"Sometimes in life you just dont know what youre getting into. Youre reminded of this, the day you kayak through an otherworldly stretch of sea caves in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The Lakeshore is a preserve of almost 70,000 acres at the northernmost tip of Wisconsin. It includes a 12-mile ribbon of cave-studded shoreline along Lake Superior, or Gichigami, "the great sea," as the Ojibwe people know it. The preserve also encompasses all but one of the 22 Apostle Islands, an archipelago that, in Ojibwe tradition, is the center of the world. On this day, as you dip and pull your blades along the red sandstone cliffs, Gichigami is strangely calm, like glass. No chop at all. Not even gentle swells. Yet your guide urges you to stay close to him. It's the height of summer, but the emerald water is cold enough to kill." Phyllis Cole-Dai shares more in this wonderfully evocative piece.
↧