ERIKA ALIN

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APOSTLE ISLANDS

MAINLAND COAST

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A light breeze carries hints of autumn as I dawdle by the trailhead in the early afternoon sun, reluctant to bring another season around the lake to a close. The trail winds north through the woods from Meyers Beach to skirt a series of promontories that offer views of the cave-riddled cliffs along Mawikwe Bay. By now, the weekday crowds have dwindled and the same plants that I expectantly watched rise to bloom in spring have begun moving toward the senescence of fall. Poised between the seasons, the land exudes a fleeting sense of stillness and fulfillment, a solemnity that seems as free of the unbridled striving of early summer as of the scarcity of the coming winter.

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Apostle Islands National Lakeshore includes twenty-one islands and a twelve-mile strip of mainland coast at the far tip of Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula. Used by Native American for thousands of years,1 the islands first appeared under their current name on a Great Lakes map in a 1744 book by the Jesuit priest and historian Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix. Though he didn’t actually draw the map, Charlevoix had apparently heard the islands referred to as the Twelve Apostles by French traders during a visit to Sault Saint Marie.2 Legend also has it that a band of pirates called the Twelve Apostles lived on Oak Island just off the mainland, hiding in caves and coves and preying on the cargo of fur traders. Yet according to former Apostle Islands park historian Bob Mackreth, the legend has no support in the records of fur traders, explorers, missionaries, or other early travelers.3

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European Americans began commercial fishing operations from the islands in the 1830s and significant logging in the 1850s, drastically altering the area’s natural environment.4 Oak Island, which is the fourth largest Apostle and known to Anishinaabe as Mitigominikaani-minis or island where there are lots of acorns, supplied cordwood fuel to passing steamships and eventually hosted both logging and fishing camps.5 Logging for white pine, hemlock, and other trees increased in the 1870s, and denuded many of the islands and brownstone quarries and farms also existed on several islands. The forests, however, slowly regenerated and the islands today support a varied landscape of hardwood and minor boreal forests, bogs and rocky cliffs, glacial bluffs and sandy spits and beaches. 

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I step onto the trail and let the dappled light of the forest begin leading me back to the shore. A pair of wooden planks runs across a lowland of towering aspen and maple, cedar, ash, and fir. The dark earth in places is damp and even soggy, but the muds that had surrounded the planks in early summer have all but disappeared under a sprawling growth of saplings and wild ginger, horsetail, and fern. A thimbleberry bears a few red berries, as do scattered dwarf raspberries in the moss. Before long I cross a creek and wind uphill past mountain maple and beaked hazel, common shrubs in northern forests. Leaves partly conceal a cluster of fuzzy light green pods with long furrowed beaks at the end of a hazel twig. Hazel shrubs produce bumper crops of nuts every few years, but I see only this single cluster of pods. The ripe nuts will feed birds and squirrels, or if hoarded away in a forgotten pantry of fertile soil possibly germinate and sprout the following spring. Yet at least along this stretch of trail, the thick understory growth is unlikely to leave much hope for a seedling.

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As it gradually winds toward the coast, the trail crosses one gully after another cut by swollen creeks into thick clayey glacial sediments. Most gullies are running dry, but a few have light flows of water and in some cases even creeks fringed by jewelweeds and other moisture-loving plants. Along a larger creek crossed by a wooden bridge, cedar, birch, and fir shade a tangle of vegetation while young hemlocks drape wispy lower branches over an apron of damp reddish sand. I pick a few blackberries on the south-facing hillside on the creek’s far bank and sit down on a nearby bench to catch some spotty sunshine. Blackberries are common late summer berries in the north woods, their fruit ripening progressively on the shrub to offer a sweetness that sometimes lasts well into early fall. In Sweden, they’re called björnbär or bearberries, the trailing plant known as a bearberry in the United States instead going by a different name. 

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I leave the bench and pick the last of the ripe berries, then continue into a shady stand of fir that gradually lightens with birch and young aspen. Sunshine filters through the canopy, illuminating old silvery birch trunks with shaggy strips of peeling bark. The birches’ leaves have begun to yellow at their tips, and the ferns, currants, and wild sarsaparillas in the understory to turn auburn, flaxen, and splotchy brown. A bush honeysuckle fountains with scarlet leaves. Though Lake Superior’s summer-warmed waters delay the arrival of fall on the shore, the change in seasons still always catches me by surprise. The trees, however, have been withdrawing sugars from their leaves for weeks, pulling the nutrients on which next season’s early growth depends into safe winter storage in roots and trunks. Now, with summer fast frittering away, the chlorophyl in their leaves is breaking down and allowing formerly hidden pigments to come to the fore. For a few weeks while dying down, the forest celebrates the passing season with a garb of brilliant color.

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I walk slowly, my gaze drawn close to the trail and often lingering on the birches. Near the ends of twigs, female catkins that bore fuzzy red styles in spring have dried to slender brown rods that will shed tiny winged nutlets onto the ground in late fall and winter. Some birches are in their prime and have smooth white or bronze trunks with sparing curls of peeling bark, fine zipper-like breathing pores, and elegant dabs of pale gray and sage-green lichen. But many appear to be slowly dying. Loosening sheets of bark hang from their trunks, exposing the decaying wood underneath, and hoof-shaped tinder conks infest rotting limbs. 

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On hearing the hammering of a pileated woodpecker from in the forest, I wander off the trail and wind between the trunks until I see the large black bird working the midsection of a dying birch. The woodpecker has carved a long, deep cavity into the trunk, and absorbed with its excavating seems not to initially notice my approach. With its body nearly shielded by the cavity, I mainly see its red-crested head moving in and out of the hole. Eventually, though, the woodpecker backs out of the cavity, looks to both sides, and flies off, zigzagging low between the trunks. Its pecking has bared the soft heartwood of the tree, a fresh, light cavern of rotting wood with a cascade of shavings at its base. 

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Shortly after returning to the trail, I wander into the forest again at the sight of a birch trunk with a rotting hollow of porous wood at its base. Carpenter ants, a favorite food for pileated woodpeckers, have tunneled through the wood and a coarse sawdust spills onto the rich, surrounding earth, creating a mulched bed for a few mayflowers and bluebeads. While the mayflowers sport loose spikes of mottled berries on their way to turning burgundy, the berries on the bluebeads have already lost their smooth luster and darkened to indigo and brown. Nearby, a wild ginger has begun to brown its heart-shaped leaves in the musty humus of a rotting log. I bend down over the log and pick up a dry, crumbling piece of cornhusk-yellow wood riddled through with ant tunnels and woodpecker holes. With each tree nourishing life as capably in its decaying state as in its crowned glory, nothing in the forest goes to waste.

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When walking the trail in high summer, I often grow impatient with the nearly two-mile meandering through the forest to the coast and scurry along to reach the first sea cave. Now, as the land hovers on the cusp of fall, I saunter along and stop often to admire berries and bright flashes of vegetation. Whether it sits on a wild sarsaparilla, rose twisted-stalk, nodding trillium, baneberry, bunchberry, or pyrola, each berry stands out against the bare earth and greenery, endowed like the first spring ephemerals that poke up from the duff with a singularity it will lose once the forest becomes awash in orange, crimson, and yellow. Tiny pinhead-like pale bluish capsules rise from thin stalks above whorls of yellowing leaves on starflowers. The capsules are dry and chalky and disintegrate easily when fingered. Yet like many north woods herbs, starflowers mainly spread by growing new shoots from underground rhizomes, the hidden wefts that unite the plants in a colony.

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The English name for fall used to be harvest, until the word autumn became more common in the 16th century.6 Like its English counterpart, the Swedish word for fall, höst, traditionally meant harvest, a meaning it retains to this day even if less commonly used.7 The verb hösta, likewise, can mean to reap or gather. I like how these dual meanings point me to a significant task of fall: to gather the land’s bounty into my senses and store it in memory against winter’s impending dimness.

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Of all the understory plants along the trail, only the ground-hugging wintergreens seem intent on bridging the seasons. Wintergreens can bloom late into the summer and while a few trailside plants bear ripening green or pink berry-like fruits, a handful of others instead bear urn-shaped white flowers lorded over by glossy green leaves. With no other flowers in sight, the normally inconspicuous urns easily draw my attention, suspended like pearly drops an inch or so above the ground. The auburn skin of a former flower has come to rest on an oval leaf below, caught on the style that protrudes from the developing fruit. A spent reminder of summer, it stubbornly hangs on, not yet ready to let go and nourish the earth with its remains.

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Proposals to create a state or national park on either some or all of the Apostle Islands date back to the 1920s, but didn’t gain ground until the 1958 election of Gaylord Nelson as governor of Wisconsin. After becoming a United States Senator in 1962, Nelson played a central role in the passage of the Wilderness Act and other environmental legislation in Congress. The federal government had rejected several earlier proposals for incorporating the Apostle Islands into the National Park System, but in 1970 Nelson’s determined campaigning paid off with the creation of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.8 In 2004, a year before the death of its namesake, Congress established the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness to provide additional protection for eighteen of the islands. Though it excludes light stations and the mainland coast and three nearby islands, the wilderness accounts for over eighty percent of the land area within the park. 

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The Lakeshore’s mainland unit is best known for the sea caves along Mawikwe Bay. The bay takes its name from an Ojibwe expression for a crying or mourning woman and was renamed from Squaw Bay in 2007 on the recommendation of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa on the peninsula’s northeastern tip.9 The aptness of the name Red Cliff, or Miskwaagbikaang, becomes apparent once the trail reaches the coast and short footpaths lead to overlooks of clayey lakeside bluffs. I follow a path to a tall, crescent-shaped neck of orangish soil and rock that juts into the lake to end in a point with a crumbling earthen wall. A few birches and a hemlock grow on the point’s inner end while slender red pines cling precariously to the far outer tip, their long roots reaching into the bare air above the wall. As I sketch the roots in my notebook, a loon that will soon fly south for the winter calls from the lake, its sorrowful wail reverberating across the shore.

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Shortly after passing the point, I reach a small cove that ends in a deep, narrow chasm fringed by red pines. “Dangerous Cliffs Ahead” reads the caption on a signpost  that also includes a life preserver and a map of caves and other points of interest on the surrounding coast. Called the Crevasse, the chasm slices inland for several hundreds of feet and on its rim and steep upper slopes sports boulders and patchy, needle-strewn carpets of moss, mayflower, and common polypody fern. A long white pine root runs across a narrow natural bridge that connects the chasm’s two sides closer to the lake and a few saplings reach their crowns up from ledges and bulges in the shady walls below. 

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From the signpost, I continue onto the rocky point that bounds the southern side of the cove into which the chasm opens and look across the water between a few branches at my first sea cave. The cave forms a broad, low opening at the base of a pine-studded promontory with thin, pale rose and peach-colored sediment layers visible along its clean lower reaches. Sea caves developed in the sandstone where the waves of post-glacial lakes could eat into thinner and weaker layers of rock. The cave-riddled cliffs around Mawikwe Bay belong to the Devils Island Formation, which extends in a narrow band up the northwestern Bayfield Peninsula and also crops out on the eastern half of nearby Sand Island and the more distant Devils Island. The formation sits between an older and a younger sandstone formation, all laid down around a billion years ago by sands carried by streams into the southwestern end of the rift basin from eroding granitic highlands to the south.10 Made of thin layers of sands that settled on shallow lake bottoms and beaches and were later reworked to fine grains by wind, waves, and streams, it became more prone to developing sea caves.11

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Waves broke against the coastal cliffs and entered cracks between the thin beds, creating expanding cavities. With each new wave, water gushed into the cavities and sloshed around abrading the rock with eroded grains of sand. Over time, caverns formed and spread horizontally and waves drilled deeper into the base of the cliffs, eating away at the walls that separated the caves and occasionally sculpting networks of chambers and passageways. The best display of sea caves in the park appears on Devils Island, the northernmost of the Apostles known to Ojibwe as Maji-manidoo-minis or “bad spirit island.”12 The island features an extensive stretch of honey-combed cliffs with cavernous chambers and pillars. The mainland trail, however, offers the only place within the park to easily view sea caves on foot. It’s also the only place around the lake where I can’t walk along the water and must instead experience the coast entirely from above.

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In addition to several sea caves, the cliffs around the cove by the Crevasse include a large diamond-shaped window cut by waves into the inner crease of the point on which I stand. I wander inland and cross a wooden walkway atop a second natural bridge to reach the promontory and look back at the point. The window’s lower opening creates a sloping succession of small u-shaped ridges representing different layers in the rock. Sunlight streams through the opening and illuminates a funnel of ripples on the water. With each barely perceptible swell, a liquid veil lazily rises upslope toward the window, but doesn’t pass through it. All too soon, I suspect, the storm waves of autumn will resume the work of hollowing out the window. 

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Like the window and caves, the promontory and point are continually being reshaped by frozen and flowing waters. Promontories and other areas of stronger rock are left protruding into the lake as the coastline recedes around them and sometimes acquire caves of their own, or windows or arches in cases where waves cut all the way through the sandstone. Caves, too, collapse as their ceilings give way, as do arches, and heavy rains and runoff join storm waves in eroding the clayey lakeside bluffs. To the right of the window, at the far tip of the point, an hourglass-shaped turret rises up from the water toward an arch-like overhang that extends a few feet into the air. I can easily imagine the overhang having once formed part of the vaulted ceiling of a collapsed cave. Like the small plants of the forest understory, if only on a vastly different scale, each cave, window, and point briefly appears and achieves a fullness of form, then vanishes and paves the way for a new creation in the cliffs.

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I wander around the sandy rim of the promontory looking across the water at the young red pines that cling to the edge of the clifftop. More red pines join white pines and hemlocks on the steep earthen slopes and ledges that drop down to the walls below me. Though their perch often looks precarious, red pines have a wide, shallow network of long lateral roots from which shorter roots sink into the ground and sometimes also a short taproot,13 helping them to take up water and steady their trunks against high winds in thin, rocky soils. As I begin to head north toward the second promontory, they continue to dominate the trailside but eventually give way to a mixed forest that also includes paper birch and mountain ash. All along the trail, pines dominate windy, thin-soiled promontories and exposed cliff rims, but cede the ground to more mixed stands where the land offers slightly greater shelter and richer soils.

 

The forest lightens and darkens with birch and pine, alternating between the two trees that most remind me of the coastal lands I knew best in Sweden. As I slowly walk, I think of how gradual my journey has been to fully recognize the place that both the Superior shore and Swedish coast hold in my life. The extent of the lake’s draw long perplexed me, no more so than during the seven years that I recently spent living on the East Coast, all the while continuing to travel around the shore each summer. For years, my longing for the Swedish coast and returns to the cottage held an equally compelling force. Yet gradually I realized that the enduring sense of home for which I longed lay in the trusted embrace of a familiar northern bedrock shore, and that Lake Superior joins geographies of both land and heart. My connection to the lake now spans over twice the length of the childhood that I intermittently spent in Sweden, weaving through most of my adult life. Each summer, I layer up experiences that settle me more fully on its shores. I’ve walked this same trail many times before and by now the immediacy of the rock and open waters and my own history with the place evoke an instinctive stillness and reassurance. 

 

The transition in the forest between pine and mixed stands of birch is especially easy to see from the second promontory. Unlike the more even bulge in the coastline formed by the first promontory, the second promontory wraps north like a lightly curled lobster claw with a broad split tip, creating a stretch of deep shelter for the mainland wall to the east. The shelter favors a mix of trees, including birch, white pine, mountain ash, and saplings of fir, as well as small cedars on the outer rim. Yet as the shelter fades to the north, red pines quickly reclaim the rim. Where the forest ends at the edge of the cliff, earthy mats of mayflower, reindeer lichen, and moss drape over the rim and then give way to a bare wall of rock with dense patches of pale green lichen and a few narrow ledges and slopes. Seepage from the forest has left black streaks and patches across the upper rock, but the lower wall sports splendidly clean, crisply layered orange and red-brown sandstone with shallow caverns and small alcoves along the water.

 

Like its earlier counterpart, except for near its inner base, the second promontory is mostly covered in bare sands and pines, a dearth of vegetation that I suspect reflects not only its exposed location but the persistent trampling of visitors such as myself. The caves murmur steadily as I turn from the wall and wander toward the outer rock. A vast womb of shimmering water stretches north as far my eyes can see and Eagle Island drifts like a lone ship in the distance, a flat forested oval with a sliver of sandstone at its base. The island forms the westernmost Apostle, the only island visible during my walk, and its Ojibwe name, Migiziwi-minis, has the same meaning as in English.14 Spanning no more than twenty acres, it’s also the second smallest island in size after Gull Island, which takes in a mere three acres at the far eastern end of the archipelago. 

 

Like the mainland, the islands create a constantly changing landscape. The bluffs and glacial deposits that cap smaller islands are especially vulnerable to being washed away by storm waves, as are sandy spits and beaches elsewhere. Yet even rocky coastal outcrops can be submerged by rising lake levels. Though several islands reach heights of over two hundred feet, tiny Gull Island rises to no more than ten feet, a compromise height of sorts between the thirty-five feet it registered when first surveyed in 1856 and the mere three feet to which storms had apparently reduced it by the early 1920s.15 Even more dramatically, a former clayey shoal known as Little Steamboat Island that appeared to the south of Eagle Island on early survey maps disappeared in a storm in 1901.16 I wonder whether the sediments that made up Little Steamboat have entirely washed away or lurk around their former rocky bed under the surface, the lost island perhaps biding its time to rise again.

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Back on the trail, a stone’s-throw to the north of the promontory I pass a light footpath that leads downslope toward the cliff rim. I descend just far enough to peer between the foliage back at the base of the promontory and see the vaulted opening of a giant arch called the Keyhole. A nearly blinding ellipse of light spills across the translucent surface under the opening and, as the water sloshes lightly within the hollows of its hidden interior, the Keyhole emits soft beckoning sounds. In the months to come, the Keyhole will lose its song to the resonant booms of larger waves and then the near silence of winter ice. For several minutes now, however, I stand in stillness on the slope, listening to the soft lament that wells up from the depths of the rock.

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The third promontory appears shortly after the second and reaches into the lake just north of a gentle slope clad in a pure stand of paper birch with strikingly smooth, white bark. As sunlight filters through the canopy, I slowly wind between the trunks and then descend toward a stand of pines. Unlike its more level earlier relations, the promontory slopes lightly lakeward, and in addition to large red pines also supports birches and blueberries and a smattering of other vegetation. The stems of a few blueberry shrubs have round pinkish galls that house the larvae of a tiny wasp fittingly called the blueberry stem gall wasp. The larvae will feed in individual cells within the galls all winter and when the blueberries bloom in spring pupate, poke holes in their enclosures, and fly off as adult wasps.17 When I first saw the galls a few summers ago, I took them for unripe, misshapen berries. Had I looked more closely in spring, however, I might have seen the round gray shells with minute holes from which new wasps had taken to the air.

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Each promontory offers a slightly different experience of the coast and its caves. By far the tallest cave with the largest opening visible along the trail can be seen from the third promontory. Called the Garage, the cave is nearly twice as high as wide and cuts deep into the mainland wall, flanked to the west by smaller caves. I leave the galls behind and cautiously move toward the rim. Aided by binoculars, I can just make out a few notches and a round alcove slightly above the water level on the cave’s back wall. But what soon catches my eye isn’t mainly the cave’s interior, of which I can’t see much, but the rim above its opening toward the top of the cliff. 

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A broad block of salmon-red rock reaches down from the rim and angles back into the opening to create a robust inner ceiling for the cave. In contrast to the solid overhang, however, the rim above the cave is visibly eroding. Its northern corner has disintegrated into a gouged-out slope of rock and earth with long roots projecting into bare air. While the rim’s southern side remains intact, an earthen mat with a wavy hemline of moss and reindeer lichen dips unevenly down over its bulging edge. The mat has slipped far enough over the edge to leave a young mountain ash in full leaf dangling upside-down from a clump of soil connected by a rodlike main root to the ground above. 

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In other places along the trail too, I had seen young trees left dangling in the air where the cliff edge had been undercut or a mat of mossy earth had slid over the rim with heavy runoff or rains. A mature mountain ash that grew six feet or so below the rim engaged in an astounding acrobatic feat to anchor itself to the cliff top above. Perched on a bulge in a wall, the tree angled a tall main trunk with leafy branches lightly out toward the sun while extending a second, leafless trunk and several bare branches vertically up the face of the cliff and wheedling their tips under the draping moss of the rim. The young mountain ash dangling upside-down atop the Garage seems destined for a more uncertain future. Fall winds and frigid storm spray will soon assail its hanging branches, and come next spring rains and runoff will continue to erode the draping clod of earth to which it clings. 

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Yet when I had first seen it over a year ago in May, I had taken the tree for dead only to return later in the summer to find it in full leaf, bravely bucking the odds and trying to complete another season of growth. By now, the tree has survived at least two summers and one cycle of autumn storms, winter ice, and spring runoff. Its sunlit leaves have even begun turning honey-yellow, standing out against the shady interior of the cave. I almost don’t want to return again next summer for fear of finding the tree dead. As I look more closely, however, I see a small sapling growing upright from the tree’s base, it too with yellowing leaves, and even a tiny shoot hugging the main root. It’s a relief to realize that even from a clump of soil precariously suspended in the air, life seems determined to spring forth from what risks dying down.

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I finally leave the mountain ash and begin to follow the trail northeast toward the fourth promontory. The promontory always marks the end of my walk and on reaching it I slow my steps nearly to a standstill, reluctant to have the fullness of another season on the shore so suddenly spent. Shallower than the first three, the promontory is partly sheltered by the coastline to the southwest and supports a dense mix of white pine, paper birch, and mountain ash. I even see a small yellow birch, a tree that prefers rich soils but excels at taking advantage of sparing patches of light. To my east sits a long concave wall called the Bowl. Nearly entirely covered in black stain, the wall sports a line of ovalish caverns at its base and on its far side another promontory, it too overlooking a line of small caves. 

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I stand near the rim watching the water play lightly around the wall, threading its way into invisible hollows in the cliffs. Already the late afternoon sun arcs low in the sky and shadows have begun to lengthen over the rock. I turn from the wall and begin to tread a path around the promontory. Once and then twice again, I circle around, winding past blueberries, reindeer lichens, and ferns as a light breeze skims the tree crowns. Boundless rock and water, blueberries, birches, and pines, the familiar feel of a northern bedrock shore kindles a primordial sense of shelter and belonging. 

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No matter how many times I’ve seen it before, Lake Superior evokes the same wonder, summer after summer showing me how to moor myself ever more deeply to the land and nurture home on its ancient shores. I sit down on a cushion of needles by a pine and rest my gaze on the distant curvature of the coast. For a few moments, the gentle breeze stills. Sated on summer, the land listens and waits. Then the air stirs again and I look up to see the tip of a branch bowing to the gathering winds of a changing season, as I too must finally do.