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Crossing to the Next Island


Lake Superior could contain all the other Great Lakes
plus three more the size of Lake Erie.
That is where we went with our boat. .
Lake Superior is about the same size as
Maine, or Indiana, or Iceland. It is bigger
than the Edmund Fitzgerald. Or Second Mate.

Most of the lakes in this Land of 10,000 lakes
are about the size of your Granddad's farm, but shallower.
Wikipedia sanguinely announces that the size of Lake Superior
means that it has the same kind of behavior
as the Atlantic off Nova Scotia. Oh, . . . boy!

It wasn't like that when we were there.
The sky was a comfortably soft blue,
and the water was a deep, deep blue.

We arranged for a slip at the Yacht Club on Madeline Island
because the weather report, which originally had predicted
as modest thunderstorm earlier in the day, said it would
come at night. Things seemed to scatter around us,
and in the morning we set out for Stockton Island,
northeast of Madeline, where there was a pier and a Ranger Station.
The Ranger Station consisted of one Ranger, a small exhibit hall,
and an outhouse. A hike-in campground was somewhere near.

The wind picked up, so after making lunch on the boat,
we started back to Madeline. It was about 18 miles
of slow going, into the wind, giving ourselves a spray-shower
with nearly every cresting wave. Our boat has a full cabin,
so we stayed dry, but by the time we rounded the south end
of Madeline, again, every mote of winter dust had been scrubbed.

The real adventure was trying to maneuver Second Mate
into the slip at the harbor. We have a single screw and a rudder.
Reverse means two things only: stop forward motion,
and crab sideways with the propeller. The rudder is for show.
Someday, when I am tired of the boat, or it ends up on a rock,
I will hoist the lovely Bubinga rudder onto my shoulder
and hike inland until someone asks me what it is.
Then I will tell them that it was used by Proteus for spreading
salmon roe, or by someone in Milan as a pizza peel.

There is a satisfaction in taking a small boat,
built with one's own hands, out onto 300 feet of blue water,
knowing that it is all right! It is no ocean craft, but it growls
back at whatever is heaving it about, slowing a little if necessary,
giving the sense that if common sense is followed,
it can do what it was meant to do: to allow a critter with legs
to cross to the next island. One can go quite a long ways,
crossing to the next island; even to return.

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