Black Beach

My backstory is at the end of this poem. 

Black Sand Beach  / by Sam Silver 

Iron-dark grains underfoot,

Formed in ancient fires and shaped by time,

Here, the shore is black as night.

Iron that was once molten is now shaped into taconite spheres,

Cooled and gathered, loaded with purpose.

In the belly of freighters, they journey

They travel through the silver channels of the Great Lakes,

A pulse of industry beneath the waves.

Above the depths of Lake Superior,

Currents swirl,

Their long, tireless arms part for a small island,

Only to rush and bend against a natural sandy causeway.

Here, water meets itself.

A rare and restless dance,

The same current, folding back, colliding,

Caught in a moment of confusion,

As if the lake is thinking, hesitating,

Before surging on, forever eastward.

So rare, this sight:

Nature’s mirror, iron’s journey,

And black sand, holding all their stories.

Sam Silver's a friend. I was talking with her about this lovely but weird little place. I showed her my video – and then she wrote this! She will attach her URLs so you can follow her if you would like. 

A bit about the confusion of posting this piece.  The VIDEO of this phenomena is at my Instagram account which is mbdanielson. My still photo leads this post. 

Two weeks ago Len and I road tripped on Minnesota’s Highway 61 which runs along the north shore of Lake Superior 

We walked a lot, hiked a bit, ate a lot of fish, and spent a fascinating afternoon at Grand Portage State Park. Grand Portage was an international trading hub from the middle 1600’s until the early 1800’s. Many indigenous people, especially Ojibwa, met there to trade furs with French, English, Dutch, and whoever else came to town.

There were many cool places to stop along the North Shore but this quick post is going to be about Black Beach. Briefly, people have known for ages that there’s iron under northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Range as well as northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Iron mining started here in the 1890’s and continues to this day. 

After they mine the ore they grind it, then use huge magnets to separate the iron from other elements. After that they bake it with clay into tiny pellets which are called taconite. Silver City, where taconite is manufactured in HUGE buildings, is on the highway next to the lake. From there the taconite is loaded into train cars which deliver it to the great ships that ply the Great Lakes. When you drive past the remaining steel mills of Gary, Indiana or Pittsburg, PA, those mills are most likely running on taconite that arrived via Silver City. 

For more than fifty years this process played out over the beaches there. Today one beach is black because decades of taconite became the beach. It isn’t toxic, you can walk on it, they even have picnic tables. 

Also this bay and beach has a small land natural causeway that leads from Black Beach to a little rocky island. The island divides Lake Superior waves rolling in toward shore; they split at the island to curve  around to meet themselves again at the causeway. Which confounded me because it was like watching a tide coming in to meet itself. 

It reminded me of the challenge and the humor of being human. Trying to find your way home even though you’re not completely sure what that means. Crashing into some obstacle. Turning this way. Turning that way. Keep going. Then … Surprise! Surprise! … five minutes or fifty years later you meet yourself and you are still one person. With some peculiar memories.