"Removals and Remainders on Isle Royale"

TRACY ZEMAN

by Tracy Zeman, Artist-in-Residence, 2022

An accounting of origins¹

I visited Isle Royale to be near its wolves, to hear them at night, to tread their same ground. I knew it was unlikely that I would see them-- almost no one does. And I knew what it meant that they were there. The islands' wolves are, in a sense, remainders of previous ecologies, of when colder winters meant more lake ice on which to cross to the islands, and of even earlier centuries when wolves roamed the continent from coast to coast before settler-colonialism and the subsequent persecution and elimination of wolves from most of the lower 48 states. The archipelago itself, tucked into the northwest corner of Lake Superior, is also a remainder-- a remainder of previous geological eras dominated by ancient lava flows then mile-thick glaciers expanding and receding. Donna Haraway, in Staying with the Trouble, recounts stories of "finite flourishing" in damaged worlds by illustrating the complex relationships between things.² In lines of connection, in endings and beginnings, there is both living and dying, and opportunities to co-inhabit and to seek out other, less deadly patterns.³ By tracing the outlines of wolf, rock, loon, in a partially wild and partially constructed space, I map patterns old and new.

Isle Royale has always been remote and has never been easily accessible. My trip to the islands begins with a 10-hour drive, north from Detroit and then across the Straits of Mackinac, the four-mile channel connecting Lakes Michigan and Huron.

connection as curative⁴

On my way west through the upper peninsula, I visit Seney National Wildlife Refuge hoping to see common loons and trumpeter swans. In summer, the loons are unmistakable in their breeding plumage, sharp black heads with red eyes and intricate linear patterns of black and white on their necks and backs. For decades, Seney was home to the world's oldest known loon breeding pair. The couple, over 25 seasons, hatched 32 chicks together. I don't find loons or swans today; the park is under construction, so I walk a short marsh loop near the visitor's center and flush a green heron into the trees.

I complete the last two hours of that leg the next morning, Superior slipping through the firs when the road curves north. I pass over the canal on the Portage Lake Bridge, leaving Houghton behind for Hancock, and head up the Keweenaw Peninsula. My friend Kerrie's green shingled cottage sits on Superior where the peninsula bends east and both sunrises and sunsets build and break over the big lake. Later I pick up my husband Matt at the regional Hancock airport. From the chain link fence, I watch him deplane with a dozen other travelers. We stay one more night with Kerrie, eating Superior lake trout and pickled beets from his garden. We drink beer and play cribbage on his enclosed porch while Superior's waters curl over rock outside. Early the next day we drive into Houghton to board the National Park Service's Ranger III to sail to Isle Royale.

crossing the River of Stars⁵

During the three-hour journey, the lake assembles and confers in waves, in the deepest fathoms. I know some of what lies beneath, the deepwater sculpin, a glacial relict; shipwrecks, over 300 of them; a long scar from a failed continental rift that brought layers of lava to the earth's surface but did not create an ocean. After three hours, a few rocky islands begin to disrupt the horizon's long gray-blue. Today everyone on the Ranger disembarks at Mott Island, an outer island, because another ship, the Queen, has broken down at Rock Harbor, one of two visitor's centers in the park. Passengers board smaller National Park Service boats to cross the bay. A Canadian couple on our boat spots a radio-collared moose and her calf in the water near a little island eating foliage from low branches. Our first moose sighting. I pass my binoculars around so everyone can see them in detail.

At Rock Harbor Matt and I unload and then reload our gear onto an even smaller boat for our final segment of the trip out to the Dassler cabin. Our home for the next two weeks, the Dassler sits on a rocky promontory 30 feet above Tobin Harbor on the far northeastern edge of the archipelago. Ranger Dylan Horn steers us around the bluff into a shallow cove and cautiously-- raising and lowering the motor-- guides the boat onto the narrow rocky shore. Scoville, a tapered wave-washed point, defines one side of the cove, and the bluff towers on the other. We unload packs and boxes onto the rocks and carry them up through the woods while Ranger Horn unlocks the cabin.

Built in 1905, the cabin was occupied by the Dassler family until 1990 when their life-lease expired and the park repurposed the structure to house visiting artists. Life-leases were extended to cabin owners and their children when the island became a National Park, granting them occupancy for the duration of their lives. The lichen-speckled stone fireplace was added in 1947. We'll use it to warm the main room on cold nights and mornings with wood collected from the brush piles scattered around the bluff. There is no electricity or running water. An outhouse is located down the bluff, and we drink and cook with filtered lake water on a propane camp stove. At night we light lanterns and don headlamps. The battery powered AM/FM radio Matt brought picks up stations from the Keweenaw, Ontario, Illinois, and Minnesota. Loons float in the harbor on that first day and most of the days after.

Isle Royale, or Minong, was occupied seasonally by indigenous people beginning at least 5,000 years ago. During the fur trapping era, in the 1700 and 1800s, the French, then British, used it as a trading post. In 1843, the United States acquired the islands from the Ojibwe during a period of predatory and one-sided land agreements and cessions. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1940, established Isle Royale as a National Park, though its dedication was delayed until 1946 by World War II. In 1980, the park was designated as a UNESCO international biosphere reserve. Over those centuries, the islands incurred and accumulated many removals, devastations, and partial recoveries, each occurrence containing numerous beginnings and endings. But some beginnings are older still.

Build & compress the caustic edge⁶

Isle Royale, a volcanic archipelago of over 450 islands, comprising 850 square miles of land above and below the lake surface, began forming over a billion years ago. For millions of years lava upwelled through fissures in a failed continental rift and then spread and cooled, again and again, creating extensive sheets of volcanic rock. These volcanic flood basalts contained feldspar, olivine, and magnetite intrusions. I find threads of red, green, and silver-black in the rock at Scoville Point. Lighting, webbing, mapping. As this lava slowly accumulated in layers, the empty spaces in between filled in with gravel and sediment from streams in between upwelling periods. Over time this sedimentary material transformed into thin rust-red sheets wedged in among the thicker black basalt formations. Eventually, more than 100 individual lava flows resulted in a total thickness of over 10,000 feet.

only more and more openings and no bottom lines⁷

The thick series of flood basalts overlaid a great alluvial fan on an ancient ocean floor. Glaciation, compression, and depression, over deep spans of time, caused the two edges of this formation to rise above the surface of the water. Those two edges are Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula, mirrors, parenthetical sisters. A vast portion of Lake Superior, the lake all other Great Lakes can fit inside, occupies this synclinal basin. I sketch the structure in my notebook-- a high-side bowl resting within a flatter, wider, low-sided bowl. Isle Royale and the Keweenaw and their adjacent fault lines make the edges of the higher bowl, and Thunder Bay and the Marquette Iron Range form the rim of the wider bowl. Hard clear Superior occupies the deeps.

The rock here, like much of the bedrock in the Superior region, is Precambrian, because glaciers scraped the surface down to its origins. Ice sheets moved mostly parallel to the islands' ridges, and narrow lakes formed in many of the deeper depressions and removals the glaciers left behind. This topography is called a "ridge and trough" formation. Seen from the sky, the archipelago looks like a parallel series of elongated shapes alternating between land and water. The elongated forms or fingers are dominated by the Greenstone Ridge-- a mountain spine running through the center of the island chain. The ridges continue into Superior and sometimes surface to form slender islands. The greenstone flows that underlie the main ridge are among the largest and thickest lava flows found on the planet.⁸ An isomorphic inheritance shaped like a crouching wolf. Glint, peak, redouble.⁹ I watch a common merganser in Tobin Harbor fish in strong wind and waves. Space and time blur in patterns of rock and water.

When the islands were still submerged, hot-mineral bearing solutions, including dissolved copper, filled depressions and cavities in the volcanic rock. This process left behind the rich veins of pure copper found throughout the Lake Superior region. This copper was first mined by indigenous people over 4,500 years ago, and many of the most ancient sites are located along the Greenstone Ridge.

The islands' corrugated topography manifests in bare rocky promontories on the northeast side and lines of forest on the southwest side. Aspen and birch forests occupy the ridges and dark green coniferous forests spread through the troughs. In the September woods, the pink lady slippers have already bloomed. Rafts of mergansers skip across the water in the cove between the cabin and Scoville as they corral minnows to eat. The glow from the Passage Lighthouse reaches us as dark comes. This first night Matt cooks dinner on the camp stove and later stays awake listening to the radio and watching a storm cross Lake Superior as I sleep. Our first morning is cold and windy. A fleet of ducks appears black in the muted light. A winter wren forages in a brush pile near the cabin. Darting in and out, it pops up for a moment as I head down to the water.

dark gnome

little summer

Sitting outside early in the morning on the bluff overlooking the harbor I hear a pileated woodpecker's high piping. This recognition, I think, is what Robin Wall Kimmerer means when she describes the once shared and common "language of animacy" that enlivens our world. Kimmerer is concerned, as am I, that this language "teeters on extinction" just like many species.¹⁰ The twin disappearances, the knowledge of sounds and behaviors knotted with the corporeal bodies of animal others, create positive feedback loops. As we lose species, their sounds and behaviors slip from memory. As we cease knowing the languages of extant species, we don't notice and maybe no longer consciously care when they vanish. Their forms overlayed on ancient geological foundations are shifting more rapidly than the processes that created them. I sketch the harbor and the moon, parts of the island still in shadow, the far trees still black. Sunlight slowly brings the contours into sharp relief.

Affliction has driven me to the sweet fields¹¹

For thousands of years, the archipelago was a seasonal destination for indigenous people. Ancient tribes mined copper, and later the Ojibwe hunted, trapped, fished, and made maple sugar. The harsh conditions prevented year-round occupancy. After Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes Basin, degrading ecosystems and fundamentally altering local economies, indigenous activities on the islands began to dwindle and disintegrate. Eventually the Ojibwe only inhabited seasonal encampments on Sugar Mountain to tap maple trees and a fishing camp on Grace Island. Though Isle Royale appears wild and does have vast swaths of forest and shoreline untouched by roads or manmade structures, wilderness is often made rather than discovered. Here, first the Ojibwe were removed and later the fisherfolk. I see a redstart fan its tail feathers in the tree outside the cabin's kitchen window. Red-breasted mergansers swim near the rust-red rocks in the cove. Accidents and kin. Foxglove climbs in white, purple, and pink.

In the late 1800s and mid-way through the 1900s "nearly every sheltered cove had its fish houses and log cabins" where fisherfolk lived from spring until fall.¹² They filled barrels full of salted fish for export to the mainland. After decades of intense fishing, species numbers began to wane from overharvesting, and once the sea lamprey invaded the Great Lakes from the Atlantic Ocean through the Welland Canal in the early to mid 1900s, the industry completely broke down. The lake trout population collapsed, and in the early to mid-20^th century, they wavered on the edge of extinction for decades. The lamprey also impacted the white fish. With their two primary catch fish depleted, fisherman turned to herring, causing their numbers to plummet. Eventually lampricides applied in spawning streams brought the lamprey under control and lake trout could conservatively be fished again. Herring and white fish too. These rises and declines, patterns of abundance and scarcity, define the settler-colonial narrative, one we still live in and under. Unable to make a living, many families left the islands during the downturn, but some kept their camps and returned through the decades.

The Dassler was never a fishing camp. It was always a seasonal retreat from city life for the family. Every night we wash dishes in the cabin sink. We refill the large two-part filter with lake water. Other cabins in the harbor have propane stoves and lights. Peter Oikarinen writes in Island Folk about seeing their lights aglow up and down Tobin Harbor years ago. Property on the archipelago was privatized through the early 1900s, but by 1935 the federal government had purchased most of the large segments in order to preserve the natural rugged quality of the island.¹³ Those who did not want to sell, like the Dasslers, were offered life leases. Decades later, there are not many occupied cabins left in the park. Cottage remains persist on little islands and along the harbor's shores. Old docks have been submerged, large rocks placed on top.

known from form

form from

traces

We hike over 12 miles on our first full day in the park. On the two-mile trail from Scoville to Rock Harbor a fox crosses our path. We slow to watch it, and it turns and watches us, its black feet on wet rocks. Park Service staff warned us not to leave our shoes outside the cabin because foxes will steal them, hauling them off for their kits to play with. Thick copresence.¹⁴ Large-leafed aster and thimbleberry dominate the understory. Thimbleberries are similar to raspberries but more rounded, like a cap, and if they are ripe, I pick them to eat as I walk. Alder and beaked hazelnut, red and white baneberry, paper birch, and aspen are interspersed among balsam fir and white spruce. Quaking aspen moves into areas where the soil has been disturbed by fire. Tall flat-topped aster blooms in diminutive white flowers with yellow centers in swamps and woods. We follow Tobin Trail to Mount Franklin and notice where fire recently swept through the rock face, consuming trees and underbrush. Sunny areas are awash in grasshoppers, clicking and sparking as we pass. This first long walk, a primer. These islands, afloat amid "damaged but still ongoing living worlds."¹⁵

Almost half of the total healed in small knots¹⁶

Wolves on Isle Royale lead hard lives. Their bodies have been retrieved from abandoned mine pits or found starved because their teeth were too worn or too few. They are driven out of their packs when they are too old to hunt and sent wandering, scraping by on what food they can find until they perish. The dark cursive of a wolf circling on ice.¹⁷ One recovered carcass had 12 broken ribs-- nearly half the total.¹⁸ They migrated to the islands in 1948 by crossing an ice bridge from Minnesota, one of the last places in the lower 48 where they could still be found after relentless persecution in the form of bounties, trapping, poisoning, and intentionally introduced diseases.

fabric of undoing¹⁹

The numbers of island wolves, after that mid-century crossing, have escalated and plummeted in numbers over the decades. An early and misguided reintroduction in 1952 failed when four wolves too accustomed to humans were brought up from the Detroit Zoo and released. Two were shot, the third was captured and removed, and the fourth was never seen again, a drifting gray shadow against the snow.²⁰ In 1980, a peak year, 50 wolves lived on the island in five separate packs. Two years later only 14 remained after a dog infected with canine parvovirus visited the island and spread the disease to the wolves. Genetic inbreeding, due to the island geography, has resulted in crooked spines and extra ribs. Another male crossed an ice bridge in 1997, temporarily infusing new genetic material into the population, though by 2016 only two wolves remained, a father-daughter half-sibling pair that could not reproduce.

At Rock Harbor Marina we rent a motorboat to visit Bangsund, where renowned wolf researcher Dr. Rolf Peterson and his wife Candy make camp in the summer season. No trails lead there; water is the only way. I search for birds in my binoculars while Matt guides the boat down the wide harbor in the morning chill. We dock at Edison Fishery, then find Bangsund down a short, forested path that skirts the shoreline. Camp is littered with moose jaws and antlers. Many of the antlers were brought here by volunteers or park visitors, but it's the teeth and jaws that reveal the histories. Peterson and his team read moose teeth as other biologists read tree rings, making present that which is absent.²¹ From teeth, the moose's age at the time of death can be determined as well as what afflictions or diseases it might have had. These time capsules store a "record of large-scale ecological change," containing traces of radioactive carbon from nuclear weapons testing and mercury from coal burning and waste incineration.²² Golden spikes in the geological register from this type of human activity, for some scientists, signal the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, where no place is left untouched from human influence.

Rolf shows us his "bone farm"-- a patch of earth behind the cottage where he has buried still fleshy bones. The farm is covered with wire mesh held down with rocks so scavengers like foxes and ravens can't dig up the bones and drag them away. These two species are never far from the wolves in winter, the season when moose are their primary prey. Ravens arrive seconds after a kill, but foxes wait in the margins until the wolves are finished feeding. "Walk[ing] a fine line between life and death," they stay close enough to monitor the activity but far enough away not to be killed themselves. Bald eagles and gray and blue jays also share in the "hunt and the spoils."²³ Even chickadees and deer mice pick at marrow in the bones left behind. Wolves, at the zenith, help sustain the systems' animal-others.

Isle Royale researchers study moose through the wolves and wolves through the moose. Teams track wolves in the winter from a two-person airplane out of Windigo, the visitor's center on the southwestern side of the main island, and volunteers collect moose bones in the summer from Bangsund. Dr. Sarah Hoy, the lead researcher on the island, tells me that all the moose are descended genetically from two original moose that swam to the islands in the early 1900s. In recent decades moose populations on the mainland have been in steep decline. Two of the issues impacting them are a parasitic brain worm and ticks, both climate related. As the climate warms, white-tailed deer have been moving north into moose territory, bringing brain worms with them. The parasites are not fatal to host deer, but they cause neurological damage and death in moose. So, when white-tailed deer and moose populations intermingle, moose often become infected and then perish. The parasite is a leading cause of moose death in some northern ecosystems.

Winter ticks have also taken advantage of warmer winters. Longer falls have allowed them more time to find a host-- something these ticks need to survive the winter. Since their "questing" phase coincides with moose rutting season, winter ticks have increased chances of coming into close contact with moose. Individual moose can become infected with thousands of ticks in one season, severely irritating the moose and causing them, at times, to rub away their fur uncovering their white skin. These pale ghost moose then wander the winter woods, eventually dying from exposure.²⁴ While Isle Royale moose are not exposed to brain worms-- there are no deer on the islands-- they are affected by ticks. Moose weakened by ticks make easier prey for the wolves, who typically target the ill, the old, the young, and the injured.

Dr. John Vucetich, a large carnivore expert and the Michigan Technical University professor that led wolf research on the island after Dr. Peterson, tells me that as hunters ourselves, we don't usually like other species who hunt, apex predators, and over the millennia we have worked to exterminate them. Eliminating apex predators, though, leads to problems in how natural systems function. After Isle Royale's wolf population dwindled down to two, Vucetich and Peterson advocated for a reintroduction, arguing that wolves are essential for a healthy island ecosystem. Without them moose began to degrade forest habitats, and their numbers grew unsustainably. Eventually the National Park Service acted, and in 2018 four wolves were introduced. Of the four, one died and one left, walking across a 15-mile ice bridge to get back home.

her leavetaking a lean figure

Over the next two years, 15 more wolves were reintroduced, and as of this fall, in 2022, there are approximately 30 wolves on the island. We hike back out from Bangsund, listening to pileated woodpeckers rattle through the woods. We boat across the bay to Daisy Farm campground and hike out and back to Ojibwe Tower on the ridge. Up and down hillocks and valleys. Joe-pye weed flowers along stream banks and in low damp places. Prickly wild rose's elongated rose hips abound on rocky openings. From the tower, the change in forest composition from boreal to hardwood is easy to see, and these possible futures-- boat, harbor, another long walk from Rock Harbor to the cabin. Then dinner, cribbage, sleep.

Even the canoe's mouth joins our song²⁵

The cove ripples in midnight shades against the early morning's pale-purple sky. The moon is still visible as the sun begins its rise. Dragonflies patrol basalt for mosquitos. I drink warm coffee in a warm breeze and watch mergansers huddle on the rocks outside the kitchen window, then slip into the water, off on the big lake for the day. Loon song punctuates the hours. Their tremolos, yodels, wails, and laughing calls have been described by naturalists and writers as wild, otherworldly, maniacal, and wolf-like. They are, to me, unlike any other sound, and hearing them both chills and delights. Loon-like birds first appeared in the phylogenetic tree about 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, with more modern loon-incarnations surfacing 20 million years ago during the Miocene epoch.²⁶ The species has been on earth a long time and has weathered a myriad of planetary changes and shifts. However, now, like countless other bird species, they are declining in significant parts of their range because of climate change; toxins like mercury, lead, and botulism; and development in both their summering and wintering grounds.

Loons nest on cold northern lakes. Many indigenous tribes that historically occupied or presently live on the same northern lands believe that loons are liminal animals. Some think that "loons can communicate across the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals," or that they are visionary seers, perhaps due to their red eyes during breeding season.²⁷ Matt and I watch a loon take off in the harbor. They are heavier than most water birds of their size, and their bones are solid rather than hollow. This physiology means they need a long runway for taking flight, but once airborne they are strong fliers and can fly at up to 70 mph. Like other diving birds, loons have a "high tolerance for carbon dioxide," and their "oxygen needs are met not from free air in the lungs, but from the oxyhemoglobin and oxymyoglobin stored in the muscles, substances responsible for the dark color of flesh in most water fowl."²⁸ Our collective mineral bodies.²⁹

Superior's white flecked skin³⁰

While their existence depends now, in part, on our behaviors and our conservation strategies, they are, like other animals, still living "outside the bounds of human constraint."³¹ They persist outside us though our thinking about them affects how we behave toward them. I flush two pileated woodpeckers near the cabin when I open the screen door. A curious Lincoln's sparrow, heavily streaked, peaks out from the underbrush, crest raised. From the bluff we see a merganser with a large fish. Two other mergansers arrive to steal it.

Late morning, we leave for an overnight backpacking trip to Lane Cove. First, we paddle to the dock near Hidden Lake and then slide the canoe back into the trees. We stop to look at the water, and I think I see a beaver, a brown hump just above the surface, but it emerges and becomes a moose. A cow floating and sinking, eating vegetation in the lake. Emerge, submerge. Up on the ridge we spot a merlin and two snowshoe hares in their rich warm-brown summer fur. The islands' only rabbit, in winter these hares rely on their broad feet to escape the foxes that hunt them. We trek Greenstone Ridge to Mount Franklin, then begin a rapid descent to the cove. Boardwalks crisscross the valley. Beaver land. A dead deer mouse on the side of the trail is being slowly consumed by insects.

We arrive at camp in the late afternoon and set up at site five, a beautiful spot on the sheltered bay. Loons swim in late sun. Cribbage, tea. Our orange tent a sun, moon, open ebb cloud absent bloom. The woods gradually turn pink as dusk comes. We talk with a couple from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who have logged 40 miles in a few short days. A father and son at the site next to us sleep on pads with no tent. There are no stars, but we do hear wolves.

removal & remission³²

In the morning we eat oatmeal, drink coffee, then pack up and leave by 9. We climb up and out and reach the top by 11. The ridge is hot and dry. We have lunch in a woodpecker forest with downies and harries, brown creepers, red-breasted nuthatches, and blackpolls. Back on the ridge, fire hot grasshoppers and bees snap and buzz. Yarrow sprouts in the burned areas, big-headed aster, and big-leafed aster. We pull our canoe out of the trees and into the water and meet a woman from Saginaw on the dock. She's keeping her beer cold in the water beneath. We canoe back to the Dassler, nap, then take solar showers. Matt had left the black water-filled bag out on the rocks to get warm the day before. We cook omelets, eat canned pineapple, and go to bed. Perhaps, during sleep, the loons' alternate lines of connection and contact might open to us too.

Unseen energies that animate everything³³

I lie in bed listening to a northern saw-whet owl peeping. I hear the sound of waves, always. The fire I build glows in the windows, while the cabin is still dark. Deep orange-reds climb as the sun rises. Through the scope I watch a loon paddle and yodel. After breakfast we walk to Rock Harbor in the rain to meet Lynette Potvin, a National Park Service ecologist, who has agreed to spend part of the day with us. Our first stop is Raspberry Island across the bay from Rock Harbor. We make the quick trip in her boat, then walk a loop trail flanked by heavily moose-browsed mountain ash through a raspberry-spruce bog. A boardwalk leads us through the phases of bog formation, black spruce to Labrador tea to leatherleaf.

Some plants here are relicts of glacial dispersal. Usually found on tundra, these arctic disjuncts have been wildly separated from their typical geographic range. Many of Isle Royale's disjuncts are carnivorous-- pitcher plant, butterwort, and sundew with its micro, almost circular leaf blades pricked with long, fine red hairs. The hairs exude droplets of clear liquid at their tips, giving the plant its dewy name. These species can live in nitrogen-poor areas like bogs and fens because they have evolved to capture and dissolve insects to source their nitrogen. Insects land on the plants' sticky fluid-lined basal leaves, and the downward pointing hairs trap them. Eventually they drown in the liquid at the bottom, and their nitrogen is released and absorbed by the plant.

Northern paintbrush and three-toothed saxifrage are arctic disjuncts too, though not carnivorous, stranded here when the last continental ice sheet retreated. Devil's club, a rhubarb-like moist upland disjunct with large maple-ish leaves grows on the northeastern end of the island. At one time a copper mine operated here. After the miners burned the island vegetation in search of copper veins, raspberries proliferated.

surface fissures³⁴

Dogwood is everywhere. Lynette explains how their flowers explode to release their seed in all directions. She tells us about a scientist who studied the boreal chorus frog on the islands and another who laboriously mapped all the butterwort sites, including on Scoville near the Dassler. I find them later in the week in ephemeral pools among the black volcanic rock threaded with white lighting-- their lime-green basal leaves bright against the dark.

After Raspberry Island, we sail around Scoville to search for loons and retrieve beaver traps near Hidden Lake. Sheets of rain cascade off the boat roof. Lynette shows us the different loon territories on a map of Tobin Harbor. We find a few of them, bobbing on the waves. She docks and heads off to find the beaver traps scented with castor oil and baited with aspen twigs. If they find a beaver in the trap, they place it in a burlap sack and take its weight and measure its tail. Adults' tails and overall mass can fluctuate with seasonal changes. Connective lines radiate through months of sun and rain and snow. After she puts the traps in the back of the boat, the castor oil's strong fishy smell fills the cabin until we begin moving again.

On our way back to the Dassler dock, we pass an open research boat with a Kevlar canoe-- extra-light weight for portaging-- protruding. These researchers and interns need to trek farther into the woods from the harbor to search for a beaver that has been tagged. Lynette pulls up to our dock in large rollicking waves. We spend the rest of the day indoors and take a long nap after a long morning in cold rain. Matt packs. We have ramen for lunch, make a fire, then eat pasta for dinner. The cabin dims as I record my notes. We sleep in sleeping bags beneath the covers. Early in the morning we canoe into Rock Harbor for Matt to catch the Ranger back to Houghton. He waves goodbye from the deck. The sun is lemon bright.

time passes as light does³⁵

I take a shower, an actual shower that I purchase a token for in the camp store. It is the only one I take for two weeks. I buy tokens for laundry. Then I canoe back alone clean, with clean laundry, ready for another week. Water laps and laps against the canoe.

canoe shadow shadow canoe

Porous tissues and open edges³⁶

I pee outside at night among the stars, wind, and waves. In the morning, a northern flicker lands on a brush pile. I wash dishes and scan the cove for ducks. I fetch water now instead of Matt. I read at the table or in the wicker rocker with my headlamp in the early morning or at night. I sweep the cabin, consume its library, and listen to the loons and the rain. The loons are quieter and fewer now.

In the settlement era many riverine systems around the Great Lakes were transformed into reservoirine systems by dams. And those dams prevented fish, including sturgeon, from returning to their spawning sites. Hydroelectric dams, pollution, dredging, stream straightening, harbor construction, and bycatch mortality led to sturgeon population declines in Lake Superior tributaries and the big lake itself. For decades sturgeon were viewed as a nuisance species, eating the spawn of more valuable fish. Dr. Vucetich's theory-- that humans attempt to eradicate species perceived as competitors-- is in this case true. During spawning runs, early settlers and farmers pitchforked sturgeon and used their bodies for fertilizer. Sturgeon were caught in nets and destroyed, or stacked in rows like timber, dried, and then burned. They were used to fuel boat boilers or turned into pig feed.

removal of bodies for study

or something other

darkened the water with its schools

Sturgeon hides were used for leather, and their swim bladders were used to clarify wine and beer. Their roe was consumed as a delicacy. One species voids the experience of another in a manifestation of our "ongoing extractive economies."³⁷ All of this targeted destruction led to their inclusion on Michigan's endangered species list in 1994. The stories of the disappeared and disappearing have commonalities: wanton extermination, displacement by non-native species, habitat destruction, and sometimes broken links up or down their ecological chain that deplete their food sources or pollute their habitats. But within those happenings, the human is always at the center. Mist rises over the ridge. I start a fire with lichen-covered logs, make coffee, and hear the loons in the harbor. Blackpolls roam branches near the cabin.

My second week I stay closer to the cabin because of the rain. I scramble on the rocks and canoe in the harbor. I walk unhurriedly and watch for birds. On the one sunny day during the week, I take a long hike, 12 miles out and back to Suzy's cave. The cave is a natural wave-carved arch left behind from an older and higher Lake Superior shoreline, when the lake was called Nipissing. I see a little gathering of clay-colored sparrows high in the trees near the cave. The white line on their crests is visible today. Another life bird for me, and one I spotted earlier but mistook for a field sparrow, a species that doesn't usually occur this far north.

A sharp-shinned hawk flies overhead on my way back along the Rock Harbor side of the trail. I stop at a beaver pond on the right side of the path and watch a muskrat. In an Anishinaabe origin story, the muskrat aids the creation of the world, being the only animal that swam all the way to the bottom of the primordial waters to bring back the mud needed to create the land. The pond is crisscrossed with fallen trees and fish-- white suckers, brook sticklebacks. Without maintenance, beaver dams eventually break down, and the water escapes, leaving a saturated surface. Plants move in, creating a meadow first, then a forest. The big meadow further down the trail looks like it may have been a beaver-pond at one time. As the system shifts from wet to dry, it supports different animals, plants, and insects, demonstrating the kind of multispecies flourishing that Haraway describes. Efforts to restore, reestablish, or boost sturgeon populations around the Great Lakes Basin, including Lake Superior, have been underway for a few decades. Many have been modeled after programs originally started by indigenous people, like the Little Band of Ottawa Indians near the Muskegon River.

The order is reknitted³⁸

Deep pinks this morning. On these rainy days I spend a lot of time indoors alone. The weather is gloomy and blustery. No birds float on the rough lake this morning. I saw a baby snowshoe hare last night in the rain. There is a small leak in the roof, and the floor is wet in a couple of spots. Haraway writes about finding ways to "compose and decompose each other," "to become less deadly," and to learn to co-exist with "environmental disturbance."³⁹ With rain jacket, rain pants, and waterproof boots, I walk over to the Scoville side of the cove in the rain. A single gull fishes in the waves. Wet rock wave. The lichen is soft. The gull's wing tips are black. Horned larks flock on the rocks in the rain. The sparrow I had trouble identifying earlier in the week peeks out from the brush-- yellowish striped head and dark streaking along the sides. A LeConte's sparrow. This time I'm sure, a last life bird for me here. It's elusive, popping up and disappearing in the sparse grass interspersed among the basalt. I stay still a long time watching, becoming less deadly, composing and decomposing.

The afternoon's spare sun stretches on the table during the rain. I keep the windows closed, tend the fire continuously, and wear layers of clothing. Three loons swim in the rainy bay but do not call. The waves are four to seven feet, according to the radio, and occasionally nine feet. Outside a palm warbler wags its tail, and I glimpse the yellow beneath. Mergansers skim and paddle through the cove.

At night I wake up every few hours during the storm. I venture out at 4:30 am, some stars visible against the still bright moon. The moon shines on the tiny cove. I draw a map of my canoe trip last night. The breeze and current were working against me, making it hard for me to control the canoe by myself. I kept spinning around in the minor currents as I tried to paddle across the harbor. I heard a big splash and turned to see a beaver in the water slapping its tail at me-- it's the only beaver I see during my time on the island. Lots of beaver evidence but only one beaver sighting. The sun rises now over Edwards Island as I write about how the beaver swam near my canoe and watched me. I floated and watched it in my binoculars, losing ground in the canoe. After our encounter I paddled to the dock at Hidden Lake. Mallards and pied-billed grebes skimmed the lake. A kingfisher perched and fished from an impossibly slight snag. Canoeing back was easier, though I missed my turn and had to paddle rapidly around a small island, also called Minong, to not be carried out into the open water.

Rain slides off rock. The waves are blue and white when they hit the outcrop across the cove. Rain enters the cabin from the ceiling. My companion species-- pounding rain, rolling waves, firecracks of thunder. I sleep poorly and wake up every few hours. Big waves and wind all night. The cabin shakes. The moon is high and gray, some slim clouds in orange, then pink. The ravens croak and sigh as I walk beneath the trees. Winter wrens continue probing the brush piles-- tails upright, round bodies dark and low. I sketch the view from the cabin window at the bottom of a page in my notebook. The point across the bay, its scant trees, the steady waves in the cove. Its rocky crescent. The trees in the rocks growing larger as they move closer to me. "We are all lichens, all coral."⁴⁰

Two rangers knock on my door at 10 a.m. to ask if they can move me out of the cabin today instead of tomorrow because of the rain and waves. I read and write for a few more hours and then begin packing up and cleaning up. I take most of my gear down to the boathouse, and they help me with the few remaining containers when they return in the late afternoon. We stand looking at the crashing waves for a few minutes. We boat to Rock Harbor in heavy rain and waves and load my belongings onto a cart. I drop some shoes I'm carrying more than once and laugh and laugh. I haven't been with other people all week. We store my things in a closet behind the now-closed camp store. I walk to the nearby beaver pond in the rain, then spend the night alone in the auditorium, sleeping first on chairs, then on the floor. One last walk to the beaver pond in the morning. I watch a few mallards fly in. Snug Harbor is curtained in fog and mist. I am ready to go home, but the intensity of the experience-- living on a bluff of rock on the big lake with no lights, water, or plumbing for two weeks-- jumbles my feelings. I begin crying while saying goodbye to some of the rangers. Stragglers from other canceled boats and planes board the Ranger to leave.

As we approach land, the Keweenaw grows longer, a solid bolt of rock amidst fog, mist, and cloud. I write this as I am-- a "noninnocent" as Haraway says, taking time off work to travel, asking others to take care of my daughter. The beauty of places twists together with crises, nature-culture complications, legacies and futures, as I attempt to work in words and walks toward partial multispecies recuperation, or toward a reminder of those remainders in need of witnessing and recording. A gull glides by the boat. The Keweenaw takes shape more as we near. I think about standing on the bluff, marveling at all the colors contained and reflected in the water as it moves and removes.

---

¹ Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 16.

² Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 10.

³ Ibid., 10.

⁴ Rebecca Solnit, introduction to Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, by Barry Lopez (New York: Random House, 2022), xv.

⁵ Han Hung, "An Autumn Evening," The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty, trans. Witter Bynner from the texts of Kang-hu Kiang (New York: Knopf, 1923), 17.

⁶ This phrase is a combination of "the way in which she began to build and compress the syntax of her lines," and "Niedecker's version of Objectivism has a curiously caustic edge." Both are from Kathleen Fraser, "Lorine Niedecker: Beyond Condensation," in Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 112, 120. The first quote is from Fraser, and the second is from Marjorie Perloff quoted in Fraser.

⁷ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 29.

⁸ "NPS Geodiversity Atlas-- Isle Royale National Park, Michigan," National Park Service, February 10, 2022, https://www.nps.gov/articles/nps-geodiversity-atlas-isle-royale-national-park-michigan.htm.

⁹ Joan Naviyuk Kane, "The Mother of All," Milk Black Carbon (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2017), 46. "[A] glint so slight as to redouble the dark / between the peaks, between them / or us, intricate and muddled."

¹⁰ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020), 57.

¹¹ John Muir quoted in Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019), 10.

¹² "Man Comes-- and Goes," Isle Royale National Park, November 4, 2006, http://npshistory.com/handbooks/natural/8/nh8e.htm.

¹³ "Cottages," Isle Royale National Park, September 25, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/isro/learn/historyculture/cottages.htm.

¹⁴ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 4.

¹⁵ Ibid., 33.

¹⁶ Rolf O. Peterson, The Wolves of Isle Royale: A Broken Balance (Minocqua: Willow Creek Press, 199), 75. The full sentence recounts: "[after] boiling the carcass, we counted 12 broken ribs-- almost half of the total, healed in small knots."

¹⁷ Kane, "More Dissipate," Milk Black Carbon, 50. Original lines read: "[we] thought we saw the dark cursive of a wolf / circling on sea ice, miles out, in an hour // not blue, though persuasive and brief."

¹⁸ Peterson, Wolves, 75.

¹⁹ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 39. Haraway claims that "[grief] is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think.&"

²⁰ Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 239.

²¹ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 36. Author's original text is "unable to make present to himself what was absent."

²² Peterson, Wolves, 56.

²³ Ibid., 132, 109.

²⁴ Christine Dell'amore, "What's a Ghost Moose? How Ticks Are Killing an Iconic Animal," National Geographic, June 1, 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150601-ghost-moose-animals-science-new-england-environment.

²⁵ Camille T. Dungy, "Ars Poetica: Cove Song," Trophic Cascade (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 13.

²⁶ David Allen Sibley, The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 123.

²⁷ Nancy Langston, "The Gift of the Loon," Climate Ghosts (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2021), 111. The longer passage is "[f]or many northern Indigenous peoples, loons can communicate across the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, with links to what anthropologist Richard Nelson calls 'distant time' when human and nonhuman shape-shifted at will."

²⁸ Sigurd F. Olson, Listening Point (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 67.

²⁹ Jan Verberkmoes, "When Wife," Firewatch (Portland: Fonograf Editions, 2021), 15. "She finds not this war / but the one from before / or before or before. Its mineral body. // The shells of it embedded in the sand / in the skin. Dull calcium dull lead."

³⁰ Peter Oikarinen, Island Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 33. The original sentence is "I roamed around the unused boats and comfortably old houses and docks until the sun settled beneath the white-flecked skin of Lake Superior."

³¹ Langston, Climate Ghosts, 107. On loons' calls Langston writes "[e]very time I hear a loon, no matter how much practice they still need to perfect their calls, I am filled with hope, for their calls suggest something wild, outside the bounds of human constraint."

³² Kane, "The Mother of All," Black Milk Carbon, 48.

³³ Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 49.

³⁴ Oikarinen, Island Folk, 1.

³⁵ Kane, "The Mother of All," Black Milk Carbon, 49. "How time passes just as the light / does: it darkens and is gone."

³⁶ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33.

³⁷ Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xiv.

³⁸ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 55.

³⁹ Ibid., 97, 98, 37.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 72.

 

Return to the Tracy Zeman Artist-in-Residence Gallery Page