FTV: Natural Disasters
Watching the Weather Channel makes one feel sorry for all those people whose lives are turned upside down by the latest meteorological disaster. Floods, fire, blizzards, ice storms, hurricanes…name a natural disaster that may be lurking around the corner and ask yourself, “How many times have I been close to something like this?” We moved to our house on Norway Avenue when I was four years old and not long after that, I remember becoming fixated on tornados after seeing the cover of one of the Golden Books about Pecos Bill. This particular volume showed the titular character riding a tornado across the plains. At that young age, I had never experienced a real tornado, but for some reason this image stuck with me and became one of my first recurring dreams. I would see Pecos Bill trying to tame a tornado while riding it down our street from the vicinity of Whitman Elementary School just up the block.
My older brother, Ron, had a collection of the Little Golden Pocket Books about geology, astronomy, insects, trees, and weather. Once I had the ‘Pecos Bill taming a tornado’ image in my head, I began pouring over the illustrations in the little paperback weather book. Along the way, the connection between thunderstorms and tornados made me an amateur weather watcher. Standing under our covered front porch during all kinds of nasty weather became my thing. When a rare tornado warning was posted, we knew we had our trusty basement to retreat to if a twister came rolling across town (or down the street).
When we started spending more time at our camp on Huron Bay between L’Anse and Skanee, we became a little more weather conscious. The original version of the camp was a one room tar paper shack with tall trees close enough to be worrisome if the weather got real heavy. One particularly bad storm convinced us to relocate to the Michigan State Police post in L’Anse (where my dad had served for seven years before we ended up in Marquette). We parked our old white and blue 1954 Chevy in the garage beside a couple of MSP cruisers. When things settled down, we went back to The Swamp. Fortunately, the trees around the camp had behaved themselves.
It isn’t my imagination that the early 1960s had some periods of pretty intense weather in the Upper Peninsula. When my wife was seven or eight (around 1963 – 1964) she lived around the corner from the Northland grocery store in Mass City. She had gone there to pick something up and the clerk wouldn’t let her leave because there was a violent squall passing through town. Some said it was an actual tornado and she remembers leaves and branches from the towering Elms that lined the main street in front of the school littering the pavement.
It was around this same time (in the early 1960s) when we experienced a seiche while we were on summer vacation on Huron Bay. The funnel shape of the bay narrows from Skanee to our place at the mouth of the Silver River. Lake Superior doesn’t experience the same six hour low to high tide schedule one sees along the ocean shorelines. Ocean tides are caused by the Earth rotating in and out of the two oceanic tidal bulges caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon. None-the-less, there are tides in the Great Lakes that are mostly wind driven. Along most of the Lake Superior beaches, the effect usually goes unnoticed. In places like Keweenaw Bay and Huron Bay, the shape of these features magnifies these local tides.
On Huron Bay, we observed the water levels rising and falling on a regular basis. When storms are blowing more water into the bay from the open lake, the high and low tides run noticeably higher and faster than normal. There have been times when we have seen mini-seiches when the tide returns after an unusually low tide. We could actually hear the tide coming as it crossed the bare sandbars and at times, the water would arrive as a small wave a few inches in height. The day we had the big seiche, the approaching wave was louder than we had heard with previous mini-seiches. The water pouring over the first sandbar was about six inches high but the biggest difference was the intensity. The water came back with a vengeance and when the level reached the bottom of our dock planks, it kept rising.
Our old camp was constructed on posts driven into an old sandbar that had been created when the lake and river levels were higher. When the river is at its normal level, the bank on which the old camp stood is on average about six feet above the water level. During the big seiche, the water reached the top of the bank and began flowing under the camp and into the yard behind. We kids had a ball running through the little lake being created in the yard, but for some reason it upset my mother. I remember her saying, “Well, that is enough – I have never been flooded out before and I am not about to start now!” Just after she shook her fist at the rising river, the upstream flow stopped and the water level slowly began to drop as the tide reversed and then left as fast as it had arrived.
There were several more fast moving high and low tides that day, but each one was successively lower. It was interesting to see the dead trees and debris shaken loose from the river upstream being carried out into the bay. After extreme tides, we were always on the lookout for ‘deadheads’ floating in the bay when motoring out to our fishing holes. As I was roughing out this particular section on May 18, 2026, my brother sent a photo of our dock partially covered in the latest seiche. It seems like Mother Nature was trying to tell me something.
The day after the seiche flooded the camp yard, we happened to take a grocery run into L’Anse. As long as we were in town, we talked the folks into driving around Keweenaw Bay to the A&W Drive-in in Baraga. At that point, we realized that Keweenaw Bay had also seen a dramatic seiche at the same time as the one we experienced on Huron Bay. It makes sense as the only thing separating the two bays is the Point Abbaye Peninsula that ends where both bays open up into Lake Superior proper. U.S. 41 at the head of Keweenaw Bay was littered on both sides with driftwood that had obviously been carried from the beach and over the road when the seiche arrived. That would have been an impressive sight. I am sure I would not have wanted to be driving that stretch of road when all of that water came up the bay and flowed into the swampland on the other side.
Where The Swamp is located on the Silver River, we have never really worried about forest fires. The strip of land between the camp yard and the river is a swamp (makes sense) and the land to the northeast of us is a thick cedar swamp. There are many channels at the end of the deep bayou that keeps the area behind our property pretty wet year round. Being surrounded by all of this wetland made the possibility of a forest fire seem remote. Back in the 1990s, we used to block out a couple of weeks to spend a longer stretch at camp. One summer, we were surprised when we arrived in late June to see how close we came to losing The Swamp to a fire.
The Ontonagon Country REA powerline that services our property and the one camp beyond us runs across the back half of our original lot. Where the road makes a 90 degree bend past our gate, we could see a burned out patch about fifty feet in diameter to the right. The fire was no doubt caused by a break in the powerline as the scorching was centered on a utility pole and the trees nearest to it. We can only assume that this had happened when the ground was still wet in the spring because it singed the grass and underbrush before apparently burning itself out. The permanent residents living next to The Swamp hadn’t been aware of it until we pointed it out to them even though it wasn’t very far away from the side of their garage.
It isn’t like a fire from a lightning strike wasn’t possible considering how many tall trees there are in the area around the camp. Jack Papin’s pioneering family lived near the end of Papin Road (now known as Collins Road) since the turn of the century (1900, not 2000). He had a small cabin a quarter of a mile from our place. Jack’s cabin had burned to the ground sometime in the mid-1960s but he wasn’t there at the time. This piece of land was later sold and a very large, modern home was built on the same site. It wasn’t there very long before it too burned to the ground. In both of these cases, had the weather conditions been dry and windy, a much bigger conflagration could have taken out all of the nearby buildings including ours. The jury is still out on whether or not these two fires were random accidents, weather related, or cases of ‘cursed land’ (yes, I am kidding).
A lightning strike did kindle a large fire in the Seney Wildlife Area on July 30, 1976. It burned some 1,200 acres before there was any concerted effort mounted to contain it. The Walsh Ditch Fire (so named for the closest geographical location to the point of ignition) continued as a ground fire until it was finally extinguished by the next winter’s snowfall. I had helped my old friend Jim haul some stuff to Ann Arbor in mid-August and on the way downstate, we noticed a little bit of smoke south of the fabled Seney Stretch on M 28. On my way home a few days later, the wind must have switched because when I got near the same area, it was like driving into a dense cloud of fog. The cars ahead of me kept going so I put on my lights and followed at a respectful distance behind.
The first car that I encountered traveling the other way literally popped out of the smoke bank when it was only a few car lengths away. After putting on my high beams and slowing down, I began wondering if I should have taken the Fox River Trail to Munising via Melstrand instead of staying on M28. By then it was too late – there would not have been enough visibility to safely turn around when cars were still whizzing by in the dense smoke. At no point were active flames visible to the south of the highway but it was still a great relief when the smoke cleared as the line of traffic neared the west end of the stretch at Shingleton. The harsh conditions encountered driving by the site of this big wildfire made me think one has to have ‘the right stuff’ to be on the front lines trying to contain a conflagration like this.
Following the Walsh Ditch Fire in the news, I reminded myself that I spent the summer and fall of 1974 working no more than 20 miles north of this location. Northern Michigan University held summer classes at a small compound on Cusino Lake on the Fox River Trail. Before the technology to dig out the Seney Swamp that created the Seney Stretch was perfected, the Fox River Trail was going to be the main highway from Seney to Munising. The Department of Natural Resources built the log structures at Cusino Lake to serve as the regional DNR headquarters. It was never used for that purpose and was later sold to the University of Michigan after the Seney Stretch on M28 was opened. When the U of M decided to sell the property, my college advisor Pat Farrell (a U of M grad) talked NMU into purchasing it.
While I was taking two summer courses there, I also served as the assistant manager. I had various duties to help run and maintain the field station. The job lasted from June until the middle of October. One of the first things Pat showed me was the gas fired pump down by the lake that would be used to supply water to the firehose located in the center of the compound. I spent a lot of weekends there minding the store when most of the other students and staff went home. Had the Walsh Ditch Fire taken place two years earlier, I am quite certain it would have been in the back of my mind considering how fast wildfires can spread. The closest I came to using any fire fighting skills was occasionally testing the pump and helping build a new enclosure for the fire hose.
I worked in the kitchen at the Huron Mountain Club during the summers of 1971, 1972, and 1973. There wasn’t any big orientation as I was hired as a replacement for a couple of kids who quit early in the 1971 summer season. At some juncture, it was pointed out that should a wildfire threaten any part of the club property, the kitchen crew was expected to help with the fire fighting effort. When I shared this with my father, he simply said, “No, you won’t. If there is a fire in that rugged country (the club spanned an area of more than 30 square miles – about the size of a standard township), you toss your stuff in the car and come home. No summer job is worth you risking your life when you have no training in fighting wildfires. You would be putting your life in the hands of someone else who may or may not have had any training.
Fighting fires is a dangerous job and you are working for minimum wage – there is no reason for you to even think of doing that. It sounds exciting until you find yourself trapped.”
Thankfully, those three summers passed without having to contend with any fires beyond the one we had to start in the club house fireplace on cool evenings. We did get a taste of how rugged the club property was, however, when we were asked to volunteer for ‘fish duty’. We were given a little extra pay to haul large drums of water and young trout to several areas along the Salmon Trout River. Two of us toting a drum half full of water and fish suspended between two long carry poles was exhausting. After our second or third trip, I told my partner, “Can you imagine being out here fighting a fire and having to scramble through this terrain to escape a fast moving fire?” It did not surprise me at all when he responded with an expletive, followed by, “The day they tell me I am going out to fight a fire, I am going home.” I smiled and replied,, “You wouldn’t be the only one.”
On one of my inspection trips to the WOAS-FM West Coast Bureau in Eugene, Oregon, we took a trip up to the McKenzie Pass in the shadow of the mountain peaks called The Three Sisters. Driving to the east of the pass on the way to the town of Sisters, we passed through some large standing timber that had been killed in a fire some years before. We took a roundabout route home to visit Sahalie Falls on the McKenzie River. When we pulled into the parking lot, there was a US Forest Service worker there passing out information about a wildfire that was burning downstream in the canyon not far from the falls. She assured us that we would be fine on the highway back to Eugene but to watch out for emergency vehicles. She mentioned one of the biggest dangers their firefighting crews face is having tourists hiking into the danger areas to get a closer look. “If the fire makes a turn and the firefighters have to evacuate, any civilians in the area would be at great risk.”
I thought back to my own escape plan from my summers at the HMC. “No problem,” I told her, “We will be happy to let the professionals take care of it.” For the record, we did see a little smoke on our way down the mountain hugging highway and on one side road, some of the firefighting vehicles were parked at a trail head. That was close enough for us.
Top Piece Video: Chris Robinson Brotherhood and their take on Dlyan’s Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)