(photo source: NASA public domain, via wikipedia.org)

I was six when our family moved north to a suburb of Detroit. My parents and grandparents were all from the area and they wanted us to be raised there, closer to extended family. In Michigan, we’d be grounded in a solid midwestern and very Presbyterian way of life. One of the first things our father did after we arrived there was to drive along the road adjacent to Lake St. Clair. St. Clair is a part of the Great Lakes story that takes place between Lake Huron and the Huron River to the north and the Detroit River which flows towards Lake Erie to the southeast. It’s the one place in Michigan where you are slightly north and west of Canada. By Michigan standards, St. Clair is literally a little fish in a big sea, but in reality, at the widest part of the lake you cannot see across. Lake St. Clair can be deceiving – changing from calm and tranquil one day to a boiling foam whipped up by the wind the next. On this particular day, Dad encouraged us to “look across the lake and you might see Canada”. I gazed out the car window, where I could just barely make out a row of greenery across the lake. The edge was dark and it looked fuzzy against the horizon. “Who is over on that side looking back at us?”, Dad asked us excitedly.

The history of the Great Lakes is fascinating. Some think the first settlers were the French explorers, trappers and missionaries who named Detroit and Grosse Pointe, and streets like Gratiot and Cadieux. There are rivers with French names like Au Sable and Pere Marquette. However before the French arrived, there were the Iroquois, Chippewa, Algonquin, Ottawa, and Shawnee Indians, led by the great chiefs, Techumseh and Pontiac. And before the Indians, we were told, were the great glaciers that created the Great Lakes.

Now most school kids in Michigan get back at least to the Indians and some as far back as the glaciers when they learn about the state. But few go all the way back to when the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was a rift of black trap rock coming up through the primordial ooze resulting in semiprecious gemstones and world renowned iron ore deposits. The most beautiful rock formation in the world, in my humble opinion, is the one named BIF, for the Banded Iron Formation, found in the upper peninsula. All of this was eons before the glaciers, and long before our little nuclear family moved back to Michigan.

A book called “Paddle to the Sea”, written and illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling was required reading in grade school. It was and still is, one of my favorite books. The story is about a young Indian boy who carves a wooden canoe with a small version of himself in it and sends it off for an adventure exploring all five Great Lakes. The little wooden boat ends up making it to the St. Lawrence seaway and beyond to the ocean. It was easy to embrace this story because we would paddle in the rivers and could see the freighters making their way across Lake St. Clair. We could hear their somber fog horns at night as we drifted off to sleep. We knew the boats were on the same course as the canoe in the story. From the lumber and iron ore lake freighters, long and skinny in the middle, to the ocean freighters which were shorter and thicker around the middle, we watched the flags and smokestacks pass by on long and slow summer days, and saw the ice-cutters in the winter, churning up a path towards the river.

In school they would show us movies with nerdy-looking stereotypical scientists wearing white coats, bow-ties, and glasses. The science movies were my favorite, especially the one where they implored us to “Imagine, if you will, a world without water!” The best movie of all was the one called “The Rise and the Fall of the Great Lakes.” In this movie, another person in a canoe goes up and down with the lake levels through time, as the glaciers advance and recede across the Great Lakes. It’s a quirky Canadian film, full of visuals showing the impact of man on nature and vice versa. Coincidentally, or maybe not, the teachers thought this movie an appropriate lead-in to studying the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Having at least dunked under or dipped my toes in all five of the great lakes, I can say that my favorite by far is Superior. I am in awe of this lake. Gitchigummi is the stuff of legendary poems. It is an ocean sized lake with ocean scale swells and water so cold your brain freezes swimming in mid-July. The rocks along Superior’s shores and the perfectly preserved shipwrecks also confirm that this is no ordinary lake. The glaciers melted over a deeply faulted synclinal chasm, creating a marvelous body of water like no other in the world. In high school, we backpacked along the Pictured Rocks National shoreline where you can see the change in lake levels sculpted into the cliffs. I spent one summer at Isle Royale National Park. The island is the upside block of that faulted and then tilted, syncline. Differential erosion made beautiful long finger lakes with ridges where the moose like to roam and feast on blueberries along the tops and thimbleberries near the lowland bogs. The island has many interesting features, including one infamous smaller island that is in a lake, on an island, in a lake. Exposed at the Rock Harbor end of the island is the precambrian basaltic trap rock, containing small amygdolites, voids filled with semiprecious gems more commonly known as greenstones. People who arrive at the island by boat usually look greener than the tiny greenstones with sea sickness from the lake swells. People who arrive by float plane just look relieved.

In 1975 I was walking home from high school in blustery November weather. When I arrived home, my mother was watching the news reports from Lake Superior, where twenty-nine imperiled men had lost their lives on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I still remember what those gale force winds did to my face walking home, and how the white caps roared across little old Lake St. Clair. I could not imagine what Superior must have looked like. My friends’ father was the minister at the Mariner’s church in Detroit where as the song accurately portrayed, “the church bell chimed 29 times”. Everyone in Michigan felt the loss, in the wind and in the ice-sharp slivers of gray etched across the sky. The morose and chilling sounds of the Gordon Lightfoot song capture the climate we all felt perfectly.

I went on to study a little about glaciers in college and to marvel at their amazing footprint across the midwest. Rolling hills, beautiful river terraces, dunes, eskers, kames, and drumlins and the irrepressible beauty of the greatest lakes in the world all tell the glacier story better than any book or movie ever could. Empires rise and fall, Indians, trappers, missionaries, settlers, and nuclear familes all come and go. The lakes were there before we arrived and will be there long after we are gone. Immortalized in poems, songs, and childhood memories, their legend lives on.

(lwr Oct 8, 2017)