The air is chilly at cruising altitude, and she's just flown over the largest surface of freshwater on Earth.
The bird glances down to see a bulky metal creature on the trail paralleling the Eastern edge of the peninsula.
I was inside, driving the vehicle with a friend in the passenger seat. We were following the coast, taking the long way around on our way up to the tip of Michigan. I was relieved that my truck had made it this far--the long drive up from Detroit was no certainty for us, and I had a backseat stocked with parts and tools in case we broke down. In another hour until we’d reach, Copper Harbor, from which we would take a ferry out to the Isle in the middle of the lake for a week of backpacking.
The Keweenaw Peninsula was radiant at the end of September, most leaves only beginning to turn for the season. Warm sun, cold shadows, blue skies, shimmering lake. We were unhurried and stopped frequently to walk around near the water. I’d heard of the community of Gay, MI from a friend recounting her trip;
“...there’s one bar there--the Gay Bar!”
Maybe that's how most people ever hear of this place-- for the stereotypical cultural paradox of a “Gay Bar” propped up by winter hardened regulars arriving in mudding rigs, ATV’s, and snowmobiles, with, at best, only a statistically pertinent queer patronage.
A sandhill crane flies overhead, heading South for the Winter. She sees the town set in a clearing surrounded on 3 sides by dense forest, with the remaining Eastern side on the shores of Lake Superior. The unincorporated community keeps no population statistics and has no legal boundary. What is today called “Gay, MI” is a scattering of houses, the bar, the fire department and the museum, in a clearing in the trees. I pulled over at the smokestack on the side of the road, seeing a path behind it leading down to the lake. The old tower is a landmark, visible from wherever one stands in town. Behind it lie the sprawling remains of the Mohawk and Wolverine copper mines. These goliaths of cement and rebar lay beached and left to decompose a century ago, their bones scattered amongst the dark dunes that slope into the lake
I stood on top of a low wall at the crest of a dune looking out into the horizon and traced the segments of the fallen concrete pier out into the clear water. Again, the bird looks down and sees what I cannot--that the dark sand drifts far into the lake, shadowing a portion of the bay and drifting South. It’s been generations since this once fruitful bay has been a haven for feasting, so she continues onwards.
The unnatural beach is made of “stamp sands”, and similar accounts can be found across the Upper Peninsula, especially in the Keweenaw. Those dark “sands” are mine tailings; 22 million tons of crushed ore piled high on the coast early in the 20th century. The mine closed in 1932, and its proprietors left town with their money. According to an article by Bridge Michigan, its modern lineage can be traced to ConocoPhillips, one of the biggest oil and gas producers in the country. (Staley, 2024)Engines groaned, drawing my awareness to a handful of dirt bikes riding north along the beach in my direction. They passed by, churning up dust clouds of stamp sands in their wake. The riders looked like high schoolers, maybe on their way to some small town debauchery, sipping the last drops of summer. As the dust settled, I imagined growing up here; trying in my mind to balance the idyllic with the harsher
realities of a life, ultimately landing on the
middle ground of the commonplace.
The mine, the tower, the dark beach; these are landmarks of Place as much as the Lake or
the Birch forest. It becomes the status-quo. Like Detroit, the vestiges of what built this town lie dormant for so long that there is no living human who has known this land without the heavy handed stroke of industry cast upon it.
While the copper boom in the Keweenaw occurred 150-200 years ago, the histories of people living there stretch back much farther. The Lake Superior Ojibwe have been fishing these waters for millenia; fitting that it’d be the Keweenaw Bay Indian community to first raise the alarm about a decline in their catches.
The community noticed that the metal laden sands were smothering Buffalo Reef, a key spawning habitat for Lake Superior Whitefish and Lake Trout. After the closing of the mine, the lake's strong currents started pulling the sands south across the mouth of the Grand Traverse river and far out into the freshwater reef. Cleanup efforts will cost an estimated $2.1 billion, and involve dredging the sands and relocating them to a (new) nearby landfill. After decades of advocacy, the Buffalo Reef Task Force (composed of federal, state, and tribal agencies) is now moving forward with a cleanup plan, still in its beginning stages. (Ellison, 2024) A win, but far from justice.
This is the reality we find ourselves in, but on some basic level it feels wrong to be talking about fines and federal grants in conversation with the fundamental worthiness of the Great Lakes. By this I mean to say as clearly as I can that some things are priceless; the aquatic life in the reef and the cultural lives above the surface cannot be meaningfully quantified in numbers. The gambles taken with our waters in the Great Lakes (oil pipelines, mine waste, etc) have nothing to be measured against--when you lose, the loss can never be fully remedied.
As I write, the fight continues against the opening of new copper mines in the UP, an outcome of the E.V. and battery industry demand. The boom and bust cycle of mines is predictable and well documented, with the land and the life it holds always coming up short.
The mine site in Gay faded into the rear view as my friend and I made our way up to Copper Harbor, where A 3.5 hour ferry ride brought us to an isle in the middle of Lake Superior. We swam in the lake every day, crisscrossing dozens of miles and encountering the local residents; foxes, moose, an owl, a wolf. The land is wet and lush between the distinctive ridges that make up the geology of the isle, the valleys managed by the steady work of the resident beavers . On top of the ridge on a clear day we can look across with binoculars to see the sheer cliffs of Thunder Bay Canada on the horizon. I feel grounded in a way I haven’t felt in months back in the city. In quiet moments im struck with gratitude for this Lake, a glacial carved basin that holds enough freshwater to cover all of North and South America in shin-deep water. (Gmiter, 2017) The water from this Lake will feed down through a series of lakes and channels to flow past my home in Detroit, a reminder that what grounds me here extends to a much larger conception of place. No environmental issue is ever truly local.
Nearing the end of the trip, I spent a quiet dusk wading barefoot in the shallow bay near our campsite, looking at the patterns of sticks in the soft, silty sand. Pacing slowly in the water, lost in patterns and thought, I look up to see the crane overhead.
She looks down and sees me too, wading in the shallow water. Maybe I’m the first human she's seen in a while, maybe the unusual sight of me wading like a shorebird visits her, too, as something like an omen. We share a moment before I look back down, vision tracing the shallow bay, waiting for the shimmer of fish to catch my eye.
References
Ellison, G. (2024, February 2). Lake Superior mining waste pollution fix will cost billions. MLive.com. https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2024/02/lake-superior-mining-sands-pollution-fix-will-cost-billions.html
Gmiter, T. (2017, October 3). A drop of water that fell into Lake Superior in 1826 is just now leaving the lake. MLive. A drop of water that fell into Lake Superior in 1826 is just now leaving the lake
Staley, K. (2024, November). Amid Upper Peninsula mining rush, tribe is still living with past pollution. Bridge Michigan. Retrieved January, 2025, from https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/amid-upper-peninsula-mining-rush-tribe-still-living-past-pollution