see Tahquamenon Falls.

Aric started Winston before he put out the fire, because he wanted to give it time to warm up a little bit. And then he used the rest of our water to put out the fire, but was smart enough to stop by the water faucet and refill the jug on our way out of the park.

We went north through lots of woods, and there were little side-trails that weren't big enough for a car that had yellow diamond signs with a picture of a person on a wedge-shaped thing. Aric said that was a snowmobile, and in the wintertime there was so much snow that it was the only way to travel.

There weren't a lot of other cars at all. Every now and then we'd pass one going the other direction, and there were occasionally houses and stores but for the most part it was just forest.

He said that was the great thing about the UP, that it was mostly scenery.

We kept going north until we got to a town with the strange name of Dollar Settlement, and then he turned west. Once we were out of town, we could see Lake Superior on the right side of Winston, and I kept a watch at it while we were going through the trees.

He stopped at a parking lot which overlooked the lake and I asked if I could fly down to it, and he said that I could. He told me we were in national park land, and that as far as he knew it was all open to the public, especially if I didn't touch the ground.

I said that I wouldn't, and I got up on the stone fence and jumped off, letting the wind give me a bit of lift before I flew down just above the treetops. It was a little ways down to the lake, and the wind was really gusting, and kept catching me off-guard. I'd gotten out of practice being on Earth and not up in the sky all the time, so it was a kind of wobbly flight down to the water.

I kept my tail to the wind, because the gusts kept flinging sand in my face, and stood on the shore and looked at the angry grey water roaring in. We might have been at home in stormclouds, but the sea was a different matter, and even on a ship the size of the Roger Blough, I wasn't sure that I'd feel safe.

I thought that since I was down here already I ought to get my hooves wet, although it didn't work out quite like I'd planned and I wound up getting most of me wet when a breaker caught me and almost knocked me off my legs. I think if I'd had my radio, I would have lost it right then.

I got out of the way by the time the next one came in, and shook myself off on the beach, then took flight again and nearly did a tumble when another gust lifted my right wing. But once I had a little bit of speed it was alright, and I actually used the wind to gain altitude, which made the flight back up the bluff really easy.

Aric was standing at the edge with his pocket telephone, taking a movie, and when I landed he put it down and asked me why I was all wet.

I thought he was being silly, but then I realized when I looked back down that you couldn't see the little beach I'd found from here, and so I told him that I'd been hit by a wave.

When we got back in Winston, he said that the bay we were looking at was called Whitefish Bay, and it was where the Edmund Fitzgerald was trying to get but she never made it.

The road eventually went inland, and then it ended and he went north for a while, until we crossed a river and came to a park called Tahquamenon Falls.

Aric told me that he'd never approached them from this end before, but he was sure that there would be signs that told us where they were. Then he asked if I'd noticed the color of the river as we went over, and I hadn't because I'd been able to see Lake Superior out the right side and I'd been looking at that.

He told me that it was tea-colored because of all the tannin that was in it, which came from all the trees. I wanted to know if it tasted like tea, and he said that he didn't think it would, but he'd never tried to drink the water from it.

It took a long time to get to the park, and Aric had to look at a map to figure out how to get there. The road which he'd thought would lead all the way to the park didn't, and we had to go a ways around. He felt kind of bad about that, but I didn't mind.

It had started to rain a little bit when we finally got to the parking lot, and he said that he hoped it wouldn't get much heavier. I opened my door and flew up a little bit so that I could get a decent look at the clouds to the west and then told him that it didn't look like it was going to for a while. It was the best I could do without flying up high enough to get a good feel for the sky, and I knew that just because I'd gotten fairly familiar with Kalamazoo weather, up here it might be totally different.

Aric decided it was worth taking the risk, so we went along a path through the woods and I could hear the roar of the waterfall long before I first saw it.

The river was down in a valley below us, and there was an observation area where we could look upriver at the falls. What was really weird about them was that they weren't a consistent brown color all the way across, but kind of streaky, so some places the water was almost a pure white and other places it was dark brown. Aric didn't know why that was, either, but he guessed that maybe the depth of the water where it went over the edge made a difference, or else it wasn't evenly mixed.

I wanted to know if I could fly over them, too, and Aric crouched down so that he could look me in the eye and said that if I did I would have to be careful, because the river current would be very strong and there would be a lot of undertow at the base of the falls.

I said I'd make sure to be safe, then I kissed him for good luck and went off the edge.

It was a little trickier flying out to the falls, because there were a lot of trees in the way, and since the land was falling away from me, I was going up through the canopy. But trees aren't solid, so as long as you take your time and pick a good path, you can get through.

I made a beeline for the falls when I was clear, because I thought that Aric probably had lost sight of me and was worrying. And I did consider toying with him and seeing how close I could get, but it would be really mean to make him worry like that, so I kept a good distance away from them, crossing over the lower part of the river first, and then circling away from the falls and up so that I could go over the top of them.

I saw another observation platform on the topside, and rather than try and pick my way back through the trees, I landed there because it was pretty open to the river, and hoofed it back towards the observation point where he'd been, and I guess he must have seen me land, 'cause he'd headed in my direction.

After we'd left the park, we drove through the woods some more until we came to a town called Paradise, and we stopped at a little restaurant and Aric didn't even look at his menu, he just ordered a cheeseburger.

All I got was french fries and salad, and I was happy with that but Aric insisted that I have the tiniest little bite of his burger because he said it was important, but he wouldn't tell me why. So I did, and it was kind of oily and greasy and salty and I don't think I want to try it again.

It had started to rain a little bit more heavily and we rushed out to Winston and drove up to the Whitefish Point Shipwreck Museum and Lighthouse.

The whole thing had once been a lighthouse and lifesaving station, and you could go into all the different buildings. The lighthouse itself was furnished like it would have been back when it was built, and almost everything looked like the stuff I'd seen in earth pony houses, except it was a little bit bigger.

There was another building that was a boathouse, and it had a lifesaving boat inside of it, and displays on the wall that explained how when the station was built the men would walk the beach looking for ships that were aground. Each station would send men out, and they'd meet on the beach and change tokens to prove that they'd patrolled, and if they found a ship in distress they'd go back to the station and launch their boat and row out to help.

Inside the shipwreck building, there were models and pictures of some of the ships that had been lost near Whitefish Point, and it also had big glass lenses from lighthouses. They were called Fresnel lenses, and Aric explained how they worked: they were like a regular curved lens, but they'd been pushed down in rings, which made them a lot thinner and lighter. He said that you couldn't focus a lens like that as well as other designs, but that it didn't really matter for a lighthouse, because the idea was to shine the beam as far as you could.

And he said that even so, they were so heavy that sometimes they were floated on a pool of mercury so that they could spin.

He knew about some of the shipwrecks, and he pointed me to the model and pictures of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which had been the last major shipwreck on the Great Lakes. He said that she sank without a trace and that none of the crew had survived and nobody knew what had happened. There were a lot of theories, but that divers hadn't found any conclusive evidence for any of the theories on the wreck.

I was curious how big it had been, if it was the same size as the other freighters we'd seen, and he said that it was bigger and newer than the Michipicoten but smaller than the Roger Blough.

It was hard to imagine how a ship that big could just vanish. And he said that the lifeboats survived, sort of, but everyone thought that they'd never been launched, but torn free as the ship sank.

Then we went down to the beach, and the wind had come up even more and the rain was blowing diagonally, and I thought about how in weather worse than this, men had rushed down to the water with a rowboat in order to try and save the crew of a ship that had run aground. At least we could fly above it.

Aric said that he'd originally planned to go back south and along the Lake Michigan shoreline, but that it would probably be overcast and rainy down there, and he didn't think we'd make it before sunset anyway, so maybe the best idea was to stay along the Lake Superior shore and go around the north side of the state. And he said that he'd always wanted to go to Copper Harbor, so this was a good excuse to do it.

I said whatever he thought was best, and he nodded and said that we were going to Pictured Rocks. Maybe tomorrow if it wasn't stormy we'd get to look at them, and if it was, than we'd admire what we could in the rain and move on.

So we drove along the north side of Whitefish Point, and then along twisting roads through the woods that seemed to go on forever. Some of the roads were paved and some of them weren't, and Aric went kind of slow because he said that there might be deer or bears that would jump out of the woods at us.

We stopped along the side of the road for a break and to have sandwiches for dinner, and Aric proved how smart he was because there was a sliding window in the back of Winston that opened up into the bed and he could turn around and reach through and get into the cooler without ever getting out of the cab, and also without getting rained on.

It was a little awkward to eat inside the truck, because there wasn't anyplace good to set my sandwich down, and so Aric held it for me between bites.

We didn't get to the campground until it was well after dark, and since it was still raining he only got out of Winston long enough to get a tag for the campsite and rather than put it on the pole like he was supposed to, he stuck it up on the dashboard. He said that there were hardly any other campers anyway, so it wouldn't matter.

I was really sleepy—I'd been drifting off for the last hour, because of the heat in the truck and the darkness outside, so I was really happy when Aric turned off Winston, 'cause that meant it was time for bed.

He looked at the back window and asked if I thought I'd fit through. I wasn't sure if I could—it was kind of small, and it would be really hard to not crash land in the back of the truck (plus I didn't want to get stuck in another window while Aric was watching). He went through it, and opened up the glass and the tailgate and told me that when there was a break in the rain to run for it, 'cause he said he didn't want to snuggle up to a wet pony.

I told him I was going to jump in a puddle, just 'cause he'd said that.

But I didn't. The rain didn't let up and I started to get bored, so I got out and ran around, and didn't get too wet. And once I was in the back, the fresh, cool air woke me back up, and I pushed Aric down and started kissing him and we both got so distracted that we forgot to close the tailgate or back window even though every now and then a gust of wind would spray some rainmist on us.