Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore by Sue Leaf

Sue Leaf, whose previous works include Bullhead Queen and Portage, has a new essay collection entitled Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part natural and cultural history, the collection covers the early days of Anishinaabe and fur traders, through the heyday of commercial fishing, lumber camps, and copper mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula, and the consequences of plundering the forests and the land.

Leaf and her husband have a lifelong connection to the South Shore. Vacationing there in their early adulthood led them to purchase a cabin on the shore. As biologists, they watched with concern as the red clay cliff along their shoreline slowly eroded – thinking that eventually, but not in their lifetime – the cabin would succumb to the water of Superior. But as the years went by, the erosion of the shoreline escalated at an alarming rate, forcing individual homeowners and institutions out or requiring them to address the erosion in ways that were temporarily effective or damaging to the lake.

Leaf uses the example of the coastal erosion of Concordia College on Lake Michigan as a harbinger to others. The college campus, sitting on 192 acres of land along the western shore of Lake Michigan, lost twenty thousand tons of sediment each year, about five acres of land from 1982 to 2005. As the bluff edge inched closer to campus, the college consulted with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and launched a campaign to stabilize the bluff. Engineers laid a half mile of drains and built artificial wetlands along the coast, they bulldozed the bluff, reducing its angle and planted vegetation, finally laying down one hundred thousand tons of stone along the shore. The project slowed the rate of erosion of their bluff, but it had unintended consequences. Neighbors directly south of the campus lost their sand beaches and the lake now laps directly at their bluff, accelerating their erosion.

One of my favorite essays in the collection takes readers through the Soo locks, explaining the purpose of the locks and how they work, then guiding us through them with her cousin, James Bittner, an experienced crew member on the 858-foot-long Roger Blough. Bittner locks through eighty to eighty-five times in a shipping season; all in a day’s work, he says.

Leaf’s book will appeal to lovers of the Lake Superior region, and anyone concerned about climate change.