Black Sands

Some people still call Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula “The Copper Country,” since it was home to over 150 copper mines and mills from the mid-1800s to the turn of the century. The remains of this industry litter the landscape. Empty mills, with crumbling bricks and broken windows, squat along Highway 28. A dredge stands in Torch Lake, tilting wildly to its side like a drunken uncle. And, of course, the Lutheran and Catholic cemeteries are filled with the names of hundreds of miners who were blown up, buried under a landslide, or fell to their deaths in the shafts deep under the ground.

But the most visible reminder of copper mining is the stamp sands. This black, coarse sand was left over from the processing of ore to extract copper. Since many of these mills were built along the Keweenaw Waterway and sections of Lake Superior, stamp sand was dumped into these lakes. This sand was like crystalized coal, shattered and scattered in a million pieces that cover the shoreline and surrounding landscape. Stamp sand is considered toxic since it contains trace amounts of heavy metals and leaching chemicals. About half of Torch Lake is filled with the sand, which shifts easily with the currents, moving its way through the local rivers and other nearby lakes. 

I don’t know what Torch Lake looked like before the mines dumped the residue from the copper onto its shores, creating miles of black gritty sand that stung my eyes and burned my nose every time the wind blew hard. And the wind would blow—grime would cover the windows of our house, a quarter mile away from the lake. A fine gray paste would cover the panes that my mother would attack every spring and fall with Windex and her Finnish work ethic. “I scrub and scrub, but I can never keep this place clean,” she’d complain. The rags she used would take two washings, with bleach, to come clean.  

As a child, I didn’t know any of this. The black sands were not pollution and waste, not an environmental hazard to me. The sands were just there, had always been there, like our television and our Ford Pinto and my dad’s limp. 

I would walk Gypsy, our mixed breed dog with the floppy ears across the road, over the railroad tracks, and down the hill to the sands almost every summer day. We would wander aimlessly, meandering our way along the shifting surface. In the summer, the sands were hot, unbelievably so, pure black drenched in sunlight with no shade anywhere. The local university tried to grow grasses and trees here without much success. Whether it was lack of knowledge about the sands’ topography or lack of any real funding, after a few years, the project stopped.  Occasionally, I would run into a dead tree on my walks, brown and bowed over by the stiff winds, still clinging to the barren landscape.

My dog and I would walk down to the lake, where fish with tumors the size of my fist would swim.  At least, that’s what my neighbor Kurt Hakula told me, between drags on his Camel cigarette. “All that sand gave those fish cancer.  Can’t eat a damn one.” I never saw any fish. I only saw the black water. It was different than the sand: it moved, ebbing up to the shore in small ripples, ever shifting and glinting in the light. It wasn’t really black either, not thick and viscous, not dirty. It was clear and clean, stretched across the surface like Saran Wrap. I could see down below the water to the black sand that swirled underneath. What was farther out, where the bottom disappeared into darkness? I don’t know. There were sudden drop-offs, dangerous currents in the lake, and I was made to promise to never, ever swim out there. Of course, some kids did—older, daring boys. Me, I was content to walk with my dog around the lake’s edges, staring at its vastness. The lake stretched for miles, emptying past a scrubby tree line into the Portage Canal, which cut a straight path into Lake Superior. A huge distance to a ten-year-old kid, without a boat or any swimming ability to speak of. It whispered of possibilities to me, of things just beyond the surface of my life in this small Upper Peninsula town.

Of course, all this was a long time ago. My dog died, hit by a pick-up one snowy January. As I hit adolescence, I discovered boys, far more interesting than the curve of black and water that stretched along the horizon. The sands moved to the periphery of my vision, glimpsed as I sped by in a car, on to other, more exciting places.  

About fifteen years ago, I went back to visit my father. I wanted to take my son to the sands, the place where I spent so much of my time when I was his age. We walked across the road, over the tracks. My son grumbled, “How much farther?” And then we were there. A ten-foot fence surrounded the sands, stretching out in either direction. Signs were posted every hundred feet that read, “PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT.” I stared. My son was nonplussed. “Can we go home and play on the computer now?”  

At dinner, I asked my father about this new development. “Some rich guy downstate bought it all. Gonna sell it as waterfront property.” I smiled, waiting for the punchline. After a long pause, he continued. “Sold three lots already.”

Later that night, I returned alone. I walked the periphery of the fence, running my fingers against the metal grids. It was getting dark, hard to see. I squinted my eyes and looked into the distance. I couldn’t tell where the sands ended and the water began.