Home sick listening to WFUV today. I called in for the third day in a row and then went back to sleep, which is always a mistake. I've lost half the day and now I feel groggy and even stupider than usual in the morning. But I did catch the fun fact (or not so fun fact) that today is the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the ore freighter the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and got to hear them play Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which never fails to make me nostalgic for all the time I spent on the beaches of Lake Huron when I was growing up.
Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the Gales of November remembered.
Now, to people who grew up outside the Great Lakes Region, this is just a maudlin song in the old ballad mode that they can make fun of. To people who know the Great Lakes at all, it's a memorial to one of many tragedies that occur on them. The word "lake" is really misleading in many ways, since they're five of the six largest freshwater bodies in the world (Lake Baikal in Siberia is the largest by volume) and the storms and weather on them are just as treacherous as they are on the oceans—sometimes worse. A nor'easter on Lake Huron, where I grew up, can rearrange the shoreline like a hurricane can an ocean beach, washing away houses, docks, and, in the winter, crushing them with ice flung in piles up to 20 feet high. Waves of 30 feet high are not unknown, and 10 feet high in a good storm is fairly common. I've stood on piers and bulkheads and watched the whitecaps smash into stone breakwaters and fling up spray at least 30 feet, which would be well up over the loaded bow of even an ocean-going freighter. Anything but possibly the new supertankers, which are already too large to fit through the Great Lakes lock system, is vulnerable. The five Great Lakes are full of hundreds of shipwrecks from five centuries, from pleasure craft to ore freighters, wooden schooners to ocean-going iron monsters.
The Fitzgerald was no toy boat, either: it weighed 13,632 tons and was 729 feet long. It went down in Lake Superior in a squall in already-rough water in less than 10 minutes, 9 miles from shore. The waves were recorded at 12-16 feet high and one theory says that the ship apparently went bow-first into one and took on water through a leaking hatch and sank in minutes, like the Titanic, not even giving the crew a chance to launch lifeboats. Other theories posit that the ship broke in two on the surface, caught between the crests of two waves; that it hit a shoal and sustained extensive damage (such damage was found on a 1994 expedition to the wreck); that it capsized. The lakes are never very warm at the best of times, but in November, just going overboard could kill you with hypothermia within minutes of hitting the water. The Great Lakes are savagely unforgiving of people who underestimate them, and even those who know what they're like.
They're the one thing I miss about Michigan, besides Mel.
In the summers when I was an adolescent and later as an out-of-work teenager, I spent hours on the beach. As long as weather permitted, I would ride my bike the half mile to the nearest easement and walk the beaches, or just sit and watch the waves come in and think—unless it was alewife season, when the beaches were covered with picked-over dead fish and flocks of gulls. The best days to go were after storms, when all kinds of detritus and spindrift had been kicked up onto shore near the high water mark. All of Michigan's beaches are public up to that mark, so I could walk for miles along them, if I wanted to, and I often entertained ambitions of walking to the harbor in Harrisville, about 8 miles away as the crow flies, but never got around to it. Instead, I'd walk up and down the mile or so of beach near my house, picking up sea glass and driftwood and bits of shells and occasionally a heavy iron spike from an old ruined bulkhead or pier. Now and then, a nor'easter would uncover the bones of some old structure long buried by the 20-year cycle of "tides."
Finding sea glass was like finding treasure. The transformation by years of scouring made it somehow more than just broken shards of bottles. The colors were almost uniformly pale, with the exception of what had probably once been beer bottles, which turned a soft dark brown, or what might have been old, dark green, 7-Up bottles. Cobalt blue pieces were especially rare and prized, probably coming from old medicine bottles or the occasional Milk of Magnesia bottle tossed overboard. By the time I left for college, I had pounds of seaglass in translucent pale blue and white and amber, dark green and cobalt and brown, and one odd piece of washed-out lavender.
After a storm, fine curving lines of pulverized black hematite or taconite marked the edges of the waves. If you dug into the wet sand almost anywhere along the shore you'd come to a layer of the stuff, either from the shipwrecks of ore carriers or as part of the natural deposits of iron that riddle the region. The beach was littered with seaweed, battered shells, and cast up stones. Many of these were Petoskey stones, the fossils of coral in the shallow sea that once covered the area. Now and then, we collected these by the bucketful to sell to the local rockhound. Just offshore where the waves broke was a line of stones, polished by the action of the water: bits of quartz and granite, and flat pieces of slate we called skipping stones for obvious reasons, igneous and sedimentary rock shuffled around by the glaciers. Up at Sturgeon Point, where the lighthouse was, a long narrow spit of softball-sized rocks curved out into the lake, making a shallow, slippery path into the water, something like the beginnings of a natural Spiral Jetty. It fell off steeply on both sides into invisible bottom and the undertow was likely to drag the unsuspecting into the middle of the lake, so walking onto its mossy surface was a daring adventure.
From the time I was little, I loved the beach and the waters of Lake Huron, what we called the Big Lake. I grew up across the street from a little lake, Cedar Lake, which emptied into Lake Huron in a little creek of tannin-stained water after meandering through the woods and under the highway just a few hundred yards from the easement I thought of as mine, near the beach house of a family named Brownell. In the spring, I went smelt dipping in it with the Culvers, and stayed up all night on the beach with a bonfire and marshmallows and a dipnet, eating freshly breaded and fried smelt, bones and all. In the summer I slept on the beach with friends in sleeping bags, listening to the rush of waves and scaring each other with stories of glowing ghost ships on the horizon. I learned to body surf and snorkel in those waves, learned to beware of undertows and phantom sandbars, learned to read the color of the water for depth and currents. I stopped swimming in it much as I got older because it was just too cold. My childhood friends would often come out of it with blue lips. But as a teenager, I was always the one who went in to rescue the wine we buried at the water's edge to keep it cool, whenever it washed into the lake. Some of those bottles were just lost, a sacrifice to the lake goddess.
The beach and the waters—those in it and those that fed it—were full of surprises and mystery, things transformed by the universal solvent. Rocks became sand, shells and skeletal bones became artifacts, abandoned junk became history. Mysterious things swam in its depths too. Dad took me out on the end of one of the docks at Harrisville Harbor one day to watch the salmon fishing boats and I looked down to see a huge, spiny, prehistoric monster swim by beneath us: a lake sturgeon. I combed the beaches obsessively, looking for pieces of history, natural and man-made. What I really dreamed of finding was some identifiable piece of LaSalle's Griffon, the ur-shipwreck of the Great Lakes.
I can't remember when I first read about the Griffon, but that was when I got interested in shipwrecks and lighthouses. I collected nautical charts and read everything about Lake Huron wrecks that I could get my hands on for a time. I wanted to learn how to SCUBA so I could dive the wrecks and find the really old ones, the wooden sailing ships that carried furs in the 18th Century when Michigan was a wild land, still largely considered uninhabitable because of the climate.
When the Fitzgerald went down, I was 15, and it both reinforced and shattered my romantic notions of going to sea. Though I was still fascinated by shipwrecks, this one was a little too real, a little too recent. Seeing images of the hulks lying on the bottom of the lake or ocean sent a frisson of horror through me when I thought of what the Fitz was now—just salvage. Salvage and the only grave marker those men would have. It was somehow like discovering a long-abandoned house, like the wonder and horror of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or the flash-frozen mammoths, caught dead in the act of living. And it was a testament to the power of the lakes to take and twist and break such a massive vessel like a bathtub toy.
I came away from those summers on the beach with a pervading love of water, and a lasting interest in marine biology and archaeology. I'm still fascinated by shipwrecks and by the idea of the sea swallowing us whole. Though the legends of Atlantis seem truly absurd to me, the flooding of New Orleans is another reminder of the ease with which water can wipe us off the map. In 2000, Robert Ballard (one of my heroes, along with the Cousteaus) discovered the submerged remains of an early settlement 311 feet (95 meters) below the Black Sea, apparently flooded when water levels in the Mediterranean, raised by climate warming, thundered through the Bosporus and raised the Black Sea's level by six inches a day. It's a sobering reminder of the results of global warming, man-made and natural.
And though I remember those summer days on Lake Huron's beach with a great deal of pleasure and fondness, and I understand how they shaped me, I know you can't go back, and that those days of wonder can't be recreated in the same place. I've walked through the trails I used to hike and snowmobile through in the woods Up North, and I've revisited the beach and the lighthouse. My old swimming hole on Cedar Lake has a fence around it now, and much of the Lake Huron easement is eroded away. People have asked me if I want to keep the house up there for a summer cottage, but it's not the same, and there's nothing there for me now.
Time to move on to new bodies of water.