Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
Rob Gorski wanted a getaway in the Keweenaw Peninsula and ended up buying an island and founding a retreat for creative souls.
One summer day in 2010, Rob Gorski hunted for a place to tie up the boat he needed for trips to Rabbit Island, 3 miles east of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.
He drove along the road by Rabbit Bay, but found no public access. He did find a homeowner chugging along on a riding lawnmower; Rob flagged him down.
“Do you mind if I use your beach to tie up the boat I take to Rabbit Island?” Rob asked.
Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
Artist Helen Lovelee developed a Rabbit Island design.
The homeowner said he did let people use his sheltered boat dock, but usually they had family camps nearby. “What’s your connection here?” he asked Rob.
“I just bought that island.”
The older man chuckled. “Son, I’ve been taking my kids and grandkids out there longer than you’ve been alive. As long as you let us continue to go out there, you can use this beach any time.”
“That sounds like a great deal!” Rob agreed.
It was Rob’s second great deal; the first was stumbling onto a for-sale ad on Craigslist while killing time awaiting jury duty in lower Manhattan. It was for a 91-acre uninhabited island in Lake Superior.
The web search was no accident. Rob, an emergency-room physician who resides in New York City, has Upper Peninsula ties.
His maternal great-grandfather came to the U.P. from Finland during the copper boom. His grandfather, Arthur Wickstrom, was born in Centennial Heights, worked for a time in the family business, Wickstrom’s Super Market in Calumet, and even delivered groceries with a horse-pulled sled until the store closed. He then worked as a cook on lake freighters. Rob’s mother and her six siblings grew up in Laurium.
While Rob didn’t grow up in the U.P., the family visited every summer; his grandfather lived to 101, dying only two years ago. Rob has been a dock attendant at Isle Royale National Park and finished medical school in Marquette through Michigan State University.
Rob and his brother wanted to buy a small seasonal camp in the U.P., but when Rob sent the island ad, his brother wasn’t enthusiastic about building on a remote island, far from firefighters and other emergency aid.
A few weeks after setting it aside, the island wouldn’t leave Rob alone. He called the real estate agent selling the land for an elderly Detroit widow whose husband bought it as an investment in 1975.
“Is that island still for sale?”
“You’re the first person that called.”
Nathan Miller
Rabbit Island
Rob didn’t wait for the second person. The price, ultimately, was right and the place definitely was. A remote island with bare remains of a log cabin built in 1883 by a Swedish fisherman did not frighten him off, it ignited memories. “Immediately, my experience on Isle Royale came back.”
Rabbit Island, also called Traverse Island, is sandstone bedrock and remains much as it was when the first mapmakers arrived in the 1800s. It has never been logged, mined, cleared for homes or subdivided. Eagles and herons nest there and the surrounding waters are rich with trout and salmon.
Rob sees the island less as his private property and more as his stewardship responsibility. He negotiated a conservation easement through the Keweenaw Land Trust to maintain the island ecosystem. The agreement, which continues in perpetuity, guarantees Rob’s protective vision for the island and locks his taxes at the 1975 level. It also perfectly laid the groundwork for what Rob considers a natural outgrowth of the place itself – the Rabbit Island Artist Residency.
The idea for the Rabbit Island Foundation and its minimalist, back-to-nature artists’ retreat blossomed with an island visit by artist Andrew Ranville, the brother of his friend Kristen Ranville Kerecman.
Lake Superior and Rabbit Island, the two decided, formed the right wilderness garden in which to cultivate human creativity and conservation awareness.
Rob and Andy co-founded the residency program so “Rabbit Island will serve as a platform for science, art, preservation and recreation for the generations.”
In 2011, their Kickstarter project raised more than $14,000 and, as an added benefit, a supportive international community.
Creative types have visited since Rob first bought the island, but the formal residency program began in 2014. Applicants have hailed from around the country and around the world.
Artists, builders, woodworkers, musicians and a composer, videographers and filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, designers and chefs, as well as a geologist, a naturalist and a National Park Service specialist have come to the island. This year, the island will host a landscape painter from Albuquerque, New Mexico; a Latvian-born composer living in Oakland, California, paired with an American-born writer living in Tallinn, Estonia; a multi-disciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile; and a composer-performer from Tel Aviv, Israel.
Those accepted to the program stay from two to four weeks. Only five or so people are allowed at one time to minimize impact on the island.
Rob holds firmly to a leave-no-tracks system. Accommodations are two basic Adirondack shelters, a sauna and an open-air loo. The residents are asked to avoid creating paths by traversing the woods a different way each time. There’s no electricity or plumbing. Food is brought by boat, foraged or fished. Water is filtered from the Lake.
“The idea was to be a celebration of the open space, and effectively one of conservation intertwined with how we live, create, consume and otherwise interact with the natural world,” Rob says.
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
Cooking is mainly over a campfire or on Coleman stoves.
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
Keweenaw Peninsula resident Graham Parsons strums beside a campfire; he organizes the annual Farm Block Music Festival north of Calumet.
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Andrew Ranville
Rabbit Island
Freshly foraged raspberries.
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
This photographer, Steven Michael Holmes, founded Mostly Midwest to promote regional musicians and artists.
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Andrew Ranville
Rabbit Island
A practical bed in one of the Adirondack-style shelters.
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
During an island visit in May 2014, late Lake ice created a polar plunge for painter Emilie Lee. “The clarity of the water is always something that gets people,” says Rob. “The juxtaposition of unyielding horizon and fresh water catches people off guard – to dive into cold, clear water and not have it taste salty.”
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Andrew Ranville
Rabbit Island
A souvenir of the island.
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
Residents have sent notes into the Lake. So far one was found by a woman in nearby Rabbit Bay who sent “the most wonderful email.”
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
New Yorker Brice Burger, left, and British artist Philip Worthington show off their fishing skills.
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Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
Two open-air Adirondack-style shelters provide the sleeping, eating and weather havens for island residents.
Interaction between place and plate drew Kelly Geary, a New York chef who owns Sweet Deliverance NYC, an organic meal delivery service, caterer and pie shop in Brooklyn. She heard about the island’s project creating recipes based on locally (or wildly) available ingredients. As the Rabbit Island website states: “Produce will be purchased from the Hughes Farm in Calumet and Chip Ransom’s Farm in Houghton; dry goods and staples will come from the Keweenaw Co-op; berries will be gathered on the island shores; trout and salmon will be caught in the lake, Gods be willing (they usually are).”
That culinary gauntlet brings Kelly back to the island every year.
“Making food on the island for multiple people is a challenge in and of itself, especially since there’s no power or water. We have to bring all the food out there. We use fallen wood for the fire, and we use water from the Lake for cooking. And then we fish from the Lake as well. I feel like every year we discover one more edible thing. It’s been a process learning about that. We’re always trying to figure out if any of the mushrooms or fungi or lichens are edible, as well as the plants.”
Kelly is learning what works and what doesn’t under rustic conditions. She plans to create a mini-magazine with hand-drawn recipes and tips about island living as her island project – to build a manual of sorts with how-tos, rules and recipes for the artistic guests.
The creative outgrowth of an island stay varies with the resident.
The Lake-inspired project of Suzanne Morrissette, an artist, curator and writer from Toronto, involved recording the Lake bottom using microphones encased in plastic bottles filled with olive oil and dragged by boat to record vibrations and tactile noise.
“Long periods of single tone usually mean that the microphones were being dragged over a large flat rock surface, whereas short sharp noises refer to the microphone jumping off smaller stones,” Suzanne described her work.
This ultimate soundtrack to the Lake was accompanied by a series of watercolors she painted.
The island experience shifts the consciousness of the artists, Rob believes. “That huge horizon of fresh water has so many different moods. The length of time people spend on the island gives the Lake a lot of opportunity to show a lot of different faces.
“When you’re on the island, it’s not sheltered very well. You’re forced to confront what the Lake puts at you, and it becomes part of your life. The fierceness or the gentleness, the beauty, the terror, the clarity, those all come to mind when I think about why I’m out there, watching storms roll over the horizon, then watching them clear away and watching the land dry. You realize that it’s not something arbitrary. Rarely are you mentally forced to experience it all. I think that really changes one’s perspective.”
So far, only one resident, a writer, asked to leave early, when the chilly early summer temperatures and stormy weather proved too much.
At first disappointed, she later wrote a compelling essay about Lake Superior’s indifference to her “contextualizing her civilized life,” says Rob. The urban dweller felt “expelled by the island” and came away with a new respect for nature’s moods.
Courtesy Rabbit Island Foundation
Rabbit Island
From left: Island owner Rob Gorski, artist and residency co-founder Andrew Ranville and builder Ty Feltner strike a proud pose the morning they left the island after a week of building.
Rob plans a long relationship with Rabbit Island. He wants to motivate a global community to consider novel ways to preserve land. Andrew was invited earlier this year to the Amazon River to advise on a Rabbit Island-modeled artist retreat.
Rob appreciates his local ties. “I consider that my home. … My connection is not because of the island, the island is because of my connection.”
He intends to take advantage of downtown Calumet’s unique artsy atmosphere by opening a Rabbit Island Headquarters office, a gallery and possibly a museum there.
The DeVos Museum of Art at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, meanwhile, has featured an exhibit of works from the resident artists each year since 2010. This year’s exhibit starts September 25.
One visitor to the island did not come for an artistic retreat. A local woman, the great-great-granddaughter of the fisherman whose family lived there in the late 1880s, contacted Rob to see the disappearing homestead. Rob brought her and her husband to visit. They went alone to see the remnants of log walls, a scattering of mason jars on the ground, birch trees growing through the old porch and a metal bed frame with a heart welded to it. The place moved her to tears, she told Rob later. It epitomized, for him, the juxtaposition of past and present at the heart of Rabbit Island.
One distant day, in fact, he foresees the island consuming the buildings he’s created, just as it did with that early fisherman’s family home.
“Anything that we brought to the island was brought by two hands, and it could be disassembled by two hands.” Or by nature.
For now, word of the island and its retreat has stretched across the world. “We’re touching on something that’s culturally relevant, and I’d like to continue that conversation. … I think that’s something really, really exciting.”
Exciting, too, is the idea that no matter how much things change in the world, this rocky speck in Lake Superior will remain to inspire another individual – be it a writer, painter, scientist, musician or, once again, a fisherman and his family.
Award-winning author Jennifer Billock has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler, Midwest Living and other publications. She fell in love with the Keweenaw while visiting her husband’s family cottage and was inspired to write Images of America: Keweenaw County for Arcadia Publishing, one of four books she’s written.