The Good Place by Canoe

Our route ahead left the protected cove on Isle Royale National Park for the blue-green expanse of Lake Superior. A west wind gusted through the twenty-mile-wide channel between Isle Royale and Canada, making the lake wave-wracked and wild-looking. We'd spent the morning portaging two miles across the interior of Lake Superior's biggest island, knowing very well that if the waves were up, we wouldn't be able to round the point in our 18.5-foot canoe. There were four of us: my wife, Lily; our two girls, Grace and Ella, ages 14 and 9; and me. The protected inlets we planned to take around the island's northeast corner lay behind the wave-blasted point.

Lily suggested we check it out. "Maybe it looks better up close," she said. We paddled toward Indian Point and the open lake beyond. A gravel bar extending from Indian Point was pounded by surf, and another point to the west offered some protection. Beyond, Superior roared like the Pacific. There was no need to discuss it. We turned the canoe around, and the waves pushed us back into McCargoe Cove. "I bet Native people used to camp here waiting for calm, like what we're going to have to do," Lily said, referring to Indian Point. Indeed, once we made it back to Rock Harbor, the center of civilization on Isle Royale, I bought a book by Minnesota writer Tim Cochrane describing how, in centuries past, Ojibwe birchbark canoeists used Indian Point as a crossing point between the island and the mainland. The Ojibwe name for Isle Royale is Minong, meaning the good place. The crossing to the mainland from here is seventeen miles. We retreated to a nearby campsite on Birch Island, which had a lean-to shelter and, fortunately, was available. In the last two days, the park had prohibited tent camping on this end of the island because wolves were exhibiting a new and troubling behavior of stealing hikers' food. Had someone been in the shelter, we would have had to canoe all the way back to the crowded campground at the deepest point of McCargoe Cove. Isle Royale remains one of the least visited national parks, with under 30,000 visitors a year, but it's only open a few months a year. Most visitors are backpackers, though guests also stay in the $500-a-night hotel near the ferry dock in Rock Harbor.

We had nine days to explore the island and intended to paddle a leisurely loop around its eastern third. Eastern Isle Royale's convoluted shoreline is lined with protective islands and bays, and a string of inland lakes offers a route between the south and north shores. Two sections of the loop are exposed to open lake, where we might be delayed or, worse, get into trouble in an open boat on big water.

The ferry dropped us off before noon at Rock Harbor village on the island's southeast shore. The day was sunny and calm, and we set out, paddling west through the long, protected bay of Rock Harbor. The harbor, formed by barrier islands half a mile to the south, stretched several miles but narrowed as we paddled west. We stopped on Mott Island, where the National Park Service has its headquarters, and hiked a trail around the island. From the mainland, Three Mile and Daisy Farm campgrounds were crawling with hikers, but aside from NPS workers going about their business, we had Mott Island to ourselves. Back on the water, a moldering log quay on Cemetery Island prompted us to stop. Ashore, wooden tombstones in fenced paddocks marked the graves of two men in their twenties who'd died in the 1850s. The park had recreated the tombstones and recently cut back thimbleberry bushes. Nobody seems to know the stories of the young men, though they are thought to have died while working in the island's copper mines. We paddled a little farther to a campsite on West Caribou Island.

Many Isle Royale campgrounds have shelters with three solid walls and a fourth side screened for bugs. The Caribou Island camp has two shelters, and motorboat fishermen claimed both. We set up tents nearby. In the nearest shelter were a father and teenage son from a small town in Michigan. They'd started their trip in a canoe, the dad explained, but rented a motorboat to boost morale after a harrowing passage around Blake Point, the island's easternmost, very exposed finger. They worried they'd swamp in waves off the point, then get soaked by rain while tent camping in a noisy campground where hikers had claimed all the shelters. I told him that in the morning we would attempt an exposed section of our own, seven miles to a protected inlet called Chippewa Harbor, and he warned me against it. We found that people's fear of paddling the big lake left much of the shoreline away from Rock Harbor delightfully lonely.

The evening was clear and gorgeous, so we paddled from our island to the old Rock Harbor lighthouse on the mainland, landing on a cobblestone beach under the lighthouse's stout white tower. We followed a path through giant thimbleberry bushes to the Edisen Fishery, a one-time fish camp the park service maintains as a living museum, preserving an operation common on Isle Royale before sea lampreys decimated the lake trout population and the National Park Service claimed the island. The fish camp featured a roughhewn cabin, wooden boathouse, and dock, where a wooden skiff bobbed.

The nights were already long in late August. Lily was brewing coffee before sunrise. I was eager to get out onto the calm water and paddle the stretch where we'd be exposed to Lake Superior without good places to land. The lake was glassy calm under a low sun. This part of the shore was riddled with pretty harbors and shallow offshore reefs that fell away into navy depths. The water was always so clear. Paddling Lake Superior was a continual amazement: endless barren rocks under an unfathomable quantity of cold, clean water. The world was drying out, and here sat ten percent of the planet's available freshwater like it was no big deal.

We rounded Saginaw Point and paddled into the open lake. The shoreline steepened and straightened; the coves and beaches disappeared. The lake, though, stayed calm. The girls shared a wide middle seat, so one could paddle at a time. We paddled hard and were hungry by the time Chippewa Harbor opened suddenly as a blue passage between rocky hills. We portaged to an inland lake and camped on Lake Whittlesey. An older couple from Michigan joined us at the site in a beautiful cedar-strip canoe.

"You shouldn't canoe in Lake Superior," the woman said when we compared plans. They had used the ferry boat to access these interior lakes. She looked at the girls and exchanged a look with her husband. I was glad they didn't have a phone with which to call child protective services. For centuries, Native people had canoed from the mainland to Isle Royale in birchbark canoes. Then Norwegian fishermen worked the lake in small skiffs. The week after our trip, my girls would start school. One of the first things they would do there was drill for what to do if someone came in with a gun and started shooting at them. In America, you could get shot on any given day, and it wouldn't necessarily be a surprise, but, God forbid, don't canoe on Lake Superior. Passive risk is fine, but active risk is bad, that logic goes. Yet taking on reasonable amounts of active risk, such as prudent paddling on Lake Superior, immerses a person in a glorious place while reminding them what they are capable of.

We spent two nights in a shelter on beautiful Malone Bay, on the island's south shore. From our shelter, we could see several islands and a lighthouse rising above the big lake. On our off day, we hiked up to the main trail, Greenstone Ridge, thinking we'd find a fire tower with views. The tower was locked and offered no views, but the walk was pleasant, and the fourteen miles was a challenge for Ella. I have complained about the Michigan couple in the beautiful canoe, but in addition to the man giving me two fishing lures, they told us of a fantastic swimming hole in a stream near the Malone Bay campground. We used the swimming hole both nights we camped there. Reached by a faint trail, a neck-deep pool bubbled beneath a waterfall. Directly under the falls was a ledge, perfect for sitting on as the stream poured over your head and neck. One evening, I strolled along the lake and saw a bull moose standing on a cobble beach and gazing at the lake like a shaggy priest.

The next day stayed foggy and gray, and we camped on an inland lake. More than two miles of portages lay ahead before McCargoe Cove and the open-water crossing beyond. We were nervous about the forecast coming from our weather radio. Wind was going to intensify for days, with a brief calm predicted for the next morning as it shifted direction. We traveled hard all morning. At 14, Grace was small like her mother and me, but she'd gotten strong over the summer and carried a large pack with only a moderate level of complaint. After the long carry, I was relieved to set the canoe down in McCargoe Cove and jump off the dock into the lake. We paddled the cove, found the open lake riled with five-foot waves, and settled into camp at Birch Island.

The wind that wracked the lake had blown away the prior day's fog, and by afternoon it was sunny and warm. We dried our gear from the night's rain, and the girls and I jumped off the island's dock into the crystalline water. That night, as the four of us camped at Birch Island, I tried to put my mind at ease by depending on something greater than myself, something I had no power to affect. No matter what we did, the lake would be as it was. All we could do was get up early to take advantage of the dawn calm, make judicious decisions, and use the paddling skills we'd gained over weeks of cumulative miles on the water. We woke in the dark and were paddling by dawn. We skirted Indian Point, a shallow cove, an unnamed point, and finally entered the open lake. Seventeen miles north, Canada's Sleeping Giant rose as a dark blue ridge 1,000 feet above the lake. Before it stretched miles of uninterrupted water, still sloshing from the prior day's blow. The sun crested the horizon and drenched the green shore with light. The lake swirled beneath us like a blue god. We kept our distance from the rocky shore and reached Herring Bay, where we paddled toward protected water. Lily sat in the bow, and I saw her shoulders relax as we neared shore. We portaged over a thin ridge of woods into the sheltered finger of Pickerel Cove and rested at a remote campsite to make coffee and have a second breakfast. The biggest challenge of the trip was done, and it was still early on a beautiful day. We were on the wild northeast shore of the island, littered with picturesque islands and clearwater inlets. I already suspected this would be the day we'd remember most—the one when we would scramble off trail around barren islands, cook dinner on a narrow skerry where eagles wheeled overhead, and canoe for hours through clearwater inlets I hoped would never end.