Lake Superior’s Lost Isle

The Voyageur II is an ungainly but sturdy little ship that sails three times a week, from early May until late October, out of Grand Portage Bay to the northern end of Michigan’s Isle Royale—an island in the northwest corner of Lake Superior twenty miles off the Minnesota shore. It overnights there, at Rock Harbor, then sails back the following day, weather permitting. You don’t ride it for cuisine or comfort—bad coffee and candy bars pass for the former, a few rows of wooden benches for the latter—but the thing is beloved, mainly for where it takes you.

I took my first ride in late May of 1997. For some reason, a friend and I hit on the idea of taking five fifteen-year-olds on a hiking trip to the island. Weather for the two-hour crossing was sunny, chilly, and windy. The Voyageur II was on a nausea-inducing roll. Determined to suppress the queasiness by fixing my eyes on the steady horizon, I stepped out on the fantail, where the only other passenger was one of those attractive women of indeterminate age. Fit, clear-eyed, and exuding the relaxed confidence of someone most content outdoors, she could have been forty or seventy.

She wore gloves, a thigh-length oilcloth shelter coat, well-worn and freshly oiled hiking boots, and weather-tested wool slacks. But no hat. Her straight auburn-silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She stood, leaning against the starboard rail, arms crossed, eyes open, serenely facing into the wind, the sun, and the misting spray. Absorbing the elements, you might say.

Being fairly insensitive to her reverie, I said something about this being my first trip to the island and asked, was this a typical sea? “I’ve been coming three, sometimes four times a year for fifteen years,” she said, giving me a quick look, noting, I hoped, the fresh oil on my old boots. Clearly, she knew things about where we were going. “There have been times we didn’t go out, because it was blowing too bad. Today is fairly normal.”

“Sixty trips? It’s that good?”

“It is for me,” she said. “For some people, Isle Royale isn’t spectacular enough. It’s not Yosemite. A lot of people who live up here think it’s just more of the same, forest and shore. But the island itself is so quiet and so pristine. Very few people come here, and there are places all over where you feel like you have the world to yourself. Friends brought me over the first time, and the place has had a spell on me ever since. Especially late September. I love September.”

For all I know, she could have been a Kia saleswoman from Bloomington. But she was right. The five days that followed were a revelation. A huge, unspoiled aggregation of maple, birch, and pine forests in equal magnitude. Gaping bays of frigid, impossibly clear and clean water. Distant lighthouses. Northern lights. Giant inland lakes. Moose, fox, wolves, and quiet.

I’ve kept coming back for ten years. I may be highly susceptible to everything that has nothing to do with commuting and an office cubicle, but the spell of Isle Royale enveloped me like smoke from a maple fire. Running forty-five miles northeast to southwest, and nine miles at its widest, the island, with its immediate archipelago of 400 smaller islands, may be, according to one geological factoid I read, a remnant of the world’s largest lava flow, flattened, scoured, and pulverized by a two-mile thick ice sheet 11,000 years ago.

Various Indian tribes hunted and did rudimentary mining on the island before white men arrived more than 150 years ago to do their digging and logging. That all stopped when Isle Royale became a national park in 1940, and today the scars of industry are all but completely indiscernible. A very small commercial fishing industry continues today out of Windigo/Washington Harbor at the south end of the island, where a handful of families with century-old ties to the island still maintain idyllic summer homes. (There’s another group of private cottages at the north end.) Park employees say that more people visit Yellowstone in a day than visit Isle Royale in a year, and sky-high gas prices have cut into private boat traffic, assuring that the number will probably not go up.

I kick myself for not getting the woman on the fantail’s name. I am in her debt. She heightened my senses to Isle Royale’s primal beauty, and she was absolutely right about September. I daydream all year of walking the island and recapturing another early autumn afternoon with sunlight filtering through canopies of fire red maple.