A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands

3 | Consuming the Islands

91 For over twenty-five years in the mid-twentieth century, Grace and Laurie Nourse ran one of the most unusual and authentic tourist operations in the Apostle Islands, a restaurant and resort called the Rocky Island Air Haven. Laurie Nourse or his son captained an excursion boat that departed from Bayfield. Passengers boarded the boat and placed a lunch order, which was radioed to Grace, who had the meal ready when the ship arrived at Rocky Island. The menu included fried or boiled fish, scalloped potatoes, salad, bread, and pie, which visitors enjoyed in an old net house that Laurie had converted into a dining room. The Nourses decorated the dining room with fishnet curtains and hung old ring buoys and floats on the walls. They converted other buildings at their old fishing camp into cabins, which they rented to sportsmen who wanted to spend several days in the islands trolling for lake trout or hunting deer.1 The Air Haven flourished because the Nourses capitalized on the connections between tourism and other industries. The restaurant got its start because the Booth Company’s collection boat arrived at Rocky Island three times a week, often carrying tourists on a scenic tour of the islands. In the early 1940s, the Nourses started serving coffee and pie to the tourists, and they soon realized that this might be more lucrative than fishing. “We could hear those passengers say 3 Consuming the Islands 92 chapter 3 ‘If I could just get a cup of coffee, I wonder how long we are going to have to lay here.’ So an idea was born. . . . [So] many people were lined up clear down to the boat up to the building so we decided that this was going to be a pretty nice thing.” The Nourses bought fresh fish from the commercial fishermen who still used Rocky Island as a base. The deer hunt also depended on island history and a connection to resource extraction. Few deer lived on Rocky until the mid-1940s. But the edge environments that grew up in the logging sites and burned-over areas provided excellent deer habitat and led to a spike in deer numbers. Every autumn Rocky Island became the center of a distinctive island hunt.2 Despite its charm and local flavor, the National Park Service shut down the Rocky Island Air Haven in 1974. The Air Haven represented a brand of tourism grounded in the islands’ past, not their future. The NPS intended to manage the Apostles as a wilderness, a place for primitive recreation and scientific study valued because evidence of human history seemed so hard to find. Such a wilderness required severing the ties between tourism and resource-production activities like commercial fishing and logging. As in the fisheries, the management of the island tourist industry required legibility, in this case a strict separation between activities of production and consumption. A restaurant and cabin-rental service like the Air Haven, with its historical connections to resource production, did not fit into this management scheme.3 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the state took an ever more active role in fostering the tourist trade. At first, this meant little more than introducing game fish and promoting Wisconsin as a tourist destination. But as the managerial authority of the state grew, and the demands of resource management became more complicated, state planners encouraged the segregation of tourism from other economic activities. Setting tourism apart has had tangible consequences for island environments. It has led to the perception that the islands represent pristine wilderness and to a federal management regime designed to maintain this perception. In the long run, the impact of tourism on island environments has proven at least as enduring as the extractive industries once so common on the Chequamegon Bay.4 An Escape into Nature AssoonasthelocksatSaultSte.Marieopenedin1855,theApostleIslandsandthe rest of Lake Superior became accessible to tourists, and tourism joined fishing, Consuming the Islands 93 logging, and quarrying as pillars of Bayfield’s economy. Early visitors arrived by steamer, but as in fishing and logging, the railroad transformed every aspect of the tourist trade. The number of visitors who traveled to the islands jumped as the railroads engaged in a promotional campaign to lure passengers out of the crowded, noisy cities and to the clean air and scenery of the Chequamegon Bay. In doing so, the railroads built the impression that...