path: root/picture-rocks.txt

I lay in the hammock looking up at the trees, watching the birch leaves fluttering in the light breeze, 100 feet above me, wondering what life was like up there. What would it be like the stand among those slender branches that would probably, some of them, support my weight. It's not impossible. People climb trees, there are even groups that get together and go climb trees. So I've been told.

John Muir writes about climbing a tree in storm to see what it felt like to be blown around like that. I plan to do that some day, but I probably won't start there. I'll probably work my way up to trees in storms. One of the nice things about this life though is that I can lie here in this hammock and stare up at the trees. I can think about climbing them, I can think about other trees, other hammocks. Last summer, Colorado. A very similar vertical view. This summer it's birch rather than aspen, jack pine rather than lodgepole and ponderosa, but the overall feel of the place is very similar to Colorado and the vertical view is very close.

A friend of luxagraf, who lives in Iran, but has traveled the desert southwest of the U.S. quite a bit has an interesting post about the visual and ecological similarities between the Sindh desert in Iran (where he lives) and the high desert region of eastern California into western Arizona. 

These similarities exist everywhere. I have no doubt that if you beamed me and this hammock into the right elevation of Ural mountains in Russia or the Andes in Peru or the Himalayas of Himachal Pradesh, I would have to work to find the differences. The world is made up of similarities more than differences, and I think that's true whether you speak of ecology, culture, religion or my preferred starting point for philosophical reflections -- the vertical views from hammocks.

Significant ecological, cultural and religious differences exist between places as well. I think to certain extent that's part of what travel is about, finding those similarities and differences and holding them up before and trying to make sense of them. Why does the jack pine thrive here, and lodgepole pine thrive in Colorado? Why is there a massive body of fresh water here and a huge range of mountains there? Why do men and women hold hands here, men and men hold hands in India and no one holds hands in China? Why does reincarnation thrive in Himachal Pradesh and not here? Why is the arboreal forest that used to be here now 100 miles north of here?

It's wrestling with these things that makes it interesting to go to other places. Seeing things is nice too, but the longer you're out here I think the less inclination you have to "see the sights". If you have two weeks in a place, I guess I understand that drive to see stuff. We watch people pulling out every morning to go do things while we're still cooking breakfast[^1]. But then if your time is limited, you want to see what you came to see, I suppose. Maybe. I'd still probably spend at least half my time "sitting around" because without that chance to daydream and reflect, what's the point?

On this trip we can more or less stay anywhere as long as we choose. Camping limitations exist, but otherwise we're pretty open ended. Consequently we don't tend to rush out and see everything right away, if we see it at all. For instance, we've been in Pictured Rocks for well over a week and haven't seen the eponymous rocks yet. And I'll be fine if we never do. 

These days I'm pretty happy sitting here in the forest, watching the wind play in the trees, the birds building nests, the earthworms the kids dig up for pets. As more than a few writers have [demonstrated][1], you can spend years obsessing over a [single square meter][2] of forest and not exhaust everything it has to teach[^2].

At the same time, we don't sit around all the time. Some long term travelers I've met seem to look down on seeing things, like that's the status symbol that sets them above the common traveler -- they're too cool to see the sights. I think that's equally as silly as running around like the proverbial headless chicken. If I know long care what's around the next bend, over the top of that rise or on the other side of the horizon then I'd stop traveling.

The answer is the third way, some sitting around, some seeing what's around the bend. In our case we walk around quite a bit. I walk slowly, the rest of my family not so much. Sometimes I can convince Lilah to hang back with me, that makes for nice hikes. Here there's a good 3 mile round trip trail out to a nearby lighthouse. That's about where Elliott is comfortable these days so we did it one day. The sandstone shelf we sat on extended nearly half mile out into the water without getting much more than six feet deep. Hence the need for a lighthouse.

There was a fog bank to the east of the lighthouse that day, a thin layer that obscured all but the top of the dunes just to east of us, dunes that site some five hundred feet above the lake. The first four hundred feet were hidden by a fog bank that stretched out over the lake and curved back toward the lighthouse, losing density as it neared the point we sat on. We ate our food and watched wisps of wet cloud blow by us and down the coast, seemingly circling back down toward the dunes.

It wasn't particularly warm and only Lilah and I stayed for long after lunch. We explored the shoreline for a while, looking for interesting signs of life. There weren't many. Superior is cold, clear, and seemingly not teeming with life. I've seen a few fish, including a very big trout in very shallow water, and Lilah and I found some curious insects, but for the most part it's pretty quiet around here, biologically speaking. At least on the water. The water average 42 degrees, there's enough life to support a fair number of fish, and the birds that feed on them, but not much else.


The weather those is completely left field. One minute it;s hot, the next it's cold. Sometimes that's just barely hyperbolic.


A good bit of my early travels were in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. I've backpacked several hundred miles worth of travels and seen a good bit of "interesting weather". Lightning so close your hair stands up? Check. Hail the size of small oranges? Check. Snow in mid July? Check. Rapid drops in temperature as a storm approaches? Check. Well, maybe not check.

I thought I had seen what wind can do, but here things are up a couple of notches. One morning, a particularly warm, humid morning, it was 8 AM and the temperature was already climbing steadily. Every morning I do a bit of discursive meditation for about 15 minutes. This morning I closed my eyes to world that was bright, sunny and about 80 degrees. When I opened them 12 minutes later -- because what was happening around me was so bizarre it broke my ability to focus on any particular train of thought and I stopped early -- when I opened my eyes again the sky was so dark it looked more like night than night, the temperature had dropped well below 55, and the wind was tossing the leafy crowns of the birch trees around like a salad spinner. It was the most complete reversal of weather I've ever experienced anywhere in the world. 

It was also very localized and didn't last long. The wind faded quickly and within an hour the nice cool temperatures were gone as if it had never happened. Curiously though, it happened again around 2PM and again around 8PM. My best guess is that somewhere inland it's heating up enough to pull some air off the lake and the lake is definitely cold enough to drop the air temp by 30-40 degrees.

Lake Superior is the coldest large body of water I've ever swam in. It's almost as cold as the Sierra lakes I used to swim in during the early season, that still had fields of snow leading down into them. When its 85-90 though Superior feels pretty good. At least for a minute or two. Then you get out and air around you feels insanely humid and hot and you want to slip back into the lake, but it starts to be too much, you get a sort of pins and needles sensation in your feet after a while. And so I'd climb out, sit on the rocks, play with the kids and warm up just enough to get back in the lake.

The second time we went down to beat the heat we learned something else about the wind. When it blows onshore it keeps the black flies at bay. When it blows offshore, look out. It's not quite as bad as what I remember about Maine, but they're annoying enough to drive you off after a while. For whatever reason I have no problem with mosquitoes. Some recently asked what we do about mosquitoes and I told them we have Thermacell, which works pretty well and we use it during the times of day the mozzies are really bad, but the rest of the time, honestly, I just let them bite me. I swat them when the hurt, but mosquitoes are supposed to bite. Where I come from though flies are completely benign, perhaps that's why biting flies bother me, it just seem extra cruel to take an ubiquitous and already fairly annoying creature and then make it capable of a painful bite? Screw that.:w

[^1]: Not that we're late risers, by the time we make breakfast I've usually been out birding, meditated and drank my way through at least two moka pots worth of coffee and Corrinne has generally walked 5 miles or so.
[^2]: This is to me the best argument against travel, is that it doesn't allow for the sort of depth of study, again be it ecological, cultural, whatever, that is possible when you stay in one place. For me though, staying in one place leads to complacency, less awareness and a tendency to take the world for granted.

[1]: /books/gathering-moss
[2]: /books/the-forest-unseen


it was too hot to hike, the air too still to drive the flies from ht ebeach and right thing to do seemed to be sitting in a hammock and gently swinging. I even made a movie of it.