COPPER HARBOR

Enough about ducks.  Even odd ducks and lovely ducks.  It's time to move on.

How about geese?

Here, it is hot and muggy, and even though it rained this morning, it is mostly dry; and we are beginning to tire of the late summer heat.  We look forward to those crisp autumn evenings we know are coming, and try not to think about the cold sleet and snow that will surely follow.

But last month, I can recall I lived in a place where the days were long and warm and the evenings short and cool.  There is such a place, hidden in the woods, just beyond Dreamland.

And when you are there--even in mid-August--you can find the beautiful colors of fall.

 If you ever tire of eating smoked fish and pasties, there is a restaurant in the north woods in Copper Harbor, the northernmost point of Michigan's upper peninsula.  There, diners feast on Lake Trout and Venison, Whitefish and Buffalo.  And, as they do, they look out over the harbor as the ferry returns from Isle Royale, and then sets out again on a sunset cruise.

The town takes its name from the ore-carrying freighters that used to crowd here at the height of the Copper boom, when America first discovered that a thin copper wire could weave the whole country together in a single conversation.  Today, no trade remains but arts and crafts; and the only copper is the gift that floats on the water at sunset.

 

 As I waited for a table, I wandered aimlessly around the dock, watching the fish.  This summer was cool, unusually so, and the result was a marvelous gift to the fish--a constant horde of flies buzzing endlessly just above the water when they were not biting featherless bipeds.

So at sunset, not twenty feet from shore, the trout leapt repeatedly, clearing the water so that you could catch with your eye (if not your camera) the instant when the fish breaks free of water into another element, where he grabs a fly and disappears again into his own realm.

 It was not a frenzy, but a steady procession, singly and in pairs, over and over again, repeating the same arc and ripple with hardly a splash.  It seemed as though no diner noticed--the sudden disturbance of the surface was momentary and incidental to the surrounding panorama, like Icarus splashing into the water in Brueghel's painting.




And, all the while, the geese paddled quietly, contentedly on the rippling, undulating water that never stilled but never moved, bobbing lightly in the changing light.

Then, just before I went in to dine, and the sun went down beyond the last trees on the last rock outcropping before the far-off horizon, for a brief moment that hung suspended in the mind's eye like the trout at the apex of his leap, the quiet goose on the calm water lit up in all his copper color.