The days remain long along Lake Superior

It’s nudging up to 11 p.m. in Ontonagon, but twilight has little interest in being gone. In slow motion, twilight soft-steps to the west on the sky’s dome. Each small increment of fading daylight signals another star to poke out of the deepening blue. There’s Vega overhead!

Around the campfire, we’re waiting for the International Space Station to pass over, for 6 minutes of visibility, starting at 11:13 p.m. It will be dark enough, just barely, to see the silent white light moving southwest to northeast, 10 degrees (a vertical fist at arm’s length) above the horizon. It will pass over this campground on the Ontonagon River, and then be a dot in the air above dots in the water—ships on Lake Superior.

So why, so light so late in Ontonagon, where the wide river pours into Lake Superior? We’re on the far western end of the Eastern Time Zone, its border with the Central zone only 25 miles to the west near Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. This old harbor town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the westernmost incorporated community in the U.S. using the ET Zone.

Sunset here tonight was at 9:46 p.m. (I’ve traded bedtime for campfire time.) Tomorrow morning, the July sun will be as reluctant to rise as the campers. In the day’s dawning, fishing boats motor up the Ontonagon River to the river’s mouth, where the water opens up to the great expanse of Gitchee Gumee.

The campground is sprinkled with mature pines towering above travel rigs and tents. It’s open enough for bluebirds to keep flashing above the spacious yard between us and the campground office; I’m intent on finding their nest cavity. On the far end of the property the road borders a wetland, insuring there is no shortage of mosquitos in the night.

The river trail is chockful of vegetation, including wildflowers in bloom, most profusely the yellow of St. John’s wort and bird’s foot trefoil, and the purple of tall Canada thistle and dainty self heal. Most of the bloom is not that far behind our wildflowers back home 200 miles to the southwest.

Softstem bulrushes with brownish spikelets that look like hairy peanuts stand in the water along a shoreline of big boulders. A few feet away, tethered sailboats bob in the marina bay. I walk along, past a promise of edibles later this summer on the shrubs of hawthorns and blackberries. The blackberries are green, but already marble-size; it should be a bumper crop weeks after we’re gone.

I become fixated on wild carrot, or Queen Anne’s lace if you prefer. Its lacy clusters of dull white flowers frame the river. I wonder about what I can’t see, those roots—the carrots— below the 4-foot plants. I know wild carrots are smaller, more bitter and not orange like cultivated carrots. Wild carrots are a dull, whitish yellow, but edible nonetheless.

The trail swerves away from the river and borders a field, a wasteland of sorts with an old lighthouse and Lake Superior in the background. I’m startled by a flock of blackbirds rising from the field grasses. It’s mid-July, the blackbirds done nesting, now resting, flocking, and readying for migrating. But not yet. The days remain long along Lake Superior.

Dave Greschner, retired sports/outdoors editor at the Rice Lake Chronotype, writes about nature and the outdoors, pursues nature photography, and is the author of “Soul of the Outdoors.” He can be reached at davegreschner@icloud.com.