Presque Isle River

The picture above is one of several waterfalls on a stretch of the Presque Isle River in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The circular cutouts in the bedrock are not just from water flowing downstream. Each one has been carved by an eddy of water that appears to the eye to be completely unaffected by the mainstream of the river. Inside the cutout, water just circles inexorably and slowly bores away the stone. These steady, hydraulic drills have bored as deep as 75 feet in an otherwise relatively shallow river, I am told. Walking by rivers like this in the Upper Peninsula, you can stumble upon green rocks, which are laden with copper. Some of them are perfect cylinders, core samples taken by geologists, or mining engineers, or whoever has a drill 1" diameter, 6" deep bit like that.

When I visited the waterfalls with some college classmates in 2000, I mentioned a line my father told me in my own childhood. I had asked him if it would be fun to jump in the water and ride down the waterfalls, and he replied "those rocks would skin a man like a deer". I suddenly recalled, in this young adult excursion perhaps 15 years later, that very thing had almost happened to me at that exact spot. My father and I wandered along the rocky banks of the river, high above its tumult. I don't know what happened, but misty spray on rock is not a safe combination with a child's boots. I slipped, and then I was looking straight up at the edge of the bank, holding on with my hands. My father darted the step or two it took to reach me, then quickly hauled me up. I hadn't though much of it, but I could tell it was a big deal because my father really looked shaken up. That reaction didn't happen again until the day he had to draw his firearm with the intent of shooting a fugitive, so the situation must have been pretty hairy, if one were mature enough to grasp it.. And that whole episode had been shelved in my mind, completely forgotten, until I revisited that exact spot many years later.