Yesterday at Whitefish Point

You never know the last time you’re going to do something.

I used to think about that, about the last time my son would put his hand on my shoulder when we were walking. And then he didn’t do it anymore but I don’t remember what the last time was like, where we were going or what we were talking about. I just remember that he used to walk along next to me with his hand on my shoulder and I reveled in it, thinking that he was claiming me as his mother, which was important because I was his adoptive mother and conscious of that all of the time. But then he quit doing it. I don’t know why; he just didn’t want to or need to anymore. We never discussed it. It was like a falling leaf. Who talks about why a falling leaf falls. It was just time.

Nearly every year, this time of year, we go to Whitefish Point. It is in the far northeast corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where Lake Superior narrows to give way to Lake Huron. Big freighters pass by going from Duluth to Detroit and Cleveland. The Edmund Fitzgerald sank 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point on November 10, 1975; its entire crew of 29 men was lost. So even though it is a beautiful place, it has a pall of foreboding even on the sunniest day.

We were there yesterday. It was overcast but not raining and Lake Superior was calm. There was debris on the beach from a terrific storm a few days earlier, tree limbs aligned so perfectly, they seemed arranged as art. You wonder how it happens that such massive things could be tossed on a beach, where did they come from, why were they in Lake Superior? There’s so much I don’t know about this lake I have loved so hard for twenty years.

When we go to Whitefish Point we walk east on the beach to what we call the actual point that juts gently into Lake Superior where it turns the corner and then we take pictures like we’ve never been there before and will need the pictures for our scrapbook. We just do this without thinking about whether it will be the last time or not but clearly as we get older it becomes a keener question.

I look at it now, this picture of me and our dog, and I’m glad we were there yesterday at the actual point of Whitefish Point with all its foreboding. And if it is the last time, I know there is this picture and we look happy, both of us, like there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. And there wasn’t at that moment.