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Sue Leaf is author of Potato City: Nature, History, and Community in the Age of Sprawl. Her books the Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake and A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts were finalists for Minnesota Book Awards.

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This past summer we stayed in Paradise, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [UP]. The Airbnb had a window view of Lake Superior. We revisited Whitefish Point and Tahquamenon Falls.

It had been 26 years since I was last there. My husband and son used to go camping in the UP every summer, but their last visit was nineteen years ago.

Much was the same, but a lot had changed.

We drove through areas that had been decimated in a wildfire. The beach at Whitefish Point was much smaller and littered with logs. When I was last there, we walked a deep beach and avoided nesting areas of the endangered Pipping Plovers. Tahquamenon Falls had pathways and overlooks that even I, with bad knees, could navigate.

During our first days, we had to stay indoors with the windows closed. Looking out the window to Lake Superior, we couldn’t tell where the sky started and the water ended. Ontario, Canada, wildfire smoke covered most of Michigan.

Lake Superior has been an integral part of author Sue Leaf’s life. As a girl, her family had a cabin on the lakeshore. She and her future husband biked across the lake’s south shore, and later purchased a cabin. They visited the UP to ski in winter. And they noted the changes, how impermanent was the lake they loved.

Leaf’s memoir shares her love story with the lake, interspersed with insight into its geological history and how humankind has interacted with the area. Lumbering that decimated virgin forests. Copper mining that tore up the land and polluted the ecosystem. Shipping and storms and the inevitable shipwrecks. The shifting of populations from Native Americans to voyagers and fur trappers to industry and immigrants. Human greed that used up the resources and destroyed the ecosystem.

I learned about the wild rice that sustained Native Americans, the bobbers who ice fish on the frozen lake, how the south shore of the lake is washing away from the high lake level.

Along the Pictured Rocks shore in Michigan is a famous rock formation, Miner’s Castle. One year, my husband and son returned to find one of the towers of the castle had collapsed. “All that we love about Lake Superior is momentary pleasure,” Leaf writes.

Anyone who has visited and loved Lake Superior will especially enjoy this memoir, but it’s message us universal.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
nancyadair | Nov 13, 2023 |
An interesting read but too much family and not enough rocks. Very impressed by his trip from Grand Portage, across the boundary waters to the Minnesota River and back to Minneapolis via canoe and hiking.
½
 
Gemarkeerd
podocyte | Apr 14, 2023 |

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