June 16
It was chilly again this morning. I guess the summer comes later in the Upper Peninsula.
It was hard to know how far we'd travelled. It hadn't looked all that far on the map, but sometimes maps deceive you, and I thought maybe we were really far north.
When Aric woke up, I asked him if it was polar bears I was supposed to have been looking for last night, and he asked why I would think there would be polar bears here. So then I found out that there were ninety divisions between the middle of the Earth and the top of it, and we were no further north that the 42nd or 43rd (Aric wasn't sure). He said on the way back to Kalamazoo, we'd pass the 45th Parallel, which was the halfway point between the north pole and the equator.
Aric and I gathered up some wood and built a fire, which turned out to be a real challenge, 'cause all the wood was wet and there was water in the fire pit even. After a few unsuccessful tries, he said that he knew an old Boy Scout trick that worked every time and went into the cab of Winston. I saw him tilt the seat forward and he rummaged around back there for a little bit before he pulled out a red stick that was about a foot long.
There was a spike on the bottom of it so that he could stick it in the ground, and then he cleared out all the kindling from the center of the woodpile (most of it was damp, too, which was part of the problem), and then took a plastic top off the red stick and struck the two together like a giant match, and it flared into a painfully bright red flame.
He gently set it under the woodpile and threw the kindling back on it and said that was how you started a fire in the rain.
At first, it just smouldered, but then it finally started burning nicely, and pretty soon the wood was hissing and steaming and popping, and we had a fire.
Neither of us was too motivated to hurry up and get back in Winston, so we went and gathered up a nice pile of firewood and set it around the fire, then he put the kettle on and boiled water for our breakfast.
We took our time eating, and we both had a few cups of coffee and watched the fire and watched the dull grey clouds roll overhead. I thought that the storm was breaking; it felt like maybe there might be a little bit of rain off and on in the morning, and then the clouds would break up and taper off.
He said that if this was like every time he went camping, the weather would get worse. Then he said on the bright side, we were at Mosquito Beach, but it was obviously too rainy for them.
Once we were done with breakfast, Aric raked out the fire and then soaked it with water, which was kind of sad 'cause of all the work he'd done to make it in the first place, but we both knew how dangerous it was to leave a fire unattended.
On our way out of the camping ground, he pointed to a brick building that said it was a showerhouse, and we both kind of looked at each other and he lifted his arm up and sniffed under it and asked how I felt about a hot shower before we got back on the road.
I felt like that would be a good idea; the best I'd gotten on the trip so far was getting rained on and getting washed by a wave. So he stopped the truck right by the showerhouse—he said that technically he wasn't supposed to park there but there weren't any other cars so it wouldn't matter—and I asked if we could shower together. He said that was against the rules, too, but if there were any park rangers, they'd be too busy writing a parking ticket for Winston to even check the showers, so why not.
He told me that it would be safest to use the boys' side. I didn't see how it would make a difference, but he said it did. Then he checked to make sure that no one was inside, and I followed him in.
It wasn’t as nice as the ones at the college or even the one at my apartment, but when the hot water finally came out of the showerhead it was plenty nice enough.
Aric wasn't too good at washing me, but he tried his best. He was really nervous about my wings, too, and I had to kind of lead him through it, and I don't think he ever really got comfortable with it. I could feel some spots that he hadn't gotten very well, and I probably could have asked him to get them again, but it felt like the wrong thing to say.
And then when I was clean, I tried to take the washcloth so I could wash him and he got really confused at first, and then he said that I didn't have to, but I wanted to, so he finally let me have it, and crouched down so that I could wash his back and I must have done a good job 'cause he let me do his stomach, too. Then he said that was good, he was sure that the soap running down his body had washed everything else, and I told him that since he was in the shower he ought to get washed properly.
Then after I'd gotten done cleaning the rest of him, I asked if he wanted to have some fun in the shower, and I didn't have to persuade him at all.
We backtracked out of the park, and went to where there was a scenic overlook (people seem to like places where they can park their cars and get out and walk a short distance to see things) and even thought it was overcast and Lake Superior was still grey it had a rugged beauty to it that kind of made me homesick.
He stood at the edge with me, just looking out over the water, and when I asked what he was thinking, he said that he was imagining how it must have been to be on a ship out there in a bad storm and to know that even if you made it to land here, you wouldn't be safe.
Even in the dull light, I could see the muted colors of the rocks, and I could imagine how they might look when the sun was shining and the lake was calm. There were some headlands that jutted out in the water, and they were undercut at their bases because of all the waves washing into them. I pointed it out to Aric and he said that the seas take everything, eventually.
We got back in Winston and drove along the coastline, through a town called Munising, and then we went a little bit further before he turned into another park so that we could have lunch.
He brought the whole cooler, and we made sandwiches and ate underneath a building without walls that Aric said was called a pavilion, and he said that there were smaller, round versions called Gazebos.
He offered me a beer, and had one himself, which he said was to settle the dust, and once we'd put away our lunch supplies, we walked through the park and to the bay.
There was a sign that said ships used to stop here and melt their cargoes of raw ore into pig iron, which was then taken to steel mills further down in the lakes. The whole place was gone—it had burned down when some coke (which was a special kind of firewood for the furnaces) had started a fire—but there were bits of sandstone bricks all around.
Aric picked one up and showed me how one side of it had turned into glass from the heat of the ovens, and it was the most amazing rock I'd ever seen. One side of it was a dark glass, and then there was a whitish line through it, and the other side was sandstone.
He explained how a lot of times, people would build things like this as cheaply as possible, so they probably quarried the local stone because it was easy, and when their furnaces melted from the heat, they just built new ones.
Then he took off his shoes and rolled up his pants and waded out into the water, and I followed him, and he rummaged around on the bottom until he came up with a rust-colored rock that he said was some kind of ore-bearing rock, and it had surely been dropped a hundred years ago or maybe even more, but this was what they'd been carrying on the ships that they'd melted into pig iron.
He carried it back to Winston and on our way back, he picked up one of the glass and sandstone bricks, too, and said that he was going to keep them as souvenirs.
I took a look back before we left and could almost see what it might have looked like back then—with sailing ships in the harbor and little houses scattered around a ways away from the furnaces. It would have looked a lot like Chonamare, maybe.
And maybe in a hundred years, Chonamare would look like this, with nothing left but some stones.
We stopped in Marquette, and along the docks, and Aric showed me where the ore ships used to load. It was a gigantic concrete structure with chutes for the ore to run down, and he said it was too big to be knocked down, so that they had just left it when they didn't need it any more, and took out the bridge that led up to it.
He told me how whole trains of ore could be unloaded into a ship at a time, and how the mines could keep producing ore even when the ships weren't running, so that they would have giant piles of ore waiting to be loaded, and once the ice was off the lake the ships would start coming.
He thought that in particularly bad years, some of the furnaces down the lake ran out of raw materials, and he thought that they'd probably have to be shut down if that happened.
I wanted to know why they didn't use it any more, and he said it was because the mines near here had played out, so they had to go somewhere else, like Minnesota. But there were still mines in the UP; he said that there was one not that far away, and it had orange lakes that you could see from space.
I said that I wanted to see that, and he said that I would probably regret it, but I might as well. So we went back towards the middle for a little while until we got to a town called Negaunee and he told me that I could fly up and look at it.
The airplane directors up here weren't as confused as the other ones had been, because they gave me permission pretty quickly, and so I flew off and it was kind of like the dirt mines in Kalamazoo but a thousand times bigger. And I could see off in the distance the orange lakes that Aric had mentioned, and he hadn't told me that I shouldn't get close to them, but I didn't need him to have told me. They looked evil, and I didn't want to get any closer than I already was.
I guess that it was important to get the iron ore out of the ground so that they could make things out of it, but it was very ugly to see. And when I'd landed and told Aric that, he said that there was a human saying that you didn't want to see how sausages were made.
I thought it was wisest to not ask him how sausages were made.
We stayed away from the lake for a while, until we got to a little town called L'Anse, which was right on the water, and then we followed the shoreline for a while until we cut back inland by a river, and then we came to water on our other side which was also Lake Superior, which meant that we were probably getting close to the end of the peninsula.
It was further than I thought it would be. Aric stopped at a park that was just before Copper Harbor, and said that this was about as far north as the UP went, except for Isle Royal which was way, way out in the lake.
The skies had cleared, like I thought they would, and the water was the most beautiful blue stretching all the way to the horizon, and the angry waves from yesterday had subsided into calm swells.
We walked along a shoreline path, all the way to the very end of the point, and I flew across the narrow stretch of water to an island on the other side. The water was too deep for Aric to wade, so he stayed where he was.
The other side of the loop looked over the bay and Copper Harbor, and that was what we took back.
When we got back in Winston, Aric said that we were almost to the campsite, and we drove through Copper Harbor and went to a place called Fort Wilkins.
It was getting too late to explore the park, so we picked a good spot and started a fire and had sandwiches and vegetables and beer. When it was almost dark, Aric got out some metal sticks that he said were old coat hangers and he showed me how to make s'mores, and then he showed me how to peel the burned crust off my marshmallow after I got it too close to the fire.
He warned me not to wave them around when they were on fire, because they could fly off the rod and they would stick to you. I asked if he'd learned that in the Boy Scouts, too, and he said that it was actually church camp.
I burned my tongue when I got greedy and tried to eat one without letting it cool down at all, and after that I was more careful.
Once we'd had our fill of s'mores, he let the fire burn down and pretty soon there was nothing but the sound of the woods and the singing of frogs and bugs, and the whole big sky full of stars, and we both lay on our backs on the picnic table and looked up.
There weren't too many airplanes flying by, which was something I was used to seeing. And then Aric pointed to a star that was moving, and he said that was a satellite, and we watched it until it went out of view.
He said that sometimes in Michigan you could see the northern lights, and it would be a very special treat if we did, but they were kind of rare. We did see a meteor, though, streaking through the darkness, and I thought that was pretty special, too.
We were both pretty tired when we got into Winston, so we just curled up together and fell right asleep.