Environmental Writing and Great Lakes LiteratureOnly a few miles further west on highway 41, after the sullen glow of the city of Marquette died out into the wooded darkness, a red-skied dawn began to timidly dust the tops of the scraggly pines along the road leading to the Keweenaw. I found myself driving faster, perhaps trying to outrun the morning which was not brightening the landscape so much as casting an ever-deepening red shroud, setting the world on fire. I glanced at my phone to see the text messages and voicemails from my girlfriend, parents and whoever else that accumulated overnight. More importantly, I saw that it wasn’t yet seven o’clock. As long as I didn’t stop, I could actually make the ten o’clock ferry to Isle Royale from Copper Harbor. It didn’t seem possible when I left Ann Arbor some nine or ten hours ago. My windows were down and my radio off, and that is the way it was the whole time save for a brief rainstorm before the bridge. As I let my hand dangle outside the car, feeling the warm, moist summer air ripping through my fingers hour after hour, my thoughts turned from rage to sadness to euphoria and back again; they finally settled on exhaustion. I still felt exhausted just then as the sun came up, and I’d been feeling that way for a long time. I’d have pulled over right then and there to some backwards, run-down motel and slept for a week if I hadn’t decided that I wanted to see a moose a couple of days back, that I needed to see a moose.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78453/1/Heeren_Travis_2010.pd
