Look up. That's Arch Rock — a natural limestone arch, curving out of the cliff a hundred and forty-six feet above the water, with nothing but blue lake and blue sky framed inside it. It's the most photographed rock on the island, and everything about it that you'd assume is wrong. So let me fix two things: how it was actually made, and the ancient legend attached to it, which is neither ancient nor a legend.
The geology first, because it's genuinely wild. This looks exactly like the kind of arch you'd see on an ocean coast, carved by pounding surf. It has never seen an ocean. Every arch and cave and stone tower on this island was cut by fresh water — by the Great Lakes themselves, at a time when they stood far higher than they do now. Around four thousand years ago, the water here was up near the base of these cliffs, and the waves slowly chewed the soft rock out from under the hard rock until only this arch was left hanging. And here's the part that impresses geologists: the stone it
's made of is a jumbled, broken-up rubble rock called breccia, which is a terrible material for a natural bridge. Brittle, cracked, weak. An arch this size, in this stuff, is not supposed to survive. It's been standing there, defying its own building material, for thousands of years.
Now, this is sacred ground, and I want to be careful and clear about that, because it's real. To the Anishinaabe —
