Summer lingers, and fades. Like everything else this time of year—the Coast Range erased by local dust and distant smoke, the Cascades somewhere off behind the haze. Cracked earth. Everything asking for just a little moisture. The ferns are crispy, the grass hardens. Our chickens stand around, stunned (okay, they always stand around stunned. . .)
I think back on this summer’s visit to my mother’s cabin on an island in the St. Mary’s River channel of Lake Huron, along the northern shore. A water world—soft ground, mosses everywhere, granite shorelines sloping into water so clear you can see puddingstone slabs on the bottom at 25 feet with their characteristic nuggets of red and brown jasper. Her island sits a mile from shore in a stand of birch, red oak, and cedar— along the hem of the Canadian Shield. Everywhere you look you see the footprints of glaciers—polished rock faces, ancient moraines, and, of course, the melted remnants of the glaciers themselves that created these lakes. Water in one form or another is the presiding architect of that environment. Even the spiders swim, or at least some of them do—we were canoeing back to her dock one evening when we came upon a spider the size of a playing card (but imagine a very creepy playing card) calmly walking across the narrow channel between two islands. At first we thought it was the nose of a swimming beaver, but there was no wake, and this didn’t really look like a nose, even from that distance. It was a spider, one that actually catches minnows. This is why I do not like camping on her island but always sleep inside. The bears don’t bother me at all—coming across a spider that catches bears worries me.
The most interesting features of the island are the bogs, a very special sort of waterworld; ancient, unexpected, curious. We paddled along the lily-pads in the larger bog that had formed in a narrow cut behind a blocked creek and extended for a mile or so before ending in a long pool of about two acres. Sediment had accumulated to the extent that the water was, in places, only a few inches beneath our canoes— each paddle stroke released bubbles of gas from the bottom. It was as if we had been shrunken and placed inside the very back of someone’s refrigerator—back where things change into dark, unrecognizable messes, and life takes on strange, new forms. Several species of leeches undulated near the surface; thick clumps of vegetation, most harboring a host of living plants, are loosely moored around the edges. Turtles sunned on the aprons of lodges the beavers abandoned as the bog silted up.
But the most amazing inhabitants were the carnivorous plants: sundews and pitcher-plants, floating on their clumps of mossy, rotting vegetation. Some of the sundew colonies were in late bloom, sending up a single long-stalked flower that looked a little like the Space Needle and was equally improbable. Shining droplets along their leaf clusters twinkled enticingly— you could easily forgive a gnat for wanting a closer look. From a kayak we could inspect them just at eye level, and each time felt drawn into a very private world, a world of unexpected, if slow-motion, violence, despite its beauty. The pitcher-plants were less opulent but equally fascinating—most held a slowly dissolving bug or fly, and their gorgeous architecture (all those curves) is one of nature’s most successful fatal attractions—I’m sure we can all imagine analogues here, but I like to stick with just the plants for a moment. Water levels are dropping—and these plants might not be around much longer. Oregon’s Darlingtonia State natural Site north of Florence has a great collection of carnivorous plants, and a boardwalk curving out into their habitat (well worth a trip).
The other bog, the sort we lack in Oregon, is a true woodland quaking bog. It too has pitcher plants and sundews, less prominently displayed but in equal abundance, nestled in deep moss, the cranberries and the tiny sweet blueberries. The shore shakes as you walk over it, and sinks as you approach the water’s edge. Someday (not soon) it will close over. We used to swim in it, and poke our legs under the verge – until we discovered the leeches. This time we were happy to look at sundews, and marvel at the water pooling under our feet even as we stood among saplings. It seems so tenuous, even though it’s been marching along its particular succession path for millennia: fragile, delicate, and rare. This is an ancient world—one that elsewhere yielded giant elk and even human remains—the Tollund Man was almost perfectly preserved in a bog. What goes in, stays. Seamus Heaney said it best:
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Who knows what is in the bog on my mother’s island? It’s been there long enough to have a wooly mammoth or two. With changes in climate (already the water levels are dropping from diminished snow melt—cabin owners are extending their docks every year) it may not be there for as long as originally planned.
