20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet pulled the last of its frozen fingers back into the north. The glacier left basins in its wake, and those basins filled, 12,500 years later, with the Nipissing Great Lakes. The waters of Nipissing would become Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, and on Mackinac Island, those waters would leave behind the Arch Rock: a natural bridge of brecciated limestone. The softer earth beneath eroded away, and where there was once a bluff like any other, there is now a thing of beauty.
This is a metaphor for how the forces that would destroy us make us unique, make us strong. It is also meaningless.
There is a tree on Mackinac Island, which unlike the Arch Rock, is not famous. Someone began to chop down this tree, but gave up halfway through its trunk. Maybe midswing the lumberjack fell dead of a stroke. Maybe he was reassigned to the hardwood forests of the Upper Peninsula. Maybe the tree dropped a branch on his head and he awoke thinking he was a German opera star. In any case, the tree is still there, still growing, still green, though its heartwood is displayed for the world to see, though ants suck the sap from its xylem.
This too is a metaphor for how strength and beauty are born of adversity. This too is meaningless.
The Ojibwe legend (everything up here gets an Ojibwe legend) says that the Arch Rock was wrought by the tears of a woman who fell in love with a sky spirit. Her father, outraged that his daughter loved that which was not of this world, bound her atop a cliff on Michilimackinac, where she wept until her tears broke the stone and her otherworldly lover came to set her free. You could find the same moral in this—that beauty is forged and true love won through hardship. When we want to believe something, we’ll find evidence to support that belief wherever we look.
What we see in nature, we long to make human, but there may be no human lesson in this Arch Rock and this tree. Maybe they tell us that our suffering defines us. Maybe they tell us nothing at all.
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