JOHN PEPIN

“Born too late and everything you love is gone; born too late and everything you know is wrong,” – Steve Forbert

I don’t recall a great deal about the road, except for a few memories from decades back that flash briefly in my mind’s eye and then dip to black.

Fortunately, there are old photos and postcards to help me replace the blank spaces or missing puzzle pieces in my reflection.

In my earliest years, the road was gravel and stretched for more than 10 miles, with guard rails fashioned from thick, stretched and silvery wire cables that hung between wooden posts painted black and white.

I have a nice photo from the 1940s that shows the road this way. Like those roadway posts, it’s black and white.

This scenic byway twisted through northern hardwood forests and curved around the rims of several taciturn lakes, some that were often hidden by the leaves on the trees.

I remember asking my dad their names when I was a young boy in the backseat and we were driving past them.

These pretty forest lakes numbered six or more, depending how you count as at least one feeds into another. Over the years, some of their names have changed.

One of the first lakes you’d encounter heading west was favored for fishing and swimming. A soft sand beach hugged the shoreline. There was a swimming raft there too.

The lake was known for bluegills and at one time, brook trout.

In the springtime or after heavy rainfalls, I remember the water would swell over the north side of the road, which undoubtedly helped cause the cracked and heaved blacktop I recall during my high school years.

One of the other lakes was the source of a creek we used to fish almost daily when I was a kid. It was such a small stream, but it held a ton of brook trout.

The water wasn’t all that deep, but it was dark as it ran through a shaded glen along an old railroad line. Culverts were barred with rusted, steel bars to keep beavers and their dams at bay.

I remember dropping my fishing line and baited hook in between the bars and pulling trout back through the openings.

In other places, on the slow bends in the creek, trout and suckers would gather in these deeper places. We would ride our bikes to the creek and then walk the creek down, fishing.

Other times, we would just walk to the fishing places, following another old set of passenger train tracks to a trail and then to the creek itself. This is one of the places where a lot of us kids cut our teeth on trout fishing.

Nightcrawlers, sinkers, cheap Zebco fishing rods and maybe a bobber or even a French spinner were the tools we used.

My dad told me that at one point, this creek was designated as a kids fishing creek and was stocked with trout.

At the source lake, there is an intermittent creek that feeds in from the upstream side and crosses through a culvert under the scenic road.

My dad and I once used worms to fish a vernal pond created by the creek.

It was filled with trout. They were ravenous and hit our baits like they were piranhas.

I followed a power line and then down through the woods a few times when I was in high school to fish the source lake.

The shoreline was a bog mat, very spongy and moved like a thick carpet laid atop the water when you stepped on it. The only seemingly safe places to stand were on thick grass clumps or against growths of bushes the lined the lake.

No big trout here as I had imagined. Panfish instead, with a few small trout and a bullhead catfish or two.

My memories of the remaining lakes along the road are blotchy and smeared like watercolor paints across the canvas of my mind. I recall the names repeated, mostly passing through my parents’ lips when I was growing up.

The largest lake flows into another that was once used for the town’s water supply, before the community switched to well water from two underground aquifers.

At some point during the years of my raising, the scenic road was closed, dead ended and allowed to fall into gross disrepair. This came with the expansion of open pits where the region’s iron ore mining continues.

From its earliest days, white settlers built this area on the mining of ore, with tremendous returns. The mining company brought much to the people in terms of jobs and the ability to make a living in these beautiful and rugged north woods.

Whole towns built up around the industry and the company helped fund improvements like a hospital and outsized hotel where mining executives could stay in the city’s downtown.

So many of the streets and other features named in the area are namesakes of mining company officials. Iron ore from the mines helped provide steel to build America.

But as is often the case, this progress came at a tremendous cost.

Today, all but one of the mines have shut down operations. The countryside is scattered with rusting and crumbling ruins of past mining activities and old shafts fenced off and marked with caving grounds signs.

The town’s population has dwindled, and the once bustling downtown is a faint and saddened reflection of itself.

Rock waste piles stand like mountains, towering over communities. Some say the piled mine tailings even surpass the height of the state’s highest peak.

I really hope that isn’t true.

Eventually, the expanded open pits of the mines claimed not only the scenic forest drive but three of the lakes. This still astonishes me.

You can find these lakes on old maps or even online maps, but they are depicted now as lakes set over the clawed and scraped features of the sprawling mine pits.

It is incredible to think that a lake could be erased off the surface of the earth, much less three. I know this is a naive thought, but these weren’t just any lakes caught up in the crush of human expansion, these were lakes I saw or knew about from my youngest days.

They seemed like markers, like so many other things on the landscape. People do indeed develop strong ties to the lands and waters around them.

I know I did. They are in my blood.

In other places in the area, the mining company created manmade lakes with dams built to help power the mines. The impoundments are used for recreation in some cases, like boating and fishing.

Some are polluted.

I wonder if there could be jobs found in paying people to level the tailings piles by hauling the waste rock back down into the no longer active pits. It would probably take at least a hundred years to get that job done.

At this point, it’s hard to know what to make of these circumstances, how to reconcile the past with the present and the future.

A lot of people would sum it up with the phrase “It is what it is.”

I guess so.

But I still have an empty space inside for those things lost forever to the big machines and the consumption of a growing and hungry country.

If I want to go back to travel that scenic road, to revisit the places I recall, to recover those missing puzzle pieces or blank spaces — beyond the photographs and postcard images — I can’t do it.

Not ever.

It’s a good thing to remember as I go on ahead.

I will likely continue to witness tremendous changes in my lifetime – changes that may seem unbelievable to me now.

I need to get outside to visit the places I love as often as I can.

There are creeks and streams and lakes to enjoy and lush forests, mountain tops, deserts, oceans and all kinds of things to experience. Not to mention the seasons, the stars and the skies so blue.

There are also powerlines and railroad tracks to walk and roads to drive. Some of these head deep into the woods where the quiet of nature speaks with a whisper and stirs my heart.

Those are the places I need to be.

I can feel them tugging at me now as they always do.

If I am to discover any answers to my endless questions, they are undoubtedly only to be found out there.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.