Not meaning to be petty, but one hope for last week’s trip to the Upper Peninsula was waterfalls. The U.P. is filled with them, but it’s mid-September, and a dry season. Fortunately, weather reports showed rain for a few days there before I headed north, and hopefully the falls were recharging. Encouraging sign right off the side of the road on the western edge of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is Alger Falls.
Alger Falls, Michigan
On the western edge of the Park, a trail leads down to Sable Falls which you hear long before you get to see it.
How about some observations from Mary Oliver, in her poem The Waterfall, For Mary Swenson
For all they said,
I could not see the waterfall
until I came and saw the water falling,
its lace legs and its womanly arms sheeting down
Sable Falls, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
A lovely loop trail in Laughing Whitefish Falls State park winds through marvelous ferns and forest. Bark Ranger Chance has been posting lots of images in the woods there. You come to the top of the falls before heading down steep stairs to get a lower view.
while something howled like thunder,
over the rocks,
all day and all night –
unspooling
Laughing Whitefish Falls State Park
At the bottom you view the full 100 foot slide down the rock.
like ribbons made of snow,
or god’s white hair.
At any distance
it fell without a break or seam, and slowly, a simple
You park on a residential street in Munising and find an opening in the woods and hope you are the right trail to Memorial Falls.
preponderance –
a fall of flowers – and truly it seemed
surprised by the unexpected kindness of the air and
light-hearted to be
flying at last.
Gravity is a fact everybody
knows about.
It is always underfoot,
Memorial Falls, Munising
A few miles south of town is another state park with a short trail to Wagner Falls. Before you get to the fall, a small stream crosses the trail.
like a summons,
gravel-backed and mossy,
in every beetled basin –
and imagination –
Wagner creek
And then the twenty foot falls among the hemlock and pine.
that striver,
that third eye –
can do a lot but
hardly everything. The white, scrolled
Wagner Falls
A trail in Pictured Rocks leads through the forest to a wide sandy beach on Lake Superior. A walk along the beach to a rocky shelf, you get to a small fall that is the prettiest of them all emptying into the great lake.
wings of the tumbling water
I never could have
imagined. And maybe there will be,
after all,
Lake Superior, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
some slack and perfectly balanced
blind and rough peace, finally,
in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that
falling?
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Mary Oliver, The Waterfall, Poetry Magazine, January 1991
Elliot Falls