Isle Royale ReflectionI don't remember it as well as I'd like to. Things were lost in the moments and anxieties and tears and laughs and days and hours that passed between then and now. I remember how my legs ached after eleven miles of walking. I remember going to bed before sunset and waking to see the stars. I remember the way the crickets leapt in great arching loops in front of us as we walked along the ridge. I remember the cave we hiked to, the moss, the trees where I tried to find faces and hands. I remember the juniper trees, their roots gnarled hands that held onto cliffsides. I remember the flies that landed on my wrists and eyelids as I wrote and drew. I remember lying on the dock, watching the sky rotate in a great circle above my head, listening to the water lick the sides of the dock below me. I remember imagining that the rocks had come to life and were playing some kind of game beneath me. I remember the mosquitos that crept out of hiding in the shade, in the night, and bite our necks and noses and ankles. I remember the great noise we heard one night, after flashes of rain and thunder and lightning, that we decided was a moose, an animal we never saw, but could imagine. I remember it all, and I miss it, as generators and phone lines and sirens buzz and blare outside my window. - Penelope Griffioen, 2023
PoetryWhen I was eighteen but still a baby we boarded a boat and slipped down the Keweenaw Waterway like a tear. We passed factories and playgrounds and big glass hotels. Then the lake opened up and swallowed the sky with it, revealing a wide world of wild, unbroken blue. Six hours passed. The island appeared like a sleeping animal in the distance: soft, sloping back, nose nestled in the water. As we approached, I could see paths that spread into the land like veins. On the shore people were moving and laughing and unpacking and departing. We watched them unloading supplies on the docks: crates of cereal and cans of beer and boxes of raincoats. There was a swell of life, warm and bright against the noble darkness of the forest, the still and empty world of the dead which we had just departed. Lake Superior was the River Styx and we were Persephone and we were once again alive. For lunch there was beef jerky and dried papaya. We made camp at the mouth of a hill. Evening came and I walked to Scoville Point: three miles in the near-dusk while Spotted Sandpipers bobbed on the waves and blisters bloomed on the back of my heels. Dusk lingered on the island. As I lay awake, the watercolor sky held onto light at its edges. Mosquitos fluttered incessantly between the tent and the rainfly. Lit by the fluorescent white shadow of an electronic lantern, you read. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. When Grandpa died it was May and you wrote his obituary in the garden, perfumed by towering daffodils and zinnias and sunflowers that he planted. Nature felt violent in its beauty. You grew your hair long like the skin of a lion. The sun finally slipped away and I felt childhood running from me into the night, grief of things still unlost resting heavy in the sky. I awoke after midnight to gaze upon the tapestry of stars. To watch leaves that caught the wind and danced to the ground. To hear the quiet coo of all the sleeping things. In the mornings I made cinnamon oatmeal and you drank coffee and we hung our wet socks on a clothesline. I passed the days hiking paths of broken rocks on the shoreline, or else lying prostrate on the earth while the wind loosened my mind. I saw creatures in the clouds, great faces bearded with moss in the trees. You swam in the lake, dashing sunlight and water in your hair. One evening I sat near the water. The ranger in the Rock Harbor store was singing to herself, and I could hear her through the open door. The day before fiddle music rang through the window of a cabin. The notes were sweet and wound together like colored thread, tangled up in the wind. At night, loon cries woke me again and again, shrill calls echoing out from one end of the lake to the other. I hadn’t heard such sounds since I was five, when, in the dark-lake night, I sobbed at the mournful wailing. You promised that the noise marked the coming of something magical. The next morning we walked through the burn. Here the land was a scalded white bone. Wolf scat dotted the trail. Blackened husks of trees guarded the mountain like giants. Fireweed grew in the ashes, freckling the colorless landscape with purple petals. We passed a rock with edges so straight that I wondered what force had birthed it: surely nature was incapable of producing something so stern. The world crept back to life as we ascended: vines and lichens and small, delicate ferns began to appear. We entered a narrow, sunlight meadow on the mountain’s spine, and a vast expanse of blue water extended on each side of us, interrupted only by small islands and large, lakestained rocks. We walked for hours. I could hear the wind and the water and the subtle scramble of tiny animals hidden by the brush. Before me, crickets leapt in great arching curves from flower to flower, and I felt like a giant, something huge and powerful moving through a tiny landscape that was not mine. We found thimbleberries, delicate and warm. Blueberries the size of dewdrops. The landscape arched into something greater and more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. The final night arrived with the promise of rain. We walked in the twilight to look for moose, in the mossy corners of the forest where the air was thick with humidity and insects. Nightfall soon drove us to bed. There is no rain, I thought. But then there was. And we could hear it, licking the rainfly, weaving through the walls, puddling on the picnic table. Something large moved into the clearing. A moose, perhaps, or some other great creature, undisturbed by our presence. I thought of the peace of this place, the magnificence that only in this final moment had it rained. And on the shore, the waves on the black rocks reached out with white-tipped fingers for an embrace. As though they had not seen the rock in weeks, months–as though they were starving to touch it again. The water swelled: the blue more frequently interrupted by moonlit water diamonds and curling white surf. The cold circled in, rushing off of the lake. Wind blew through the juniper and rock grass, disturbing only the tips of the pine trees, leaving the rest of it still. The water is wrinkled today. Something loud is I wonder how the land would change I can see Isle Royale Light reflects in each We let a cloud And on Isle Royale 
About the ArtistPenelope Griffioen was a teen artist-in-residence in July of 2023. She writes nonfiction prose and poetry, with her work primarily focusing on setting and the natural world of the Midwest. Penelope grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and attends Kenyon College, where she studies English and French literature. She has had work published in DePaul’s Blue Book and is currently an associate with the Kenyon Review. She cannot wait to someday return to Isle Royale.
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Last updated: April 7, 2026