ERIKA ALIN

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PRISONER'S COVE

NEYS PROVINCIAL PARK

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By the time I leave the forest for the upper beach, the sun has climbed high enough over the treetops to dapple the rocky point at Prisoner’s Cove in gleaming swatches of pewter. The point ripples with glacially-polished humps of a wan, slightly greasy rock known as nepheline syenite. Born in the molten chambers of an ancient volcano, here and there the syenite’s soft folds swirl with colorful streaks and inscriptions from the deep. Scraggy islands and clusters of vegetation spread out in dips on the upper and central outcrops. But mostly the point seems to reveal the land as it must have looked in a bygone time before lichen and moss covered the surface, let alone shrubs and trees. All morning, I’ll weave between the bare rock, islands, and luxuriant forest understory, searching for the hidden richness that lurks within the visible world of rocks and plants.

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Prisoner’s Cove sits in the far northwestern corner of the Coldwell Peninsula, a rectangle of rolling hillsides just shy of where the Superior coast begins dipping around the Pukaskwa Peninsula toward lake’s eastern shore. At 13,300 acres, Neys Provincial Park takes in the entirety of the peninsula as well as a collection of islands to the south. Several trails lead to overlooks of the lake from the coastal hillsides, but a popular trek winds between the sandy beach and forest behind the cove onto the rocky point. I’ve walked the short trail to the point many times, more often than not hurrying along to reach the outcrops at its end. This morning, the forest floor bursts with the unbridled growth of summer rain, fog, and warmth and finally commands my attention.

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Profusely flowering mayflowers, bunchberries, and starflowers join club mosses with bright green strobili in weaving around mossy patches with twinflowers and three-leaf goldthreads. Diminutive drops balance in tidy rows atop the straight stamens of bluebeads with splaying yellow petals while pale strands of beard lichen shed from draping tassels on spruce and fir glitter atop the damp earth. In whichever direction I look, mosses, lichens, and flowers appear saturated and poised in the early morning calm. 

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I bend down over a cluster of ghost pipes that pokes up from the duff around a rotting log flanked by ground cedars and emerald-green mosses. The cluster’s dozen or so fleshy white stems stand no more than three to five inches, but look positively luminescent in the dimly lit understory. Lightly tinged in pink and fringed with sheath-like leaves, the stems end in a drooping white flower with the odd translucent leaf flaying at its top. Most flowers remain deeply bowed, but a few have begun to turn upward to make it easier for pollinators to reach their reproductive parts. The white stems darken quickly and will gradually straighten out and point their seed capsules skyward before drying to brown. But for now, they rise up like nodding wraiths from the intricate subterranean web of fungal strands that sustains life on the forest floor. 

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Ghost pipes inhabit moist, shady recesses where the buildup of needles, duff, and moss on the ground delays the recycling of nutrients into the soil. With poor prospects for photosynthesis, they don’t produce chlorophyl and instead obtain nutrients by parasitizing the hyphae of fungi that tap into the roots of nearby trees.1 Trees and plants the world over grow thin specialized mycorrhizal roots to encourage colonization by fungi whose long hyphae can roam across large areas of soil and extract water and minerals from dead organic matter. But while most plants also supply their fungal partners with sugars produced by their chlorophyllous green leaves, ghost pipes take nutrients without giving anything in return.2 The pale, archaic forms before me glow with a stolen underground bounty. 

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The forest behind the cove has grown up on sandy sediments carried downstream over thousands of years by the Little Pic River, which empties into Ashburton Bay to the north. Along early stretches of the trail, patches of loose sand alternate with a thin covering of earth, which becomes more pervasive as I wind further inland and closer to the point. In addition the sandy beaches in Ashburton Bay and Prisoner’s Cove, sediments carried downstream by the Little Pic River built up a network of low-lying inland dunes. Much of this network was leveled during World War Two, when the bay housed one of three large prisoner-of-war camps on the Canadian shore. 

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The German prisoners at Neys Camp 100 were prevented from escaping by three rows of nearly ten foot-tall barbed wire fences and vast miles of wilderness.3 While eventually also helping to fill the wartime labor shortage by working in logging operations along the Little Pic and Pic Rivers, they passed their time studying languages, playing in the camp orchestra, and engaging in sports, painting, metallurgy, and other pursuits.4 A second large camp west of Marathon also interned Japanese-Canadian civilians forcibly relocated from the country’s west coast while a smaller camp to the east of Schreiber only interned Japanese-Canadians. Once the German POWs had returned to Germany, Neys briefly served as a relocation camp for formerly interned Japanese-Canadians. 

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Little evidence of the Neys camp remains today, yet a few rotting metal-clad wooden boats used to transport prisoners on the river rest on the upper rock on the point. Slightly inland of the cove, however, a loop trail leads across the leveled dunes to offer a firsthand view of the gradual reclamation of bare sands by mature forest. The trail begins in a stand of red pines, which according to an interpretive brochure was planted in the 1950s to stabilize the blowing sands. Fir and scattered aspen and tamarack have since come up between the mature pines, and mosses, blueberries, bunchberries, and mayflowers spread across the ground, though not as thickly as along the trail to the rocky point. On remnants of the original dunes behind the pine plantation, richer soils support a greater mix of larger trees, and club mosses, ghost pipes, and mossy hummocks create a verdant ground cover that resembles that behind the point. 

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As I near the far end of the cove, the trail crosses a cold-water stream and loops west toward the outcrops. I let the forest surround me in a final burst of greenery and then step onto the rising back of the point. A sloping plain of lightly lustrous rock reaches lakeward in weathered casts of pale orange and gray, its surface undulating with long north-south trending humps and ridges patchily covered in lichen. Shallow rut-like glacial grooves run across the rock and silvery splash pools fill in shallow dips and fissures between low mounds and flats near the water. Enhanced by soft shadows, the rock wraps around satiny wrinkles and ridges before quietly slipping into the lake.

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✧

 

“Under the Volcano Trail: Wonder Where You’re Walking?” reads the caption on a large interpretive sign at the edge of the forest. While many stretches of the lake’s northern shore were born of magma that welled up from within the earth, only at Neys do I walk on rock that formed deep inside the rumbling magma chamber of an actual volcano. The volcano had its origins during the early Midcontinent Rift period and laid down a collection of alkaline rocks known as the Coldwell Complex, which intruded into surrounding granitic and greenstone belt lands.5 The complex mostly consists of gabbro, a dark, coarse-grained cousin of basalt, and nepheline syenite, a pale, relatively rare relation of granite that around the lake only crops up on the Coldwell Peninsula. Though the volcano’s magma chamber originally sat one and a quarter mile underground, the point has been exposed by uplift of the land and the removal of overlying rocks by the glaciers. According to the interpretive sign, its outcrops sit at the very top of the former magma chamber and erode at the infinitesimal rate of one centimeter or roughly two-fifths of an inch every five thousand years, “about the width of your fingernail” the text states.

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From the cove, the outcrops run south across a series of broad protrusions separated by boulder-strewn recesses. When I first started visiting Neys, a one-and-a-half mile interpretive trail led across the rock, every now and then detouring into the forest to circumvent boulder-strewn areas. The trail was marked by a dozen or so signposts that explained the geology of the peninsula and highlighted the presence of different minerals and noteworthy features in the rock. By now, the text on many signposts has weathered out and become largely illegible. Other posts have disappeared, probably toppled by storm waves and either removed by park staff or swallowed by the lake. Instead of wandering from one signpost to the next, as I used to, I meander haphazardly across the lower and upper rock, drawn forward by whichever pools, piles of boulders, or islands of greenery catch my eye.  

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Nepheline syenite is a hard rock and, as a signpost still explains, creates the hillsides of the rolling landscape inland of the coastal strip while the weaker gabbro has eroded away to leave behind valleys. In many places on the lower rock, stunningly polished humps and mounds of syenite reach toward the water. But as cracks that formed during the cooling of the magma are exposed to freezing and thawing waters, a former signpost had indicated, ever wider joints form and blocks of rock eventually loosen. I soon reach a broad, east-west trending dip strewn with block-like boulders, some of which have the pale orangish cast of weathered syenite and others the heavily pitted gray surfaces of gabbro. On the far side of the dip a sloping arm of gabbro flows across the paler, smoother syenite, which in turn creates a slender raised dike and grid of veins atop the darker rock. 

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The volcano that laid down the Coldwell Complex erupted a total of three times, each time producing a slightly different mix of syenites and gabbros depending on the chemical makeup and temperature of the magma in its chamber. The outcrops on the point formed from magma associated with the second eruption and include a gabbro rich in the dark mineral biotite and a syenite rich in whitish nepheline and smaller amounts of biotite and amphibole.6 Eventually, exposure to air changed the nepheline in the uppermost layer of the syenite to natrolite, a mineral that weathered to an orange or pinkish cast.7 Chips in the surface sometimes reveal the stark difference between the rock’s thin skin of natrolite and whiter interior of syenite.

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Alternately fractured and smooth, the outcrops on which I walk often stretch far enough inland to be largely shielded from waves along their central and upper reaches. Stunted bog birch, spruce, cedar, and other trees cluster in broad grooves and islands of vegetation, creating a bridge between the bare lakeside rock and lavishly garbed forest floor. I sink down beside an island and slip my hands over the cold, graphite-slick rock, the sun’s rays still too oblique to warm the surface. The island’s knit of scraggy trees is surrounded by a fringe of blueberry and bearberry and thin mat of mossy soil with three-toothed cinquefoil and pixie cup lichen. While the mint-green goblet of one pixie cup shelters a raindrop, the rim of another is dotted with bright red specs, the fruiting bodies of the lichen’s fungus. Both pixies are frosted with dust-like white granules of algal cells and fungal hyphae, which can grow into new lichen after loosening from the stem or being splashed from the cup by a raindrop. Glistening against the damp earth, they have a distinctly enchanted look and create dazzling accents to the edge of the island.

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As alluring as the clusters of vegetation are the scattered peaty pools that gather in shallow dips on the upper outcrops. Bounded by short orange walls, smooth gray flat, or pale angular chunks of syenite, the pools are rimmed by small cedars, shrubs such as sweet gale and Labrador tea, and occasional hummocks of sphagnum moss. One slightly more substantial pool includes several buckbeans with trios of pointed leaves that poke a few inches above the surface beside naked stems topped by clusters of round seed capsules. A mossy, rust-colored hummock of sphagnum moss sports a light cap of leatherleaf sprigs and spruce saplings and near its base a dozen round-leaved sundews. Arcing up from red-trimmed leaf rosettes, the sundews recede into the moss when viewed from only a few feet away. A few, however, have strayed onto the margins of the pool and reflect thin nodding stems with flower buds into the dark, tannic-colored waters.

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Even the more exposed central outcrops provide a toehold for plants. The edges of shallow pools and water-filled dips harbor tufted bulrushes, bird’s eye primroses, and butterworts, while short walls and crevices shelter three-toothed and shrubby cinquefoils or where damp soils press into nooks and corners bog rosemaries, sticky false asphodels, or leatherleafs. Much of the vegetation is familiar, but I also see species that I rarely encounter further south on the shore. A bristly mat of black crowberry spreads across a thin-soiled mossy edge of inner rock. Common to exposed northern and low arctic landscapes, the crowberry creeps across the ground with short reddish stems that bear whorls of spike-like green leaves and eventually wine-red berries that gradually darken to black. 

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An alpine or bog bilberry with urn-shaped pink flowers and blue-green oval leaves fills out a mossy nook further down on the rock. Also known as an alpine blueberry, like the black crowberry, the bilberry is a woody, low-growing circumpolar shrub that is critically imperiled or imperiled in Minnesota and Michigan respectively and entirely absent from Wisconsin.8 Circling around the central outcrops, I also spot a few arrow-grasses lurking in a fissure with water-logged mosses and lakeshore sedges. The nearly foot-tall arrow-grasses have lightly reddish or yellow-green stalks girdled by short alternating stems bearing tiny bulbous flowers with peeling rose-tinged clefts at the base. Plump and tender, the flowers are topped by glimmering tufts of whitish stigmas and on one plant have begun to elongate into slender fruit capsules. Though inconspicuous, the arrow-grasses have an especially novel look.    

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In many places around the lake, the shore takes its character mainly from the appearance of its bedrock, whether it be light or dark, smooth or angular, low-lying or tall. As I move between different destinations on the lake’s northern shore, the sight of bird’s eye primroses, three-toothed cinquefoils, harebells, and other familiar species provides a reassuring continuity and makes it easier to settle into each new place without recreating my connections from scratch. The black crowberries, bilberries, and arrow-grasses, on the other hand, speak to the role that even subtle variations in vegetation can play in defining the appeal of a distinct stretch of shore. 

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By now, I’ve only come about a third of the distance when driving clockwise around the lake from Duluth and the small worries that shadowed the early days of my trip lie behind me: my old car will break down, the campgrounds will all be full, I’ll slip on the rock, have ceaseless rain, drop my camera, or receive an emergency call about my pets back home. Occasionally during long hours of driving, I wonder if the time I devote to circling around the lake couldn’t be better spent getting to know a single place. Yet each place offers a unique source of discovery. By the time it reaches Neys, my journey has found a steadiness and ease, steeped in appreciation for the distinct homecoming that each stretch of the shore extends. 

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For years I yearned to replicate around the lake the same instinctive rightness of presence that I knew on the Swedish coast. Yet eventually I understood that, despite the overlap in many plant species and bedrock types, unlike the Swedish coast the Superior shore had always been a place that I’ve had to intentionally get to know. As such, it imparts a different kind of grounding, one that lies not only in the land itself but also—and, at this point, perhaps primarily—in the journey of exploring and coming to know it. Each of the dozen places or so that I return to holds its own resonance and promise, mattering far more than the actual time I spend in it. As I continue to journey along the shore, over time a new landscape of intimacy and devotion springs up. Slowly but surely, the lake roots me down more fully in my own being.

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At the sound of a freight train rumbling on the hillsides behind Ashburton Bay, I turn to see a long line of cars stalking the tracks between the two ghost towns of Port Coldwell and Jackfish. Port Coldwell nestles in a narrow inlet to the peninsula’s east and got its start in the early 1880s as a fishing station and supply depot for the construction of the railway.9 The coal-burning steam locomotives of the time refilled their boilers at regular intervals from water towers along the route. Once the first trains passed through in late 1885, the town became a watering stop and source of fresh fish that was served railway dining cars and moved on ice to distant cities in eastern Canada and the United States.10 As fishing operations expanded in the 1920s, Port Coldwell boasted over one hundred residents and a school, chapel, and boarding house. Within decades, however, overfishing and the spread of the sea lamprey had devastated fish stocks and the need for watering stops had disappeared with the switch to diesel locomotives.11 By the early 1960s, the town had lost its entire population. 

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A similar fate befell Jackfish, a fishing village and railroad supply depot to the west. Larger than Port Coldwell, Jackfish also served as a pulpwood harbor, coaling station, and transshipment port for coal that arrived by freighter from Pennsylvania and was moved on railcars to Schreiber and other sidings where trains refueled along the shore. Though seemingly destined for permanence, like its smaller relation, Jackfish eventually ended up abandoned. Homes and buildings knotted through with memory and spirit were plundered for wood or left to rot and be reclaimed by weeds and wild growth.12 Neys Provincial Park takes its name from a former railway stop called Neys Siding on its northern border, a reminder of a fleeting era that once connected a remote stretch of the Ontario shore to urban centers to both the east and west. 

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Once the whistle of the train fades, I wander inland onto the trail through the forest. The understory behind the outcrops is even more sumptuous than that behind the cove, a storybook world awash in mossy boulders jeweled in sparkling drops. Spruce saplings, Labrador teas, starflowers, and twinflowers dress springy mounds of feather and sphagnum moss while ghost pipes and one-flowered wintergreens bow in dips. The Labrador teas have shed their flowers, but at their tips bear fresh whorls of long, pale green leaves with wooly white undersides. With new shoots sprouting from rhizomes and branches that root down in the sphagnum, the shrubs spread in thickets across the mossy mounds. I sink my hand into the moss and finger the spongy wetness for a tender shoot, then stand up and wander between the trunks until I stumble into a small, sun-sprayed clearing.

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Magically airy and light, the clearing holds a low tumble of boulders edged in mint-green clouds of reindeer lichen and Labrador tea. I stand in the sun gazing at its shrubs and stones and the wispy branches that move gently to and fro on a nearby birch. Every boulder and pillow of reindeer lichen seems to brim with a mesmerizing clarity and for brief moments the rocks and air, trees, mosses, and I all become part of the same spellbinding lightness. Once the reverie is broken, I aimlessly amble about until I come across a boulder with an elegant hat of haircap moss. Haircap mosses form one of the most enchanting components of the ground mat in the boreal forests that encircle the Arctic tundra and in Sweden are called bear mosses after their use by bears to soften their dens.13

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The boulder includes both the wirier bright green common haircap and the stockier bluish-green juniper haircap, each species creating a distinct colony of straight, unbranched stems with spiraling leaves. The juniper haircaps all appear to be males and are topped by red, rosette-shaped splash cups that collect beads of rain or dew into which sperm cells are released. Yet haircaps also spread by cloning, which probably explains the uniform colony on the boulder.14 In contrast, the common haircap colony includes both male and female plants, the former with less showy cups. Two dozen or so fertilized female plants have grown thin burgundy stalks topped by pale auburn capsules. The capsules are initially covered by hoods with long hairs that protect the spores inside from drying out; hence the name haircap mosses. By now, the hoods have fallen off and the capsules opened round mouths to release their spores to the wind in search of moist nubs of soil in which to germinate.15 

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The boulder in front of me seems to exist for the sole purpose of providing a substrate for a superbly crafted array of lilliputian forms, which in addition to the haircaps includes a light fringe of pixie cup lichen and mound of pincushion moss near its base. A leafy liverwort clads a nearby rotting piece of wood, a soft shag of short stems bearing dense rows of lightly translucent leaves with tiny lobes at their tips. The boreal forest appeals to me partly because it holds its life forms close to the ground, offering a richness of mosses, shrubs, and flowers that make up for what they lack in stature with an intricacy that encourages me to bend low and look closely. 

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I finally brush the damp earth and needles from my knees and make my way back onto the lakeside rock. An expansive plain stretches south with shimmering swells of pinkish rock along the water. There, on an easily wave-washed platform I quickly find what I’m looking for: a sweeping, block-like rectangular pattern with long bands and streaks painted by the rough stroke of a giant brush across the rock. An outcrop slightly to the south displays a second, even more striking block-like pattern, it too extending for dozens of feet and featuring linear bands composed of minerals in different sizes and colors. “Spectacular Blocks,” Ontario geologist Al MacTavish had called the large patterns during a second Institute on Lake Superior Geology field trip that I attended a few years ago. 

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Magma had entered the volcano’s chamber in great pulses that created turbulent currents that sorted minerals according to density and size.16 Heavier minerals such as black amphibole and lighter minerals such as nepheline thus ended up in distinct flowing bands. Additional bands developed from layers of less fluid magma that gathered in portions of the magma chamber and along its cooler walls.17 Earthquakes and tremors later caused layers to fracture and slump from the walls into the chamber's hotter center, where they created layered blocks that were softened and partially mixed by currents. The parallel bands in the rectangular patterns preserve the these layers, each mineral-written line an inscription from the deep that reveals the magma chamber at an instant in geological time.

 

While some bands are thinner and more finely grained and grayish-brown or peach-colored, others are wider and more coarsely grained and boldly colored. Wandering around the second rectangular block, I see black tendrils of amphibole meandering around red daubs of natrolite or orangish fragments of weathered rock. Where the surface has chipped along a fracture, stark white syenite surrounds coins of red natrolite and charcoal-like spikes of black amphibole, some over one inch long and others no larger than specs. All minerals start out black and only slowly acquire color after being exposed to oxygen as the rock weathers or cleaves apart. For eons the coins and bands lay buried in the dark, indistinguishable until the air drew out their colors and painted the rock’s surface.

By now, the sun has moved higher in the sky and begun to bleach the colors on the rock and bathe the furrows between the syenite’s humps. Yet the clarity of the mineral grains remains startling. Around the block’s edges, billowing smoke-gray streaks swirl across ashen syenite, likely remnants, MacTavish had said, of amphibole-rich bands that flowed within syenitic magma that moved chaotically around the block. Phantoms from the stirrings of a distant underworld, the bands offer glimpses into the tumultuous process of the coast’s creation. The longer I study the block, the more its swirls and bands stir a deepening reverence for the forces that created this stretch of the shore. I know that my steps alone won’t erode its pattern, but I instinctively walk around its edges and try not to step on its colorful crystals and bands.

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The outcrops showcase some of the most impressive designs that I see in rocks anywhere around the lake. But though some motifs are conspicuous, many are smaller and harder to spot from a distance. Long stretches of rock also display fairly few contrasts in color or texture. I loop around looking for my favorite patterns, backtracking when suspecting I’ve gone too far. A flat swath of smooth pinkish rock is covered in small, irregular pitted red splotches. Elsewhere, wispy gray blobs and splotches of gabbro appear in the paler syenite, as do blobs of syenite in the darker gabbro, likely remnants, geologist believe, in some cases of older blocks of rock that began to break apart and melt in the chamber and in others of the mingling of the two magmas in the chamber.18 Surely, the swirls and splotches that I see represent a mere fraction of those concealed under the lake or the mosses and soils of the inland forest.

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As I walk south, the outcrops continue to sit low along the water and either rise gradually inland or pinch off to boulder-strewn recesses. But eventually the coast grows steeper, blockier, and more fractured. Massive angular slopes climb out of the lake, topped by mountain ash, cherry, and birch. The odd purple rattlesnake-root with a tall glaucous stem and long, hairy purple flower buds grows in a moist shrubby patch. Before long, however, I approach the end of the self-guided trail at a u-shaped cove with a boulder beach. 

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On the cove’s far side, chunky black gabbro abruptly gives way to a gently mounded slope of syenite that sweeps a short distance south. Set low beneath the rising hillside, the slope descends lakeward with flowing blends of black stain and green lichen that give way near the water to an ethereally smooth band of pale pink rock. Somewhere within the depths of the pale rock, conspicuous minerals may await the workings of weathering to emerge into the air and reveal the hidden scripts under the surface of what I see. Yet for now, the band remains perfectly polished and clean, revealing the land as I imagine it looked soon after the glaciers’ retreat, when nothing but bare humps of syenite slipped quietly into the lake.

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