Michigan, Day Four

We would spend Tuesday kayaking along Pictured Rocks, but I had done some poor planning, and while we spent the night in Grand Marais, we had to make a 9:00 a.m. departure in Munising, sixty-five miles away. So we left Grand Marais at the crack of dawn and drove along deserted Northern Michigan roads, through some of the densest fog I have ever seen, with two enormous sandhill cranes along the side of the road as our only witnesses. We arrived in plenty of time (I had been kicking myself for not arranging things better, and compensated by getting on the road at six a.m.) and had a mediocre breakfast at a cheerfully decorated and, thankfully, well-heated (it was 52 degrees outside) place called The Dogpatch in downtown Munising. A few minutes before nine, we arrived at Northern Waters Adventures on the edge of town.

Northern Waters was little more than a giant barn, most of it filled with junk that seemed to have only remote relevance to kayaking. We checked in with Linda, who behaved like she was the owner, though did not introduce herself as such, then met with the rest of what would be our group – a friendly, talkative man from Wisconsin with his two daughters, a high-schooler and a tween, and a quiet couple in their forties, from Ohio if memory serves. Our guide was a tall, lanky fellow named Meir who spoke with the unmistakable monotone of someone whose lack of enthusiasm for anything that goes on around him was induced by many years of regular marijuana smoking. Actually, I don’t even know if that was how his name was spelled. Even though Meir looked too young to have been born in the sixties, I could easily imagine a pair of pot-smoking pinko hippies naming their son “Mir” back in the day. We had already signed a bunch of forms absolving the outfit and its guides from responsibility for all kinds of terrible things that were sure to happen to us once we were out on the water, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should have been more worried than I was.

I have to give credit where credit is due, however – Meir sure knew his boats and his paddling. Once we got to our put-in point at Miner’s Beach, he gave us a much longer and far more detailed primer on kayaking on open water than we ever got on the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick last year, though that outfit seemed more professional and better organized in every way. Meir gave us detailed instructions on what to do if the boat flips, why it was not a good idea to push the paddle too far back in the water, how to give the paddle extra momentum by executing a punching movement with your airborne hand, and dozens of other useful tips. Just from that half-hour or so on Miner’s Beach, I feel like I am a better paddler.

Evidently, there had been some conflicting marine forecasts earlier that morning, but by the time we were finally on the water, the weather could not have been more perfect. There was not a shred of cloud in the sky, there was only a slightest hint of a breeze, and the water was a deep, bright and amazingly clear turquoise. Bizarre though the comparison may seem, it reminded me the most of a photograph an old friend showed me many years ago of her vacation to the Cayman Islands.

Once we were on the water, we first paddled west to Miner’s Castle, one of the most prominent rock formations in Pictured Rocks, a rough stone pillar of sorts sticking up from a high outcropping that buts out into the lake. Near the pillar, a hundred feet away or so, there is a flat platform. Another, similar pillar had once stood there, but it collapsed into the lake a dozen or so years ago. You can still buy postcards in town that show both of them.

After seeing Miner’s Castle, we turned around and paddled east, where most of the otherworldly rock formations of Pictured Rocks were. The cliffs of Pictured Rocks themselves are predominantly sandstone, but the soil of the surrounding area is rich in a great variety of minerals, and since sandstone is very porous, the many underground streams and rivers carry the minerals to the surface, where they oxidize, creating a staggering variety of the most unusual colors. In fact, this was the first explanation for the name “Pictured” Rocks (Colored Rocks would have been more precise) I had heard on my first visit two years ago. We would hear an alternative one the following day, as well as having the unplanned opportunity to see them from a slightly different vantage point.

In the meantime, we were paddling right under the towering cliffs, following the jagged coastline. The wind had picked up a bit, but the paddling was still relatively easy and our loose group was making decent progress. Attempting to describe the rocks in detail would be futile, and photographing them, which I would do the following day, only slightly less so. Suffice it to say that they are overwhelming. Imagine plopping the Red Rocks of Sedona, AZ into Lake Superior and you’ll begin to get the general idea.

A little over an hour into the trip, we stopped for lunch at the end of a beach, and Meir, in a long-winded version liberally sprinkled with “and stuff like that” told us the story of the Ojibwa Indians, specifically the pacifist offshoot on Grand Island, which we could see to the northwest; the story which, through the diaries of Henry Schoolcraft eventually made it into Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. After lunch, we spent almost three more hours on the water, seeing more gorgeous cliffs and beautiful weather, though the wind continued to kick up steadily through the day. By the last half-hour, we were starting to feel the day’s work in our arms and back. We took out well after three, the group helped Meir load the boats onto the trailer, and broke up in the parking lot with smiles and handshakes. J. and I stayed on the beach for another hour or so, swimming in a bracing but wonderfully refreshing and shockingly clean water.

Our lodging for the night was Sunset Motel, another minimalist establishment. It was a little further from the center of town than I had hoped, and not walking distance to anything, but it was spotless, and true to its name – every room looked directly out onto Munising Bay and Grand Island beyond, with benches and picnic tables placed in the front with the express purpose of allowing guests to watch the sunset. Strangely, it also proved to have one of the most comfortable mattresses I have ever slept on, orders of magnitude better than any other hotel, and even better than our very decent one at home.

We had dinner at the improbably named Sydney’s Shark Bay Bar. Located right on the main drag just before downtown Munising proper starts, it is probably the best known restaurant in town, or at least the most written-about. I had seen several mentions. The owner, apparently, has a life-long fascination with Australia, and though she has never been there, she decided to give her restaurant an Australian theme, complete with kangaroo crossing signs and old license plates from New South Wales. The main dining room had a decidedly institutional, cafeteria-like feel, but the bar area was cozy and inviting, with a real oak bar that curved around one side of the room, seventies-vintage faux leather captain’s chairs instead of stools, and several candle-lit booths around the perimeter, into one of which we settled. The menu was extensive, mostly standard pub grub, but several varieties of local fish – they had walleye and lake perch in addition to whitefish – were featured prominently. On our waitress’s recommendation, we stuck with whitefish – apparently, it had been pulled out of the lake a scant few hours earlier. J., who was starting to get tired of road food, made the mistake of ordering hers broiled – it was overcooked and dry – but I went with fried, and it was delicious. It wasn’t heavily breaded fish-n-chips style, being lightly dusted with cornmeal instead, and I finally got a good idea of whitefish’s flavor. It is a mild fish, not particularly complex, but when it is as fresh as it was on my plate, it had a pleasant, clean taste reminiscent of cod, and had a distinct scent of a Lake Superior breeze. A very different animal than it is in smoked form.

Our evening’s beverage was also one of the more satisfying of the trip – the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, made by the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland. Sydney’s had it on tap and advertised it with large posters depicting the beer’s namesake. The Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the best-known bits of local lore. It was the last ship to have wrecked on Lake Superior to date, in November of 1975, killing all 29 people on board. At just under 800 ft., it was also the largest ship on the lake at the time of its launch. On the night of November 10, 1975 off the coast of Canada, it encountered thirty-five-foot waves and 60+ mph winds, took on water, broke in two and sank just fifteen miles from Whitefish Bay which would have provided sufficient shelter for the ship to wait out the storm. Gordon Lightfoot recorded a song about the wreck a couple of years later. Today, the story is told often as the closing (hopefully) chapter of a long history of shipwrecks on Lake Superior, as well as a reminder of the savagery the lake is capable of – something that I admit was a little hard to imagine as we paddled along Pictured Rocks in light breeze and bright sunlight earlier in the day. The beer named after the ship was delicious – pitch-dark, thick and robust, it had a faint malty sweetness around its very porter-like bitter core, but also had more hoppy notes on top than a typical English porter. We enjoyed it thoroughly.

After dinner, unable to stay indoors on another of Michigan’s interminable evenings, we wandered downtown, largely dead, but home to the least expected and most welcome establishments in Munising – the Falling Rocks Café. A coffeehouse-cum-bookstore, it served delicious coffee roasted somewhere in the general area, a good selection of books, and lots of comfortable chairs and tables at which to sip and read. We resolved to come back for breakfast.

Upon our return to the motel, we watched the sunset – I finally realized my dream of having J. see one. Though it set over Grand Island rather than directly over the water, it was still beautiful, and the relative lack of wind, though it took something away from the previous night’s drama, helped J. to stay warm long enough to see the entire thing.