Cherry wine and sand. A bridge long enough to make you feel nervous, short enough to make you feel safe. Blue water, clear down to 19th century shipwrecks. Cool air that makes you think Canada with every local Yooper’s, “hello.”

An eerie peace covers the forest and the water, harboring secrets of past battles and untold stories. This land and these waters are not easy.

Gordon Lightfoot’s lyrics, depicting Lake Superior’s conquer of the Edmund Fitzgerald, plays regularly on local radio stations. The words hang in the forest leaves and on top of the glassy waters.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called ‘gitche gumee’
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy

With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early