When I began planning for this trip, I had only one fixed rule: that it should conclude with Lake Superior. The order of the others did not matter. The Lake that Longfellow's idealized Ojibwa had called Gitche-Gumee was going to have to come last.

Anyone who has seen Superior will know why. This is not only the largest body of fresh water on the planet: it is, hands down, the most beautiful. Cold, clear waters crash against cliffs; the eye hunts in vain for a horizon. In the mornings, fog rolls inland, fingering among dark headlands; in the afternoons, whitecaps sparkle on blue water and gulls gambol over long beaches in the winds that blow from the sea. Evenings bring calm, and long cool light. The yellow brick road of Oz lies on the big Lake. The sun hits the water, hisses, and goes out; what was bright gold turns instantly to burnished silver. The sky fills with a bonfire's breath of hovering stars.

Though an arm of Superior reaches almost to the brink of the Sault, the Lake properly begins at Whitefish Point, seventy highway miles to the northwest. Until then one is beside Whitefish Bay, a wide dream of water, but bounded. If you squint you can make out Canada, distant but visible, on the far side. At Whitefish Point, though, the land stops and the sea begins, and there is nothing out there but an imagination of distant shores. Fifteen miles off this point, struggling in huge seas, the iron boat Edmund Fitzgerald broke apart and plunged five hundred feet to the bottom in November 1975. It is a measure of Superior's vast size that the Fitz's chroniclers will tell you she almost made haven. In Lake Ontario, fifteen miles out gets you more than a third of the way across. In Superior, fifteen miles out is practically inshore.

In 1983, Rod Badger and I came to Whitefish Point toward the middle of a late July morning. The fog had not yet burned off the Lake; gray surf rolled out of it onto gray sands. Sawgrass moved in the wind. The foghorn at the Whitefish Point Light gronked as if mourning a lost companion. We sat on the solitary beach and played a tape of Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and felt as though we had come to the end of all lands; that beyond would be only the sea, and perhaps, far out, the misty byways of the Irish Isles of the Blest.

In 1998, I set out to re-create the experience. I knew the fog would not be there unless the weather cooperated, but I could at least hope for the solitude, and I had the same tape along. What I was not prepared for were the changes that had come to the shore. I had seen the pattern developing on the lower Lakes, of course, but I had managed to cling to the belief that Superior - the largest, loneliest, and most distant of the Lakes - would somehow remain immune. I was wrong.

- from "To the Superior Ocean"