Tag: lake superior

Messing About in Boats

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

This is about boats, so of course it’s about desire. The beautiful forms of boats arouse the longing to have one, and to go places you couldn’t without it.

My father had this bad as a kid. In the summer of 1932 in Duluth, he talked his friends into building the next best thing to a boat: a raft. Scavenging scrap lumber and driftwood, they dragged the stuff down to the shore of Lake Superior, nailed it together, then pushed the ungainly craft into the water and paddled out furiously with some old two-by-fours.

The Journey Home

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0600

LAKE MICHIGAN—MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2005

Second Mate Patrick Pettit was in the map room as the American Spirit sailed out of sight of the Upper Peninsula and eased its way into Lake Michigan. Pettit was chatting up a visitor while hunched over a map on the drafting table, charting the boat’s course with a pencil, triangle, and plastic compass. Unlike oceangoing ships, Pettit noted, boats on the Great Lakes don’t make use of celestial navigation or Morse code.

Water and Steel

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Port of Duluth—Saturday, October 15, 2005

In the middle of the night, at the end of a long day in the middle of October, I found myself sitting in a recliner. I was in the lounge of the penthouse high above the long deck of the American Spirit, a thousand-foot bulk freighter. We were plunging into the gaping darkness of Lake Superior.

Nature Lover

admin — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Minnesota boasts no defining fine artist, no painter of universal renown. Alexis Fournier, Seth Eastman, Nicholas Brewer, Wanda Gag, Dewey Albinson, George Morrison—any of these names may ring a distant bell. But Minnesotans have no Albert Bierstadt or Winslow Homer, no Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe or Frederic Remington to lionize. The central Minnesota town of Aitkin, however, has made a bid to raise the profile of its most famous son, Francis Lee Jaques.

For Those About To Get Off The Rock...

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0600

It wasn’t love, but it was enough to risk his life for. It was the first morning of 1992 at five a.m. on Madeline Island and the bar had emptied out when Tommy Nelson, the ponytailed owner of Tommy’s Burned Down Café, spun out onto Lake Superior in his 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood and was surprised that the ice held. He already had the record for the earliest crossing: Two years before, he’d driven the two-and-a-half miles of ice to mainland Bayfield, Wisconsin, in a one-ton Chevy Van only fifteen days after the ferries had quit running.

Sole Survivor