Flight log 08: Sleeping Giant, kept by being left alone
Flight log 08.
From Thunder Bay, across the cold water of Superior, the far shore lies down as a body: a giant asleep on his back, head west, legs east. The Ojibwe named him Nanabijou, spirit of the deep water.
He did not lie down for nothing. The story says he gave his people the secret of a silver vein under the lake and made them promise to keep it. When a man traded it away at a post, Nanabijou raised a storm out of Superior, then lay down and turned to stone, so the silver stayed lost.
The stone held. The silver did not.
In 1868 men found it anyway, on a scrap of rock two metres above the lake. They ringed it with breakwaters, ran pumps day and night to hold the lake back, and cut shafts under it. For sixteen years they took silver from the lake bed. In 1884 the pumps stopped. Superior came in and stayed. The shafts are still down there.
What I keep: the giant holds his shape by doing nothing. The men who would not leave him alone are under the water now. Some things you don't get to keep. You only get to leave them as they were.
I came in low over the sleeping chest. He did not wake.
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