Windigo

At 5a.m. Monday, I am on my second watch, trying not to shiver. The sun rose moments ago, a laser point anticipated by hours of purple, then pink, then even pinker pink sky. Now growing, now spreading on the horizon, now a familiar forming fire making the direction that I’ve been watching for hours uncomfortable full in the face.

We are in the middle of Lake Superior. “Middle” as in draw a line from the tip of Outer Island in the Apostles to the opening of Washington Harbor on Isle Royale’s western end. Sixty-seven nautical miles, crossing the shipping lanes on a proper heading of 45 degrees. Hit your mark on 45 to make the corners square. Find the middle of that line. That’s us.

Sea state is dead calm (or nearly so) and winds are light, so Cygnet pushes at a stately five knots on her stalwart little diesel motor. I have been watching the angle from the pulsing red light at Ontonagon change slowly, growing more oblique, and the pair of lights at Grand Marais, and the three lights behind us (one white, two red) on Outer Island. Earlier, when the northeastern horizon was dark, I could see the diffuse glow of Thunder Bay ahead.

It surprised me, to be able to see lights on both sides of Lake Superior. It’s a 16-hour passage and we left as the June 30^th sun was setting. It’s singularly clear. It’s surreal, this new experience of Lake Superior impressing me with both its smallness and the bigness at once. Around 1a.m., the Milky Way mirrored itself in the glassy surface and we were making passage among the stars.

After my last watch, I pulled into my sleeping bag with my fleece and down puff and wool socks and cap still on and tried to raise my body temperature enough to stop the persistent chill I’ve had all night. Around 8a.m., I woke to hear the diesel powering down and emerged to find Fred setting the sails. Bright sun, blue sky, and a fair south wind pushed us gently along at two to three knots, about as fast as one walks. The wind then built a little throughout the morning, and we cruised into narrow Washington Harbor with aplomb – on parade with full sails, cheered silently on by the waving balsam firs, spruces, and shoreline cedars.

My friend Fred is captain and owner. He more so than me has had several actual job titles, but both of us fall back on our training and experience as younger guys for fundamental identity. He’s a forester, and I am a wildlifer and, hence, we speak a common language.

Cygnet is a 35-foot ketch built in 1968. A wooden boat. Her lines are timeless and graceful and mix well with a simple elegant design and sense. Interior, you see her bones and the main luxury is a berth just big enough and a galley and cabin out of the rain.

Boats and yachts lie along a continuum in my imagination. If, as they say, form follows function, yachts own the space where function addresses fashion and comfort and prestige. Boats, on the other hand, own the space where elemental efficiency and faithfulness to design combine in the face of the limitations of materials and the physics of water and wind.

Cygnet is a wooden organic thing, a creature of trees and therefore a creature of sun and soil and water – a karmic companion for a forester captain. She was crafted one piece at a time to be at home in the interface of water and sky, an echo of essential technological innovation that enabled our species to claim six continents and innumerable smaller islands before the backward reach of written history.

When you see an older boat sitting proudly in her berth or at anchor or pulling gracefully, you are seeing the physical manifestation of a love story. Some captain or some family or some series of them have loved or rescued it, fretted over it, fussed with it, and gone adventuring. Such boats live in the stories the families tell lovingly. All boats age and weather, but fiberglass is nearly inert. Wooden boats, by contrast are alive, they are a stasis, a battlefield where the forces of weathering and decay are held at bay and defeated by attention and creativity and the very occasional curse offered in frustration.

Peek around in the utilitarian interior of Cygnet and she shows you her honest charm. I slept in the V-berth with my feet on the Sampson post and a view of the locker for the anchor rode, and in the morning, I invariably bumped my head on the bulwarks. I am not complaining. I slept soundly, secured from the wind and rain and rocked by a gentle swell. In the bilge and the engine compartment, you see the planking and the tar and the stout wooden ribs: stained dark with the imprint of time and the alchemy of bilge seepage. The interior smells of tropical hardwoods, coffee, and faintly of diesel. No floating condo this, she is a boat.

On arrival, we frittered the fine afternoon away tied to the ferry dock at Windigo, the National Park Service post at Washington Harbor, where there’s a ranger station, a camp store, a bank of showers, a fuel dock, and some vagrant berths. A group of early teens were hanging about too, checking in with the Wi-Fi, and navigating an invented economy of Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers. Welts on their necks betrayed their battling with mosquitos. They seemed oblivious, lost in the experience of trail life and wet boreal muddy bliss. I was there once.

Windigo seems like an odd name for such a beautiful place. Native American writer and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer builds a summary chapter around the Native American legend of the Windigo in Braiding Sweetgrass. The Windigo was a horrific vaguely human-like monster that stalked Native villages during winter nights hoping to eat you. Windigo was the very personification of insatiable, self-destructive hunger, its yellow teeth forever exposed having devoured its own lips. The more the Windigo ate the hungrier and more desperate and dangerous it became.

Kimmerer writes that the Windigo legend likely arose because of social imperatives that winter imposed on Native communities. Survival for these communities required that vital resources of stored food, gathered fuel, and hunted meat were shared among all and that individual postures of gratitude, generosity, and reciprocity were the social norms that made it work. Greed in the form of excess consumption or hoarding threatened community survival and greedy individuals were first counseled, then ostracized, and ultimately banished if they refused to align their survival with that of the community. Imagine the banished, scraping by on their own in the winter shadows, always there on the margin – trading community common good for a consuming greed.

But here on transition from Superior spring to short Superior summer, biotic abundance is ascendant. Fred was photographing two loons from the dock when beyond them, at the head of the bay, two moose splashed noisily through the shallows. A full orchestra of bird songs provided the score and thimbleberry flowers predict abundant thimbleberries later. The richness of boreal life in full flag, plants and fungi, animals of all sorts. Did you know that otters chirp to one another under the dock? Even the mosquitoes. Even the mosquitos, fullness of buggy life firing on all cylinders.

The pavilion had public Wi-Fi so I logged on with my phone seeking news of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the question on immunity for a criminal ex-president. “Don’t do it,” Fred teased me.

I was a good kid, raised in a conservative rural small town, educated at private Christian schools, trained in a faith tradition that valued intellectual rigor alongside of a Protestant orthodoxy. I went to church twice on Sundays and was so indoctrinated that even in high school when my best friend and I were rambling about near the beach on a summer Sunday night, we stopped to find a church of the correct flavor to attend for an hour before resuming our rambling. I was taught, explicitly or from the modeling of my community, to value and respect institutions, taught that deference to top government officials was grounded in their emergence from a good-faith democratic process and a presumption that their integrity was governed by a patriotism that we both shared, even when we disagreed on what that meant for governing.

I remember my first vote, waiting in line at the Jamestown Township Town Hall in the evening in 1984. By chance, my friend’s dad was in line behind me. He went to my church, was my Cadet counselor. I must have communicated my nervousness, so he explained it to me.

“You give your name and address and then they’ll send you to the booth. And then you vote for…” and he caught himself. I expected him to say “Ronald Reagan” but he didn’t. He caught himself and said, “who ever you want to.” I was, and remain, impressed by that.

I grew into a wizened adult, aware enough of (for example) Nixon’s Watergate to know that even the highest levels of government can be degraded by a maleficent and unscrupulous person. But even the Watergate example, where erstwhile Republican allies told Nixon that the game was up, was an illustration in the ultimate good direction of the system and the robustness of the institutions. As I participated as an adult voter, I also knew of and criticized bad actors, believing to a point that the problem was rooted more in individual people than in something systemic. I held my cynicism at arm’s length – sometimes only on the belief that cynicism is ultimately a resignation, a way of self-preservation or privilege to decide not to care and to believe the worst about someone.

Sitting in the Windigo pavilion on Monday afternoon, faith in institutions felt untenable if not aggressively naive. The anchor lost its purchase. The moral poverty of conservative justices too weighty and obvious to ignore. Even now, I choose my language carefully, some latent impulse about fairness and introspection, I suppose. But I am done.

Sailing, like fishing, requires just enough mental engagement to push the decrepit state of our politics out of mind. Puzzling out the weather, watching the sky. Here in this beautiful place on the edge of wilderness, short summer growth surges as if collectively mindful of the late springs and early freezes. This opening in the forest pops with thimbleberry flowers, wild roses, goldenrod and red osier dogwood. Mountain maple and mountain ash, the latter an energetic example reminding me of its dying kin in my tamed back yard. Here one could forget about ascending authoritarianism now aided by a corrupt Supreme Court. Of the six justices bending the law beyond all recognition, two are cartoonishly corrupt, taking lavish gifts from moneyed interest, and three are the felon’s own appointees. That the chief justice fails to see that this meets minimally “the appearance of” conflicted interest is a damning indictment of his own corruption. What’s the commonality? Ask yourself?

Our democracy is the beloved wooden boat. It only persists through love and maintenance and attention to see and replace the rot it before it sinks the whole enterprise. And it takes work. I teach at an intersection of ecology and public policy and for five weeks out of the year, I add a deliberate injection of faith — and citizenship is embedded in the very DNA of all of it. That’s where we’re at. We’re nearly lost, foundered and sinking, scuttled by the money men who stroke the machinery long enough to buy themselves isolating luxury, all polished chrome and fresh teak, tied to the pontoon in the gated marina.

That cleansing expanse, that watery flat horizon, that knowledge of the distance. Hold me. Give me a reason. Puzzle me the route ahead. Puzzle out the lights in the gloom, their patterns, their security for where to turn if we need to bail out.

Windigo now wears fine tailored suits and flies a private jet between his many houses, vested in the perverse virtue we’ve made of hoarding wealth. We’ve given the whole game in the name of money, a Windigo economy with the very personification of Windigo morality as their would-be king. The money men have structured their kept justices to kill off the administrative state, their performative framing for the world of government acting in the public interest. Their kept justices ruling that scientists should not receive deference in matters of science. Now wetland aren’t wetlands under the law, and young women have no autonomy over their health and a black snake sleeps uneasily on the south shore. Now polluters can shop for ideological judges/venues to substitute their truths for those of the scientists and we’re leaving 1.5 C in our wake as we head into the unknown.

The storm on the horizon loomed when Citizens United was decided and well-meaning people reasoned, “Well, how bad can it get if money equals speech? They’re patriots like us, they’re interested in the public good.” “Right?”

On the way back from Rock Harbor, we studied the NOAA weather forecasts looking for the weather window and wondering what a 30% risk of thunderstorms really means to a small boat in the middle of Lake Superior. We left on a full-sun morning, and I scolded myself for allowing all this fretting to cloud the experience. During the late afternoon, we watched a thunderhead build and flash over the Keweenaw and dark rainclouds on the Canadian side. And we passed between them, entering the Apostle Islands archipelago almost nearly where we left it. We navigated the famously treacherous Apostles in a dark morning fog with space-age technology. Bits of birch bark in the bay and the smell of warm rain.

Windigo is winning. The thunderheads are building in the west. What we do from here is everything.