Will Holman is a designer based in Chicago who was one of the three winners in our architecture competition last year. He arrived in the Keweenaw in early August with a bag of tools and a willing spirit and spent close to a week on the island. His intention was to get a sense of the location as a basis for future collaboration. This he accomplished. Below are some of his experiences in his own words as well as photos of the frame-up of our sauna, which he helped design and build.
+ Rabbit Island - by Will Holman
Besides architecture Will works as an assistant to artist Theaster Gates and designs furniture using found and recycled objects. He is also collaborating with us on the fabrication of an island medical kit. The perfect island medical kit–one that has everything you need and nothing you don’t.
More by Will:
The first person to swim to Rabbit Island
On July 29th, 2012, Sara Maynard swam to the island from the Hannula’s pier in Rabbit Bay. The crossing took one hour and fifty one minutes–A record! The lake was calm that day and the afternoon sky started out sunny and became slightly overcast as she neared the rocky northwestern shore of the island. She touched a foot down in waist deep water and was greeted with howls as she climbed out of the lake to a waiting bonfire.
At the time we had talked about inviting a reporter from our local newspaper, the Daily Mining Gazette, to cover the event but busy days came and went in the preceding weeks and Sara pulled the trigger on a whim amidst a window of promising weather. Regardless, it was the kind of thing where news was made in a small town and we find ourselves still thinking about Sara vs. the Lake in terms of newsprint and smudgy photographs. Grandkids will definitely hear about this one.
Sara had this to say about the experience:
Being on the island allowed me to jump in and swim at any time, for as long as I wanted, without worrying about things like sharks or seals which are always on one’s mind where I train in San Francisco Bay. Also absent was the constant stream of motors zipping around which happens on most inland lakes.
Another thing was the mental component of long distance swimming in the wide open lake. Its one thing to be a competitive pool swimmer where you are racing for a few seconds or minutes, but when you start to get into distance you enter a different mindset. While the island crossing was one of the longest I have done thus far, the actual distance in the water wasn’t something I was terribly concerned with physically. What I was focusing on during training swims around the island and finally during the crossing was what to do when all you hear is water, or silence, for hours. Swims around the island were great and then having the support kayak and dinghy to guide me across the bay was amazing (not to mention the surprise boat visit from you guys). Being removed from the noise of the city for an extended period beforehand also prepared me to be in my own head and with my own thoughts.
So what did I actually do during the 1:51 that it took me to swim close to 4 miles? I have to admit (sadly!) that that silly song was stuck in my head for the beginning of the swim (“So call me, maybe?”). This dissipated, thankfully, and I found silence and the rhythm of swimming. I felt moments of complete awe of where I was (a lake with a fjord!), of the fact that I was spending three weeks on an island in Lake Superior, and that I still had so much ahead of me. I was overwhelmed with feeling completely fortunate to have had this opportunity. Then, when I felt like I had thought a lot about all that, I started counting to 100, until I got to 1000. And then counted some more!
Read more about Sara’s experiences cooking, camping, sauna building, trips to town and view more of her photos on her blog here and here.
p.s. Her trip to the island was sponsored by the Kickstarter community. Thanks y'all.
The No Island is a Man artifact kit from Andrew Ranville and the DeVos Art Museum. A limited-edition of only 60, proceeds will benefit the Rabbit Island Residency program, the Keweenaw Land Trust and the Superior Watershed Partnership.
The kit is two CNC-machined and laser-engraved pieces of red oak sourced from the Keweenaw Penninsula held together by powerful magnets. Contained within is an infosheet, the exhibition catalogue and postcard set, a signed Rabbit Island Quadrangle print, an eco USB stick containing field recordings from the island (mp3 and Quadraphonic audio formats), a forestry-certified pencil and a brass matchcase with compass hand-made in Idaho by K&M Matchcase.
Get the artifact kit here.
The No Island is a Man exhibition is still running and is on display until December 14th. If you are in the area please come out to see it.
Two new books for the Rabbit Island library via the Royal Geographical Society.
Being based in London I had the opportunity to attend the RGS for the 2012 Explore Conference this past weekend. It was a very inspiring few days with many more than these few highlights—
+ Donating one of the Rabbit Island Quadrangle map prints to be preserved in the Royal Geographical Society library and archive.
+ Meeting artist/explorer Luce Choules and Simon Beckmann, co-founder of the Joya: art + ecología residency. Plans were set in motion to work together and share experiences/research in the near future.
+ Learning lots more about GIS and GPS in the field mapping workshop. Can’t wait to put the techniques to use out on the island.
+ The passionate introduction and closing comments from affable adventurer Paul Rose.
+ Hearing stories of survival and survey from such brilliant speakers as Sarah Outen, Ed Stafford, Mark Kalch and many others.
While Rabbit Island may be a small island and not as remote as some of the examples seen this past weekend, I know some amazing “micro-expeditions” will happen there over the next few years. The conference highlighted the importance of pursuing good research – both scientific and cultural – no matter the relative size or proximity to home.
Get outside, go explore.
—Andrew
Rabbit Island was just added to the national Conservation Registry. The Conservation Registry is an online database that tracks and maps conservation, restoration and wildlife projects across the U.S. It was launched in 2008 and to date it is the most comprehensive repository of geospatially-specific project information in the U.S. By scrolling across the site’s map you can see most of the conserved land in the nation.
We came across this site while researching websites that combine mapping with prospective conservation planning.
It is a dream of ours to become involved in this space and collaborate with developers and designers to combine crowd-sourcing with mapping tools that document property lines, watersheds, and existing open spaces. As real estate evolves will property transactions occur with a conscience? Picture Things Organized Neatly applied to land use and you get the idea, as currently land parcelization is anything but neat from an ecological perspective anywhere outside of the mountains. We definitely need a better way to create islands amidst the grid!
At some point we need to choose what is needed of the environment prospectively, according to the science of sustainability (i.e. how much land is needed and where exactly it should be located to sequester/offset the byproduct of the rest of our activities), and then secondarily create policy and market solutions to obtain this in the context of disjointed lands previously cut up and assigned various non-natural functions (roads, parcels, parking lots, subdivisions, etc). Celebrating the value of the intact nature of the island (art!), exemplifying restraint with regards to its potential development, and then (hopefully) using this to help promote the idea that everybody should be able to access nature and learn from it, is, perhaps, one of the larger premises of the Rabbit Island project.
Lately we’ve been brainstorming with the team from Why Don’t We Own This? in Detroit and are working on some interactive maps using the 2012 Keweenaw Country Land Atlas and Plat Book. Stay tuned. With a little luck this will develop into a functional tool that helps the community buy and sell land with purpose. If you are interested in collaboration please get in touch.
The Rabbit Island Conservation Registry page can be seen here.
Other finds:
Take five minutes for a realtime sunrise over Lake Superior from Art’s Rock, Rabbit Island. August 31st, 2012.
-by Andrew Ranville
This rock, those trees, that clearing, the shimmering glow of the water, the smell of the white pines – it calls to you. You’ll find answers there. That sun, those slowly crashing swells, the endless blanket of blue.
The world there has this glow, this sway: its like the water you wade in through your eyes while standing perfectly still on land. There is not reason, only desire and unobstructed momentum to the places upon this land that call to you.
You can abandon the constructs of time, if you allow yourself, and come to know only the falling and rising of the sun, the push of the winds, the coming and going of clouds that cover and sometimes sprinkle the land, that can illuminate the night just as the shimmering lights of the north might.
You come alive.
—
Words and photos from our friend Miles Mattison who joined us for a couple weeks late this summer. A photographer, illustrator, and artist based in San Francisco, Miles spent his time on the island taking photos, exploring, helping build, and creating a series of hand-painted signs to interact with the landscape.
See more of Miles’ work here.
When an east wind blows above 25 knots the swell passing north of the island does an interesting thing: It rotates gradually to the south and breaks on our western shore. Waves traveling hundreds of miles from east to west reach the shallows of the island and wrap around them, crashing on shore at an angle approximately 120 degrees off of where they began. It is a pretty amazing phenomenon–a bit counterintuitive, even–and one we wouldn’t have believed until witnessing it drub our boats on occasion. This stuff definitely wasn’t in the manual.
Wave scientists explains this with a concept called refraction. According to this principle as a swell passes the rounded edges of an island gravity, momentum and friction force the axis of the wave to rotate to keep a constant relationship with shoreline and each wave maintains a fixed angle to the changing water depth. Given the curvature of the northern tip of Rabbit Island you can find yourself standing on the shoreline in front of the main camp with the wind blowing your hair from east while waves crash over your feet from the northwest.
This is not ideal for our moorings which take sizable waves even when completely protected from the direct force of the prevailing wind. On nights when a good nor'easter blows we sleep with one eye open and take turns waking up at two hour intervals to shine headlamps on the water amidst the crashing waves and blowing wind. The chance of discovering a severed line, failed cleat, or a boat adrift has a way of inducing restlessness, let us tell you.
Over the last three years we’ve refined our mooring design, hardware and placement accordingly. After much hands-on experience we’ve come up with a solution utilizing thick ¾" line, iron anchorages, underwater buoys to float heavy galvanized chains, stainless thimbles at all intersections of line and metal, stainless washers and nuts, strong climbing knots, rotational swivels, stainless quick links, shock absorbing snubbers, locking carabiners and rope floats to keep the mooring line off of the abrasive bottom. The result is low impact, completely removable and easy to manage. It shows due respect for the forces of Lake Superior with minimal excess.
We’ve also found that when faced with a storm shifting the boats even a few boat lengths to the south down the shoreline can matter quite a bit. The above photo from August illustrates this idea well. Marlin’s sailboat in the distance was in the best position to handle the large refraction waves and wasn’t disturbed whatsoever. The Montauk 17 in the middle of the photo took a few large swells but rode them without much fuss. The smaller Whaler 13, on the far right, however, took an intermittent pounding when sets of waves broke over her bow and stressed her mooring line to near failure. Thankfully the little boat lived up to its design and was, indeed, unsinkable.
All of this practical hydrology has put us through an apprenticeship of sorts, and we’ve found the work interesting. Dealing with the waves and wind on the horizon is a constant variable on a remote island in Lake Superior. On the bright side, however, when heavy weather rolls in it is never without reward. When our moorings are pounded from the northeast and our boats are exposed to swell, one thing is also for certain–surf’s up! And there is also lots of time to think as we’re not going anywhere a while.