Lake Effect

learning from the Great Lakes

Milwaukee’s Lakefront

Lake Michigan never fails to make me catch my breath. Growing up in Milwaukee, it was a frequent backdrop to various activities: farmers’ markets, birthday parties, jogging, or simply a place to go for a bit of leisure. It’s where we swam, or skipped rocks at South Shore Park, and went sailing with our neighbors (formidable sailors, who even into late age, participated in annual sailing races from Milwaukee to the Michigan side of the lake). Whenever I’m in Milwaukee, Lake Michigan — to the east of the rest of the city — is my natural compass. 

The first time I visited Lake Superior, I was around 12 years old. In my mind, it reminded me of Lake Michigan: a stretch of water as far as the eye could see, glimmering in the sun, a cooling force on a hot summer day. At that time, I didn’t understand the magnificent, sublime scale of these bodies of water. I didn’t understand the scale of Lake Superior alone: according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, “it covers 31,700 square miles, and could hold as much water as Lakes Michigan, Huron, Ontario, and Erie combined, with room left over for three extra Lake Eries.” My next visit to Lake Superior wasn’t until about 15 years later. It was June, and I watched the car’s thermometer dip from the mid-70s to the 50s after our stop in Lac du Flambeau, as we continued up Highway 51 towards Ashland. A fog covered the lake, common at that time of year; I couldn’t take my eyes off of the water as we drove parallel to it, from Ashland to Washburn, and finally to our destination of Red Cliff. 

When I moved to Madison for college, I felt contented with its geography of an isthmus: being on a strip of land flanked by two lakes. Each morning, leaving my dorm to go to French class, the first thing I laid my eyes on was Lake Mendota. And yet, Madison’s lakes only bolstered my sentiments for Lake Michigan; seeing these lakes’ opposite coastlines from where I stood made me miss the grandeur of the Great Lakes. As a child, I wondered, if I squinted hard enough, if I really looked closely, could I see Michigan’s coastline from Milwaukee? I let myself get lost in and develop a sense of curiosity around the horizon, where the sky and the water visually meet. I drew unfair comparisons between Lake Mendota and Lake Michigan on the basis of their sizes, without realizing that they are, truly, in different categories: according to the Decolonial Atlas, the Anishinaabemowin term for what white settlers deemed the Great Lakes is Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin, meaning “The Five Freshwater Seas.” These bodies of water contain one fifth of the world’s fresh water, and are large enough to create their own weather patterns. 

In the book Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore, author Sue Leaf writes of Lake Superior as allowing people to “ponder a way of life that requires an accurate reading of nature, that wrestles with big water, and that is lived in the rhythms of our restless planet. In the twenty-first century, when we struggle to define our human role in the ecosystem, it would be helpful to meditate on an obvious existence where nature is big and humans are small.” It’s an “honest, dramatic way of life.” Who are we in relation to our environments? What can we learn from these environments that inspire awe? How can we — how should we — engage with these environments? 

Much of Milwaukee’s lakefront is public land, created by filling in lakebeds. It’s an ongoing, committed effort that began in the 1890s, in the interest of guaranteeing public access to Lake Michigan. As Virginia Small wrote for the Shepherd Express, “socialist leaders later expanded upon that vision and dramatically increased parkland by filling in lakebeds. The 22-acre Lakeshore State Park, completed in 2007 atop debris from Milwaukee’s Deep Tunnel sewer expansion, culminated this century-long public enterprise.” This designation of public land for leisure is an important acknowledgment of the working person’s need for rest, and was a strong part of Milwaukee’s socialist tradition during the 20th century, which prioritized the public health of working people through initiatives for public housing, lunch programs, medical exams, and increased wages. 

While it is wonderful to have universal access to this lakefront, to be used “for what we will,” and to have the land protected from corporate ownership and the exploitation that goes hand-in-hand with that, there is a darker, limiting side to this use. The city and county’s claim on the land for park use creates a barrier between human and environment: we can access it, in a maintained, manicured, restrained state, but we can’t fully engage with it to grow or gather food, or tend to it in such a way that richens it. It is designed in such a way that existing in ecological reciprocity with it is impossible. Lake Superior’s southern coastline is dotted with national parks and lakeshores. In Impermanence, Leaf writes, “[Red Cliff and Bad River reservations] were originally in favor of the park. But later, as the legislation became more defined, tribal governments opted out, fearing that they would lose autonomy in crucial activities such as ricing, hunting, and fishing.” The ideology that guided the designation of wilderness areas during the 1960s and 1970s viewed humans as distinctly isolated from the environment, as a force that could only harm nature, rather than active participants in sustaining it and being sustained by it. 

And harm it we have, though not by our mere presence or status as humans, but by capitalist greed. Impressive amounts (amounts so impressive it seemed unreal) of copper and iron used to exist along the shores of Lake Superior. The mining activity boomed, generating wealth for the settlers and populating small but stately towns along the lakeshore, and then fell flat when the resources were exhausted. Still, Lake Superior iron deposits account for 90% of U.S. iron production over the last 50 years. The tragic fate of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald can be owed to such greed: the ship, owned by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, was transporting over 26,000 tons of taconite (low-grade iron ore) from Duluth, Minnesota to Detroit, and other Great Lakes port cities. Caught in a violent November storm in 1975, with hurricane-force winds, the freighter sank, snapping in two, its 29 crew members perishing with it. The Edmund Fitzgerald is one of at least 350 wrecked ships in Lake Superior. 

Just a month after the shipwreck, Gordon Lightfoot recorded his ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, in which he refers to the storm as “the witch of November.” The history of the figure of the witch is inextricably tied to the rise of capitalism, as Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch. The witch is at odds with the rise of patriarchal control over women’s bodies, the mechanization of the accumulation of resources and power, and the devaluing of women’s (domestic) work in the face of industrialization. Federici also significantly identifies the woman’s body as the primary site of the production of the capitalist workforce, and women’s domestic work as social reproductive labor, that is, labor that keeps the workforce running. With witchcraft being inherently at odds with capitalist accumulation, with capitalism’s disruption of the ways of living that witchcraft embodies, there is a sense of poetic justice in that November gale disrupting the flow of capital. The loss of those 29 lives is horrific and tragic; I don’t wish to make light of that at all. Greed — the pursuit of profit, the abuse of resources both human and environmental — creates dangerous and risky work conditions for many. 

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the mining of natural resources until they’re depleted, should make us question how we are to interact with our surroundings. To view the environment as our paradise lost, in which we fell from grace, distances us from it in another direction. To me, these Great Lakes, these vast inland freshwater seas, inspire awe. Through this awe, I wonder how this environment can push me to grow, how it can sustain me, and how I might give back to it. I turn again to witchcraft’s focus on the natural world, and to the traditions indigenous to The Five Freshwater Seas, to view the nature around us as not something solely to take from, but to give back to and learn from, to respect and live in balance with.