The Gift of Water

as seen in the Marquette Monthly April, 2018
By Jim Pennell

My wife and I share a love of the outdoors. We’ve been from one end of the U.P. to the other exploring trails, campgrounds, and boat launches. We appreciate and enjoy the woods, but for us the real attraction is water. There is a certain intimacy in paddling on a quiet inland lake, and rivers often hide surprises just waiting around the next bend, but it’s at the mouth, where river water meets Lake Superior, that a unique beauty is found.

In a watershed, rivers and streams are the dynamic links—the arteries—between land and sea. There are three hundred of these arteries feeding the great beating heart that is Lake Superior. One ten-mile stretch in the western U.P. alone has eighteen of them. If spaced out evenly, there would be a river mouth about every mile along Superior’s south shore between Birch Point near Sault Ste. Marie and Little Girl’s Point on the Michigan/Wisconsin border.

The mouth of a river is more than merely a location. The sound of merging waters, the mingling of smells, and the movement of birds across broad expanses of sky and beach, all combine to create an experience that seems to soak through your skin into your body like. . . well, like water. The atmosphere at a river mouth is charged with energy and life, due in part to the moving waters releasing increased amounts of oxygen into the air. The result is that you simply feel good there. Waterfalls exhibit this same phenomenon, and that may be one reason why humans and all living creatures seem to be drawn to these areas.

A river mouth is also constantly changing. It’s been said that ‘You never step in the same river twice’; it’s also true that ‘You never look at the same river twice’. Water and sand shift and change places so that a river flowing unimpeded one day will struggle against an ornery Lake the next. The meeting of river and lake is not a mere intersection, but a conversation. This conversation can move from a few mumbled words between old friends to a casual discussion or a loud, joyous family reunion, with everyone talking at once.

You can’t judge a river by its name. The Ontonagon is a lilting Ojibwe name that rolls off the tongue, but the river mouth itself is one of the most unattractive I’ve found. It’s fat and industrial where it meets the Lake, and it slaps angrily against the concrete canal that humans have forced it into. Nearby, however, is a gorgeous river with a miserable name that I won’t mention, because this mouth feels like a secret that should be kept. It’s a beautiful, isolated spot that we found at the end of a long two-lane road, with deserted beaches stretching endlessly in both directions. The only sign of humans that we saw there was a blanket left behind in the sand.

The area around Grand Marais has great rivers with great names. The Hurricane is there, where no hurricane has ever been, along with the aptly named Sable, which is French for “sand”. The generous Two-Hearted River flows with unity and love while the Blind Sucker is pleasant enough, but saddled with the most unpleasant river name in the U.P.

It seems every river has to find its own way to the Lake, not unlike we humans finding our own paths in life. The bold Huron River breezes its way in past campers and kayaks. A few miles away its gentle little sister, the Little Huron, gracefully slips into the Lake unobserved. The Au Train is reluctant to get to the Lake and winds back and forth for miles, like a young boy making his way to school on a spring morning and delaying his inevitable destination as long as he can. The Yellow Dog River, a favorite of mine and of many others, doesn’t empty into Lake Superior at all. Instead, in a cruel irony, it flows into Lake Independence, which then seeps into Superior through the swampy Iron River.

Water cannot be created or destroyed, and it is always moving. What flows in a river today may come out of your tap next week or be bottled in plastic next year. Water is water is water, and water gets along with itself fine. Instead of trying to humanize water, we might be better off to water-ize our human lives and let our similarities blend us together. We’re all flowing rivers of flesh and blood. Our only differences are where we’ve been, where we’re going and how we’ll get there.

WATER SAVER TIPS

Use old dish water to rinse out recyclables.

Pour your pet’s unused water in a nearby plant, not down the drain.

Contributor’s note: Jim Pennell is a musician, writer, and amateur explorer who just might be close to water right now.

“The Gift of Water” columns are offered by the Northern Great Lakes Water Stewards and the Cedar Tree Institute, joined in an interfaith effort to help preserve, protect, and sanctify the waters of the Upper Peninsula.