Travel Theme: Beaches

Whitefish Point beach, A fin du monde

Thailand, where I am now, has its share of magnificent beaches. Mountain-encircled. Clear blue watered. Silhouettes of fishing boats crawl along the horizon mimicking snails.

So too did Malaysia and Puerto Rico before that.

However, the beach I chose to share for this Travel Theme, Whitefish Point, is one of the most uniquely iconic I have ever been to.

Quite literally a fin du monde shooting out into Lake Superior, the beach at Whitefish Point is a memorial, a final eulogy, to all those lost vessels. Myron and John B. Cowel and the Superior City, and most famously the Edmund Fitzgerald, who perished in the frigid and unpredictable waters of this great inland sea.

Lying only 10 km north of the insignificant town called Paradise, this beach is littered with the remnant driftwood of the decayed woodlands of the Canadian Shield. In the winter, the sand and the ice and the shards of decaying driftwood jet out like oversized splinters on a
frostbitten skin.

Regardless of the time of year, far off in the fogged horizon lay the intangible white towers dotting the shore of Canada. And the lighthouse horn sounds, a voice reassuring to those lost vessels. It lets them know that Paradise is close; that there is a way around this end.