Location Taken: Caseville, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2009
At the edge of the horizon, there is an island.
I don’t know its name, or how large it is, or what it’s like there. But it lurks, a black line above the water.
In the winter, the ice on the lake looks like it stretches all the way. Perhaps people, in the distant past, set off across the treacherous surface to see if they could reach it. Or perhaps they visited by boat or canoe in the summer and knew just how far that walk would be.
The shipping lines tend to run right on the horizon. If you’re on one of the large dunes dotting the Great Lakes coastline, you can sometimes see ships right at the edge of forever, that vanish as you descend. The great boats of the lakes require deep water, and deep water does not freeze easily.
This, however, is not an area of deep water. This is a large bay, and the rules are different. Perhaps, sometimes, when the air is bitter cold for weeks on end, you can walk across. And find what is to be found in that dark line.
That is Big Charity Island. It is about half a mile wide and five miles from where you stood. It is in the center of Saginaw Bay. Little Charity Island is to its left, just out of your photo.
I don’t know about 2009, but this year, 2014, all of Lake Huron froze over.