Lake Michigan Ice

White capped waves are rolling in slowly, in majesty.  Ice is beginning to build on the sand.  Soon Lake Michigan will wear a white collar of ice that will keep the sand from washing away.  The sun is shining yet the wind is causing the temperature to be below freezing.

King Salmon

King Salmon

            Under the bone white moon lattices of king salmon ribs litter the banks of their birth streams.  Below the murmuring surfaces of westward running streams, smolts burst from their clear coral eggs stell wearing yolk sacs on their bulging bellies.  If the embryonic fish survive the hungry mouths of predators on their westward trips to Lake Michigan, they will return to their birth place at maturity.  It is their place to be born, to spawn and to die.

            The imprint of their birth place enters into their bodies along a sense organ called the lateral line that carries an accurate map and compass.  It is a network of circuitry more intricate than the West Michigan river systems.  The fish will be able to return with the certainty of the cycling planets and constellations of stars.

     In the jade green waters of the inland sea, Lake Michigan, king salmon gorge on smaller fish and crustaceans.  Their skins speckled with dark colored spots carry the blue sheen of sky and the earth tones of forest.  They feed their voracious dream of the birth stream until their bodies grow heavy with it. Their bodies are stuffed with coral eggs or pearly white milt—female and male.  For both sexes the dream is the same.  It enters the tops of their heads as the sun streams into their pineal gland and gathers force.

     In the freedom of the sweetwater sea, they bide their time, slowly fanning their tails, drifting through layers of warm and cool water called the thermocline.  They drift. In their bodies they carry the wordless undeniable dream: a rocky stream bottom in the shadows of pines, the traceries of ferns, and wildflowers.

            The dream gathers force as the harvest moon grows heavy on the horizon.  Sleek and round from a summer of feeding and their cargo of coral or pearl, they grow restless and cease their feeding.  All at once they streak toward the estuary, linger there for a while, then streak upstream toward their place.  It has been so since the Pleistocene times when the salmon breathed glacial melt water through their red gills.  It is still the same water and still the same urgent force: birth, procreation and death.

           So they ignore baited hooks, snares and leap dams following the ghosts of their migratory ancestors.  Finally they reach the place where they wriggled free of their gelatinous eggs and begin their journeys.  The female fans a hollow in the stones with her tail while the male waits and watches.  She releases the clear coral eggs then the male releases his pearly white milt to fertilize them.  The king salmon have spent it all.  They die and their elements enter other life cycles along the stream. Only their clean bones remain while the new generations gestate on the bottom of the stream.

Salmon Obsessed with Return

An Obsessive Sense of Place

Lattices of salmon ribs litter the banks of a stream.  On cold autumn nights, frost flowers bloom reflecting star light.  The stream babbles and unintelligible song as it rushes westward.  It is the salmons’ place to be born, tow spawn; it is their place to disintegrate and die.  Salmon are anadromous fish, fish evolved to follow an elegant rhythm of always returning to their birth stream to spawn after maturing in a saltwater or sweetwater se.

            For male and female salmon alike, the imprint of place is their obsession.  As smolts they burst from their transparent eggs still wearing a yolk sac on their bulging bellies.  Like their ancient ancestors who breathed glacial meltwater through their gills, the newborns streak down stream to the freedom of the great inland sweetwater seas known as the Great Lakes.  In jade green waters they feed their voracious dream until their bodies grow heavy with it—until they resemble silver purses stuffed with treasure: slick coral beads and pearly white milt.

Summer sun dazzles  down through the thermoclines—the layers of warm, cool, cold water—where it enters through the fishes’ pineal eyes—triangles on top of their heads—giving them sure knowledge of their place in the larger scheme of things.  They bide their time drifting in schools, fanning their tails in repose, gorging on small fish.  They dream of their place where clear water chortles over quartz and granite under shifting shadows of white pine and tamarack.  It is their place and as their urgent need to return gather force under a moon that grows heavy on the horizon, a moon the color of salmon eggs, a moon that must change to bone white, the salmon mill about in the harbor.

The fishes’ bellies grow heavy as the harvest moon.  The dream becomes reality as celestial cues, the sun, the moon, the stars enter each cellule and each dancing atom of their bodies.  Then they begin.  The fish return to their stream and nothing will stop them: they ignore hunger, snares, treble hooks.  On their silvery sides their lateral lines carry everything they need to know; their maps and compasses imbedded in the circuitry of their bodies…the hereditary wisdom of their species carried in a network of circuits from pineal to tail.  It is a sure knowledge of the west Michigan river system linked to the Great Lakes.

                                                                                        --Barbara Spring

Poems about Water

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/springpoetry  Click the link for poems about water

Isle Royale in Lake Superior

Greenstones,  Wolves, Moose, Thimbleberries, and the Isle Royale redfin lake trout

On the map, Isle Royale looks like the eye in the wolf’s head shape of Lake Superior with Duluth its snout and the Keweenaw Peninsula its mouth.  It is precious since there are few places left on this planet that have been preserved like this.  It is unique; some of the oldest rocks on this planet form Isle Royale, its plants and animals  and minerals.  There are copper mining pits on the Island where native Americans dug rich veins of copper long ago.

     When I think of Isle Royale, I think of Eden, a place away from cars and the noise of machinery. There is no traffic on Isle Royale; only hiking trails.   The sounds of Isle Royale are of bugling moose, the silvery songs of northern songbirds, the lapping of waves on rocks and the quavering voices of loons.  Sometimes there is the slap of a beaver’s tail.  The resident pack of wolves are elusive and seldom seen.  We did not hear them at all.

     My husband and I hiked the trails there and I’ll never forget the thimbleberries  higher than our heads along a trail.  We picked the large berries like none other I have ever tasted, copper color, tangy and delicious.

          We found greenstones, Michigan’s semi precious stone.  We stayed on Isle Royale for a week and every day we took a different hiking trail.  We watched a diving duck teaching her young to dive.  We saw a fox near its den, and had a close encounter with a moose.   As we hiked, my husband Norm said, “I smell a moose.”  I didn’t believe him, but as we came around the bend, there it was, bigger than life, standing athwart our trail.  We kept a respectful distance and it casually strolled off.

          We did not fish, but the rocks off of the island are the place where the Isle Royale redfin lake trout spawn as they have for millennia.  This is an endemic species and it’s good to know it is still returning to Isle Royale every year before returning to the depths of Lake Superior.

          In my book, The Dynamic Great Lakes, I have a section devoted to this very special fish, the Isle Royale redfin lake trout.

Lake Levels Rising in the Great Lakes

The Detroit Free Press

Water levels are surging in the Great Lakes and likely will set records this summer, forecasters said Monday — a remarkable turnaround from earlier this decade that's bringing welcome relief to shippers and marina owners, but causing flooding and heavy erosion in some areas.

A six-month bulletin from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicted Lake Superior and Lake Erie soon will reach unprecedented high points, as a heavy winter snowpack across the region's northern section melts and mingles with water gushing into the lakes from rivers swollen with spring rainfall.

Levels have been trending upward at varying rates since 2013, when Lakes Huron and Michigan fell to their lowest points and the other Great Lakes were significantly below normal. That was the nadir of a nearly 15-year slump that stranded pleasure boats, forced cargo vessels to lighten loads, dried up wetlands and fueled conspiracy theories that water was somehow being siphoned off to the parched West.

               "It's quite the shift," said Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology with the                           Corps' district office in Detroit. "Now we're at the other extreme."

Lake Superior, which holds more water than the other four combined and sends it in a continuous flow through its southern outlet, is about 15 inches (38.1 centimeters) above its long-term average level for this time of year, and nine inches (22.9 centimeters) higher than a year ago. Lake Erie is 26 inches (66 centimeters) over its long-term average.

Michigan, Huron and Ontario aren't expected to set records but are well above average, Kompoltowicz said.

Great Lakes levels are known to fluctuate over time. But experts said the prolonged drop-off of the past decade and the more recent rise likely result at least in part from a warming climate.