Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula divides Lake Superior into two lobes. It must have once presented a massive obstacle to the glaciers sliding down the surrounding valleys of some 10,000 years ago, splitting the ice sheets like the keel of a ship. An ice-cutter, if you will, until the peninsula itself was overwhelmed.

Now it is a beautiful place, woodsy and rocky, and the towns along the lake have tried mightily to turn themselves into some kind of destination. There are art galleries, restaurants, lodges – but also a sense that it all hasn’t worked out as hoped. Empty storefronts. Artistic failures. And hardly a gas station in sight.

That’s OK, of course. The coastal towns are more attractive because they are not crowded, and there is a fascination in faded glory. In the interior of the peninsula are spots – parts of the Keweenaw National Historical Park, marking the area’s copper mining past – that reminded me of castle ruins in Europe. All these walls that used to be, broken down but still pointing to the sky.

Odd, in a way, because Keweenaw’s immediate past is not upward, but downward. It’s deep in the rock, where copper runs in seams that are now gnawed through by shovel and drill.  Don a hardhat and a jacket at the ruins of the Quincy mine, and you can descend into the earth. Cold. Damp. Dark. All the elements we associate with the grave. 

Being dragged into the mine on a rattling steel  flatbed, behind a chuffing tractor, I hung my head. As we lost daylight, I touched – for just an instant – the fatalism that must have washed over many young miners when they first entered here: This is an unnatural place where no man should be. Then my eyes sought out the signs of previous human endeavor – machinery, doors, roof supports – and that made survival, at least, seem possible.

Our guide dropped us off near the oldest part of the mine, at shafts that have been open since the Civil War. They slant downward, dangerous slides that end in jagged rocks.

As I said, the earth in Keweenaw is gnawed through. And topside today we are still eating away, though now it is through the trees; truck after truck of downed trunks pass along the roads that once carried copper to the harbors. Day after day after day.

It was visiting the peninsula that made me really appreciate what a strange race Europeans must have seemed to Native Americans. Industrious but intrusive, we were almost totally outside their experience, unless – I thought – we appeared to them as pale and as hungry as termites.  

I don’t suppose the natives knew much about the Ice Age, but if they had they might also have seen us as something like those great glaciers that once crept over the peninsula, leveling and gouging as we progressed across the land. The glaciers left hills and lakes, of course; we have left mountains of waste rock and empty pits. 

And yet life encompasses them all. Down in those Civil War shafts, bats flitted in and out of the light beams, and for 84 levels below us, we were told, the mines are now filled with groundwater. Something living, undoubtedly, courses through there as well.