Leaving behind more than footsteps on their summer vacations, tourists impose a rancid legacy on the north shore of Lake Superior.
People always bring her their garbage, because they can’t pack out what they brought in, having so enjoyed themselves, being here only a matter of days, not wanting to spoil their good time with their own filth and waste. So people bring her their garbage. Sometimes they merely toss it to Lake Superior, who opens her arms to them and their industrialized offal; and Superior dutifully delivers it to that Indian lady on the island, in tattered strips of shining plastic, swollen reeking cigarette butts, Hershey’s, Nestle, Jetpuffed, Foodmart, Molson, Labatt, Moosehead, Lay’s, Tostitos, Hershey’s, Tostitos, BetterMade, Propel, Coke, Pepsi, Tostitos, Hershey’s, Tostitos, Hershey’s, Tostitos, Hershey’s…
She gathers them up, so they won’t be ingested by Canada goose, merganser, yellowlegs, cormorant, loon, oldsquaw, bufflehead, pine siskin, olive-sided flycatcher, striped sparrow, goldfinch, larkspur, snow bunting, young eagle, red-tailed hawk, osprey, peregrine falcon, gyrfalcon, owl, whitefish, lake trout, redfin, coaster, perch, bass, walleye, shiner, mollusk, crayfish, plankton, algae, mycelia…
When the air and summer water are so warm that their garbage builds up, fast, like their good times, she builds small beach fires, downwind from her small house and its dormant woodstove. She slips past a tree line, through flocks of geese that observe her every move, find comfort in her predictability, part like supple grass for her passage, then congeal with confidence. She returns to the shore with slips of birch bark, and the water birds part again, briefly, for her dutiful passage. She gathers desiccated bits and branchlets of cedar from the pebbled beach, building layer upon layer of flammability for a pyre of strangers’ visits. She gathers unburned bits of charcoal from lake-choking entertainment from the nights before. The last of the vanishing caribou watch, wondering when it is safe enough to pass through her personal space, wondering when she will give the gift of dormancy and predictability once more. Business as usual in isolated bliss, even though the caribou have stopped breeding.
She sends those unwanted molecules upward, on the same southern breezes that bring the visitors, not really wanting to share that garbage with her cousins a hundred miles farther north, but not knowing how to cope with the poisons that have been gifted to her. One lady says, “Here, I’ll leave you my bacon grease,” and the Indian lady on the island says, “No, the bears live over there, leave it over there, you have mistaken me for a bear.” And when she comes back from fishing for breakfast, the bacon grease is there, with the creamy mac and cheese, Molson, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Winston Salem, fiberglass, polychlorides, styrofoam, paper, plastic, plastic, plastic. And the flock of geese parts as she lights a small, still-morning beach fire and scatters the lethal concentrate of summer tourism’s college professors, ecologists, the head of a conservancy somewhere far else far away—children of self-indulgence and instant self-gratification.
She pokes the fire, adds bits of this and that, vaporizes the experiences. A sun clears an eastern cape once again. And she ambles, picking up dried stools from her old blind dog with her bare hands—dry, soft memorabilia—testament to a long and loving relationship. The woman and the dog, the two of them once kept them at bay, the visitors… and their garbage. She tosses the stools into raspberry bushes at high-water’s edge, thinking that maybe tomorrow she will rise before the geese and taste ripe tidbits of fecal recycling.
Lois Beardslee is an award-winning Ojibwe/Lacandon author and illustrator. She is the first Native American to win the Michigan Notable Book Award, for her latest book, Words Like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers (Wayne State University Press, 2020), which received a silver medal in the 2021 Midwest Book Awards. Her work celebrates the strengths of indigenous people while addressing contemporary issues like climate change, socioeconomic inequality, racism in education, cultural appropriation in literature, and the impact of post-Brown Decision white flight on Native Americans north of the Great Lakes Rust Belt.
Header painting, Potty Training, Dixon Island, Lake Superior, by Lois Beardslee.
