To most people in Minnesota and nearby states the phrase "North Shore" evokes images of crashing waves, towering cliffs, cascading falls, seemingly endless vistas, and easy hiking trails cutting through otherwise almost impenetrable pine forests rich in the smells of the north country. On the other hand, I suspect that for many, the phrase "South Shore" conjures little or nothing at all. Yet this region also has a lot to offer, including the Apostle Islands National Seashore, Bayfield, and the bucolic gem of Madeline Island, once the capital of the Ojibwe people, now home to Big Bay State Park, the village of La Pointe, and miles of gravel roads offering intermittent views of vintage cottages and the outer islands.
Discerning readers will immediately point out that none of the things I've mentioned here is actually on the South Shore; they all lie mostly around the corner of the Bayfield Peninsula, tucked within the protection of the outer islands and the expanse of Chequamegon Bay. But that's merely a quibble, especially when you consider that the South Shore runs for hundreds of miles, all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.
The stretch we visit, running from Superior to Ashland, has a character altogether different from its opposite number to the north. The beaches tend to be sandy, behind which the highway lopes through graceful hills weathered by streams and creeks so feeble that they've been given names like Lost Creek One, Lost Creek Two, and Lost Creek Three. The hardscrabble villages along the way—Port Wing, Herbster, Cornucopia—are miniscule, though they carry a lingering atmosphere of maritime life highlighted by the lighthouse and concrete pier in Port Wing and the Halverson Fishery in Cornucopia.
The coastline itself is punctuated by peninsulas extending out into the lake—Quarry Point, Roman Point, Bark Point, Squaw Point—and the bays that lie between them. But you don't find many DNR signs directing you to these features. More common are the signs identifying the sloughs that have formed in the backwaters where the creeks meander out to meet the big lake. It would take a connoisseur of landscapes to fully appreciate this biome—one equipped with a kayak and a field guide to ericaceous plants.
Most vacationers speed past these nondescript stretches of highway, eager to get to the shops, restaurants, and more picturesquely recreational marinas in Bayfield and Washburn. I suspect many skip the shoreline route along Highway 13 altogether—you don't actually see the lake all that often—and keep to the faster lanes of Highway 2 farther inland.
A few weeks ago Hilary and I booked a cottage right in the middle of Herbster. It turned out to be sandwiched between the fire station and the community center, which (we learned) is open twenty-four hours a day. But the setting was plenty woodsy for all that. Venerable spruce trees were growing in the front yard on either side of the sidewalk, much of the real estate nearby was undeveloped woodland, and we could see Lake Superior off in the distance out the kitchen window.
During the two days we were there we saw only four people in Herbster: one construction worker on a scaffold refurbishing the windows of a church and a mother and her two children leaving the community center gym. Traffic on the highway at the bottom of the hill was negligible; the deer hunting opener was still a week away.
Our plan was simple: explore a few of the minor sights in the region, buy some fresh fish at Halvorson's Fishery for dinner, and read. We spent some time on our first evening acclimatizing ourselves to the suddenly snowy landscape at the beach in Herbster (see above) and the public landing at the end of Bark Point. The next morning we took a hike into Lost Creek Falls.
The trailhead lies just off County C, a few miles up the hill from Cornucopia. The air was cold and crisp, the landscape mildly hilly, and the snow-dusted forest a mix of spruce, maple, and mature red and white pine. My only concern, and a minor one at that, was that we didn't know how long the hike would be. The Trails.com website described it as 1.1 miles, but didn't mention whether this was one-way or round trip. The sign on the fridge at our cottage listed it clearly at 2.2 miles each way. And the spiffy government sign at the trailhead put it a 1.5 miles in each direction.
It was a lovely trail, and the falls, though hardly dramatic, made for a pleasant stop and turn-around point. Hilary broke open a dam of twigs that had created a backwater pool downstream from the falls, and we watched the water tumble through the newfound gap in a minor torrent for a few minutes.
Such are the quiet amusements of a morning spent in the deep woods.
The hike out, as usual, was much shorter than the hike in had been. (Correct distance? A little more than two miles round trip.) On the spur of the moment, we continued south along County C over the hump of the Bayfield Peninsula and down the other side, veering east through orchards, past a golf course, and into the town of Washburn. Our new plan was to get a cup of coffee at the Coho Café and spend some time in the Chequamegon Bay Bookstore.
I rarely browse in bookstores these days—I have more books than I'll ever get around to reading. But everything is different when you're traveling. You didn't bring all that many books with you, you're spending money right and left anyway, and you sometimes form an indelible connection between book and locale that becomes a meaningful part of the vacation. I still look back fondly on the hardcover edition of The Iliad (the Fitzgerald translation) that I bought in a used bookstore in Lanesboro that later burned down. Then there's that masterful piece of travel writing, Time and Tide in Acadia, which I spotted in a little shop in Stonington, Maine. And what about that coffee-table book of the photographer Nadar's portraits of his illustrious contemporaries Baudelaire, Sara Bernhardt, Balzac, and many others that I lugged home all the way from Avignon? I've never seen a copy like it. (Confession: I haven't looked at it much, either.)
We walked up to the check-out desk twenty minutes later with the Browne study, a small hardcover anthology of the poems of Theodore Roethke, a beginner's instructional manual for the accordion, and a copy of Hilary's upcoming book club book, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. (We might easily have stayed longer, but the sun was shining outside, and I had neglected to bring my reading glasses.)
The woman behind the counter pulled out a small pad equipped with carbon paper and wrote the titles and prices on the topmost sheet. Then she turned to her electric adding machine and rung up the total and the tax, which she noted on the slip.
"I'm almost tempted to pay with the emergency check I carry in my wallet just to maintain the anachronism," I said. This benign remark produced only a slight look of bewilderment, so I handed the woman a credit card.
The Coho Café was closed, but lunchtime was approaching, and we decided to head up the shore to Bayfield. Along the way Hilary made use of her phone to determine that Maggie's Cafe was closed (we later learned that it had been closed for two years) but she spotted a restaurant a few blocks down the hill called the Manypenny Bistro. It was not only a good choice, but also, we learned, the only restaurant currently open in Bayfield. Our waitress explained why herring was the only fish on the menu, and we picked up a number of incidental facts about people in town from a large, talkative man named "Tiny" who was sitting alone at the next table.
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| Quiet times in Bayfield |
Tiny seemed to be retired, though he paid for his meal with a very large bill that the waitress had difficulty making change for. Everyone who came in seemed to know him. He told us he was born and raised in Happy Hollow, just east of Cornucopia, and we took note of the road sign later as we passed on our way back to Herbster.
Along the way we'd passed the Red Cliff Reservation and taken the loop road north to the Little Sand Bay Visitor's Center. From the beach and pier the views out across the bay to the islands were grand, but the buildings were closed and the only person we saw was a goose hunter returning to his car carrying a shotgun and wearing a bizarre, full-body suit made of short strips of cloth that resembled feathers--a ghillie suit--who told us, "I missed."
There's a fishery museum further down the shore, but it, too, was closed. I walked past the yellow tape and down to the shore; the buildings appeared to be deteriorating to the point of collapse.
The fishery in Cornucopia was also closed—no fish for dinner—and the general store was closed for the season. But the sun was still shining, and we had a fine time stopping to investigate the ingress of Lost Creek into Lake Superior from both banks. This entailed driving out to the end of Roman Point and stopping at an unsigned public landing.
Chalk it up to the brilliant afternoon sunlight: everything roundabout was stunning. The slough was bristling with vegetation, the rocks on shore looked like lumps of rusty gold, the sand lay spread in elegant swirls along the beach, and the clouds drifted by in soft, theatrical bands and tufts.
We spent the evening reading and listening to Bill Evans' CDs on the DVD-player at our cottage. I took a look at an anthology of critical essays about the Scottish philosopher David Hume that contained passages like this one:
Exegetically, we could say that Hume was following Schaftesbury's two most distinctive ethical tenets, namely, that the moral life stands on its own feet, and must do so if it is to retain its purity, and that judgments are akin rather to aesthetic taste than to rational insight.
Well put. But I soon wearied of such stuff and turned my attention to a collection of blog entries set in Door County by the opera-singer-turned-mystery-writer J. F. Riordan that included entries such as "In Praise of Small Towns," "The Intricacies of Casual Conversation," and "The Going Price for Squirrels." I especially liked her piece about eating an entire package of Chuckles in the local hardware store, evaluating them, flavor by flavor, from one end of the row to another. The cashier watched her and then said, "People always finish the whole pack before they leave the store."
Meanwhile, Hilary had spotted a collection of newspaper columns on the shelf by a local author named Howard Paap, chronicling life on the nearby Red Cliff Reservation, reviewing the early history of the Ojibwe people, and describing life in Bayfield both in and out of the tourist season. Perfect.
It clouded up during the night, and our morning walk through the woods east of Meyers Beach was a chilly one, further undermined by the wooden boardwalk that extends without a break for the first three-quarters of a mile. I'm sure it serves a purpose, perhaps both practical and ecological, but in mid-November I'd rather be walking on crunchy leaves than icy planks. All the same, the hike through the scrubby woods was nice, though neither the big lake nor the red cliffs for which the area is famous ever came into view.
A half-hour in, the trail meets up with the stub end of Mawikwe Road, and at this point you can also see Lake Superior, just down the hill through the woods. Though the trail continues through the woods for miles, we scrambled down along a steep narrow path to the lake, and I was delighted to discover when we got to the beach that it was frozen solid. We could walk back to the car along the lakeshore without struggling against the shifting sand.
And so we did.
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