6:37 am, Sunday morning. Father’s Day 2017. 57º F, rain is falling. No, better depicted as the heavens opening up, c’était le déluge!
I’m running.
An eerie, fifty foot layer of fog hangs over Lake Superior. I’m looking out at the break wall at Presque Isle Park in Marquette Michigan. I’m alone on the “Island”, as it is referred to by the locals. The park is closed to car traffic. Alone on a 323 acre island, my idyllic state.
It’s not November, but I start humming passages from Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald:
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors’ cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call ‘gitche gumee’
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early
The day before, we walked this same two mile track. Black flies were feeding on the leeward side of the island, Humans were on the breakfast menu. You don’t see a single insect on 47th and Madison in NYC with tons of auto exhaust and air conditioner coolant spilling into the atmosphere 24 x 7 – the invisible chemical mist numbing everything in its path. Continue reading “Running. Around Gitche Gumee.”
