Whitefish Point

The Upper Peninsula has a fine shape. A big arching peninsula that sprouts lesser peninsulae in various directions. It even has a handle on top, or a kind of dorsal fin, known as the Keweenaw Peninsula, reaching far into Lake Superior. Keweenaw is the UP’s UP, and a whole other trip I’d like to take someday, if only to see the century-old opera house built with copper-rush money.

But that’s another trip. The UP comes to a number of points, one of which is Whitefish Point, jutting out between Whitefish Bay and the main body of the lake, which we reached last Sunday -- the ultima of this particular trip. State roads peter out before you get that far, but a local road can take you to the point, which features a lighthouse, a museum, a bird watching zone and a sandy beach with a view of Canada and a stiff cold wind blowing in from the lake. The gray-blue water was intensely cold, and the sky peaceful with puffy clouds here and there.

Front and center inside the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald, retrieved by divers after nearly 20 years in the drink. It’s hard to imagine the violence necessary to sink a ship big enough to carry 26,000 tons of cargo, but there she lies, in two pieces, on the bottom not far from Whitefish Point.

But it was not an Edmund Fitzgerald museum. Along three walls were other stories of other wrecks, most costing some lives, and most so long ago that there’s no living memory of them—the Comet, Vienna, Myron and Superior City, just to name a few. Among the artifacts from these wrecks were the nautical things you’d expect, such as a ship’s wheel, anchor chains, or steam engine gages. More poignant were bits of flotsam like bottles, dishes, a candelabra and even a bar of soap in its late 19th-century packaging. Some of the museum’s benches were made from wooden planks from wrecked ships, with their name carved in it.

Hanging near the ceiling was a second-order Fresnel lens, formerly the bright eye of a lighthouse elsewhere in Michigan but since retired. I don’t think I’ve seen one before, since I probably haven’t spent enough time in maritime museums -- though maybe I saw one in Greenwich, England, but forgot it. But I’m not sure how I could have forgotten. Meant to magnify light, and representing an important technical advance in the 19th century, a Fresnel lens is also an astonishing piece of glasswork. At first its overall resemblance to a human eye strikes you, but the more you look at it, the more the glassy curves and grooves and nodes emerge into an ensemble of glass pieces, arrayed like soldiers on parade.