Circle Tour - Day 3

The plan was to spend the morning sunning myself beside Lake Superior.  At the campsite, the mosquitoes were horrendous, but surely down by the lake!  But with high humidity and no wind and a full scale charge by deer flies, the only way I could stand the shore would be by wading in up to my neck getting hypothermia from the frigid water.  

Time for a change of plans.  I would have other days on Lake Superior beaches. I packed up quickly and hit the road.  

I first stopped at Iroquois Point to look at the lighthouse.  Lighthouses are one of my great loves and here was one of the prettiest.  It was closed, as many attractions are on a Monday, but I could walk around it and along the boardwalk on the beach. For some reason there was a pleasant breeze here. 

At Bay Mills I saw a sign for the Mission Hill Cemetery overlook.  That sounded promising.  Photos I had taken of Lake Superior were uninteresting, just a lot of water. So I drove up and up and up the hill until I came to the cemetery. Yes the outlook had a good view but more importantly, here I was at another of my great loves, an old cemetery.  Cemeteries give the best feel for the history of a place and are a place for walking, better even than a park for exercise. 

Mission Hill is so much better than one of those bland Protestant cemeteries that seem to be set up more for easy mowing than memories.  Here were Native American stones that were painted in bright colors rather than engraved.  Elsewhere were marble stones that dated back to settler days.  Here and there were plaques that simply said

This monument speaks of the dangerous life of the sailors that work on dangerous Lake Superior

The bodies of the sailors of the wrecked steamer Myron are laid to rest here with no individual stones. 

I liked the individuality of the burials.  One family planted wildflowers that must have been loved by the couple that were laid here. 

That seemed right to me. 

I came down from the hill thinking it would be the most interesting spot I would see today.  But then I spotted another interesting cemetery, the Bay Mills Old Indian Burial Ground.  

The boxes were spread all over the burial ground.  What was that about?  I parked the car and went over to the surrounding steel fence to talk to a woman working there to find out what this was all about.  She was Paula Carrick, Bay Mills tribal historian.  She explained that her people believed that it took four days for the spirit of the deceased to reach the afterlife. Into these boxes, families placed mementos and things that the people in the grave might need to take with them.  It was much like the pharaohs in their pyramids.  Sadly the fence had been placed there because grave robbers had gone in with metal detectors and desecrated the graves.  

Paula also explained the "unknown" plaques up on Mission Hill.  She and her crew had cleaned up that cemetery, too, and using modern technology, found out there were unmarked graves.  Some day they might identify those, too. 

Paula and I started talking about other graveyards.  She had ancestors from Scotland and had recently visited there. We talked about Glen Coe and Culloden, two places where ghosts still walk.  We both felt them when we were there.

As I drove off, I had so much to think about.  

Tonight I am at Drummond Island...but that is a story for another day.