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1 | Lines in the Forest
- University of Washington Press
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22 As its name suggests, Outer Island is hard to reach. Twentyfour miles from Bayfield at its closest point, Outer is the most vulnerable of the Apostle Islands to Lake Superior’s violent weather. It stands, in the words of one writer, “like a clenched fist directly in the path of Superior’s worst fury.” Only the most skilled and experienced kayakers venture this far from the mainland, and the distance and unpredictable weather deter most sailors and powerboaters. Those who do reach Outer Island find two primary attractions: a lighthouse at the northern tip and a long, graceful sandspit on the southern end.1 The lighthouse draws the most attention, as lighthouses always do. With their manicured lawns, beautiful views, and stories of isolation and adventure, the lighthouses of the Apostles have served as tourist attractions since the midnineteenth century. The U.S. Lighthouse Board constructed the Outer Island lighthouse in 1874, with an 80-foot brick tower that commands a view of the open lake. True to its romantic image, the station has a daring rescue story. In the ferocious storm of September 2, 1905, keeper John Irvine watched as wind and waves tore apart a disabled 338-foot ore barge, the Pretoria. The crew abandoned ship, but their lifeboat capsized before they could reach the island. “Captain Irvine, who, though sixty years old, is still hale and strong, started to their rescue,” reported a newspaper account. “By almost superhuman effort, 1 Lines in the Forest Lines in the Forest 23 while his life was endangered every minute, he brought the five who still clung to the lifeboat safely to shore.” The romance and history make the Outer Island Lighthouse a rewarding destination for those who make the long trip to see it.2 The island forest also has a history, one that powerfully represents the rewilding of the Apostles. The seven-mile trail that runs from the lighthouse to the sandspit sees little in the way of foot traffic. Sections of the trail are virtually impassable, inundated by water backed up behind beaver dams. The trail passes through three distinct forest types. A nearly straight line divides the northern and southern portions of the forest. North of this line, hemlock—once one of this forest’s dominant trees—joins yellow birch and sugar maple in the forest canopy, while it is almost completely absent to the south. The northernmost tip of the island is different still: a 185-acre patch of old-growth hardwood/hemlock forest with trees over 350 years old, among the largest and most important original stands of this forest type in the Great Lakes basin. The lines running across the Outer Island forest are far more important than they may at first seem. They bring into subtle relief questions about the future of this forest that have everything to do with its past. As is the case in most of the forests in North America, this past involved axes and chainsaws. Logging started late on Outer Island, due to its isolation and distance from Bayfield. The forest remained largely uncut until the 1920s, when the John Schroeder Lumber Company built a railroad on the island and established a large logging camp. The trail that today carries hikers between the sandspit and the lighthouse follows the old railroad grade.3 The Outer Island forest owes its peculiar composition in part to the logging that the railroad allowed. Schroeder lumberjacks clear-cut the southern half of the island and transported the sawlogs to the company’s Ashland mill. It was a tour of the Outer Island logging camp—and the uncut forest that remained on the island—that so disturbed Harlan Kelsey when he evaluated the islands as a potential national park in 1930. But the Great Depression swallowed the Schroeder Lumber Company, and logging on Outer Island ceased by 1931. Following a well-established pattern for cutover landscapes throughout the region, the piles of slash and logging refuse dried in the sun and wind and caught fire in 1936. Aerial photographs of the island taken in 1938 show the destruction caused by the fire. They reveal a stark line across the middle of the island: the cutover, southern portion of the island burned, the unlogged hardwood-hemlock forest did not. The resulting line would have been hard to miss in the ensuing years.4 [44.222.242.27] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:03 GMT) 24 chapter 1 1.1 This 1938 aerial...