by Porter Fox
I bought a few books and met the ship a half hour later at Lock 8. No one said a word when I boarded. I dropped my gear, ate a quick meal, evaded Mike, and went to the wheelhouse. Captain Ross was there. He pointed to another wheelhouse—this one sitting in a ship recycling lot on land. “I used to drive that boat,” he said. “I can see myself in the window!” An old steamer used for Captain John’s restaurant was tied to the dike. The boat had been built for a Jordanian prince. Captain John found it, brought it back to the lakes, and put a restaurant on it. It was a hit for a while, then started to fall apart. The town eventually shut it down, and now it’s in the lot.
Two hundred miles of water extended in front of the Equinox. I could see the route that La Salle had sailed ahead: Long Point, Presque Isle, Pelee Island. Haze and fog softened the horizon line. The storm moved south, and the crew chatted and joked, occasionally glancing at the radar. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to sail this stretch in a leaky ship with no idea where you were going. Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, full of shoals and ledges. During the day the crew could use a lead line and take bearings. In the dark, they must have been completely lost.
I couldn’t sleep that night, so I walked to the freighter’s stern deck. A swinging chair jury-rigged with a chain and shackles hung there. It was the only nonmanufactured object on the deck. I sat in it and watched the electrified glow of Buffalo fade away. Whitewater roiling off the prop glowed beneath stars. The engine room blocked the wind and made the air smell like diesel. I could see running lights on two ships miles behind us. They followed our exact path. Far to the north a single white beam from a lighthouse swept the water.
I PLANNED MY LAST DAYS on the Equinox carefully—writing, reading, eating—making sure I didn’t end up staring at a wall for hours at a time. Captain Ross and the crew were tired of my questions. There wasn’t anywhere to get away besides my cabin. The view was either of water or of fog.
I spent most of the day in the wheelhouse. Sometimes I’d say goodbye to the crew on watch, then stay for another hour or two. No one seemed to notice. Sporadic conversations with Captain Ross stretched out over days. He would start a story about how much his wife loved her sailboat in North Carolina, disappear for fourteen hours, and finish it the next day.
The Equinox hooked north at the western end of Lake Erie and steamed up the Detroit River. The river was a lighter shade of green than Erie. Waves exploded on docks along the Ontario shoreline, and a few fishermen held on as their boats tipped violently. The shipping channel is two lanes wide at the entrance to the river. A US ship named American Mariner ran parallel to the Equinox five hundred yards away. I could see its smokestack through the trees on Bois Blanc Island. The American captain hailed and asked what the Equinox planned to do when the lanes merged two miles ahead. Ross replied that he planned to go first. The American said he had entered the channel first—he had—and had right-of-way. Ross replied that he was currently in the lead—he was—so he had right-of-way. The American countered that the Equinox was ahead because the American captain had had the sense to power down to avoid a collision. Then he called the Coast Guard and asked for a ruling. The Coast Guard waffled and requested each boat’s position. Ross had the throttle pinned, clearly pushing the Equinox ahead. Eventually, the radio went silent and the seventy-thousand-ton drag race was decided.
A grain elevator loaded a ship on the Canadian shore. “I don’t know why the Americans don’t trade in grain,” Ross said. American ships also don’t travel up the salty Saint Lawrence River, so they last much longer. The Manistee, a US ship built in 1943, was still operating a mile upstream. “It’s a tough boat,” Ross said. “It burns a lot more fuel and takes a much bigger crew, but how do you scrap a boat if it’s in perfectly good shape?”
The river angled east, and downtown Detroit appeared like a house of mirrors. The city was founded in 1701 by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac as an advance post for the expanding French fur trade. After the British took over the city, Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763—led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac—destroyed eight British forts around the city and halted British general Jeffery Amherst’s plan to invade the American West. Detroit survived, and by 1765 it was the largest city in the northland. It’s still the largest city on the border, with 680,000 residents.
A row of smokestacks and billowing steam outlined the southern edge of Motor City. The scene on the shoreline was an apocalyptic rendition of the once-great northland metropolis. Entire blocks were overgrown by trees and weeds. Graffiti covered empty warehouses with broken windows and caved-in roofs. The surrounding land, a short walk from downtown, was layered in rubble.
We steamed past the street where Henry Ford had opened the Detroit Automobile Company in 1898. Ransom E. Olds had started his plant nearby the year before. Ford founded a second business, that would later be renamed the Cadillac Motor Company, before settling on the Ford Motor Company in 1903—in a rented shop on Mack Avenue. (His two investors were John and Horace Dodge.) In 1908, General Motors in Flint, Michigan, sixty miles northwest, became the holding company for William Crapo Durant’s Buick operation, which suffered greatly from his middle name but profited from his salesmanship. In the next twenty years, 125 auto companies set up shop in the Detroit area.
There were signs of life downtown. A hundred people wearing brightly colored spandex lined up in front of a yoga instructor near the Renaissance Center, a collection of glass-sided skyscrapers. A kayak club paddled along the shoreline. The Equinox eased past them, then picked up speed at Belle Isle and steamed up the Saint Clair River to Lake Huron.
At 9:00 p.m. the sun was still out. Fog had set in, and I could barely see the water. I saw my own breath on the wheelhouse catwalk. The dampness and cold penetrated my jacket. There were no buoys, ships, or rocks. You could see them on the radar but not through the windshield. “Lake’s too cold,” said the wheelsman.
I went to sleep around midnight. At some point after that the boat passed through Soo Locks on Michigan’s northern border and entered Lake Superior. I couldn’t see land from the wheelhouse the next morning. The water was glassy calm. Captain Ross was at the helm. “We were down-bound on Superior once on a ship that had cracked in half and been repaired,” he said. “Forecasters were calling for forty knots. We weren’t getting the wind, though. I decided to go through Huron and the Saint Clair. I went for an hour in Erie, steaming south with the north wind behind me. Then the real wind came. The sea was building. Waves coming over the back of the deck. I said, ‘Shit, what the hell did I get myself into.’ I knew the farther south I went, the bigger the waves would get and the more trouble I was going to get into. But if I tried to turn the ship around and go back to Detroit, I would be beam-on into the sea. One or the other. I slowed down and put the wheel hard to starboard. That was a hell of a turn. All six hundred feet of her was rocking and rolling sideways. The only thing I could see was that repaired crack in the hull. We made it back to Detroit and dropped anchor. I didn’t sleep too much that night. You don’t get seasick in moments like that; you’re just scared. Even the most courageous sailors are praying. You’re just a little pimple on the Earth. You’re so far from anybody, and looking at your radar screen, there’s nobody around.”
Captain Ross stared out the windshield for a half hour after telling the story. The helmsman gripped the wheel. Everyone in the wheelhouse seemed deep in thought. “You are like a floating city on a ship,” he finally said. “We are our own doctors, lawyers, family, police. You really have to be able to deal with it.”
The fog set in again, and the Equinox powered into the whiteout. The average depth of Superior is 483 feet. Off Grand Island, the bottom drops to 1,333 feet. Somewhere down there the Midcontinent Rift, a giant scar of hardened magma where North America split in two a billion years ago, runs across the bottom. Deepwater sculpin swim that deep. Native lake trout and lake herring circle above them. Sleek black loons, herring gulls, harlequin ducks, and oldsquaw dive a
t the fish on the surface, and eagles, falcons, terns, and plovers glide above.
I hung out in the wheelhouse late that night. The claustrophobia was gone. My sense of time and space had adjusted. The isolation and pace of the ship was calming. At home, I realized, I rarely made decisions about what to do next. I simply bounced from one obligation to another, squeezing in sleep and family time in the few hours that remained. The pace on a freighter forces you to think about things, deliberate, and reflect as the landscape creeps by. It was similar to the way Champlain, Brûlé, and La Salle traveled—one step at a time. They wrote in their journals at night, preserved samples of plants and animals they discovered, drew maps, learned native languages. They saw more of America than most modern Americans ever will.
That night I dreamed of a cottony white cloud covering the lake. Above the cloud, the moon seared a crescent into the sky. I saw gray wolves and black bears wandering through stands of paper birch and pine on the two-hundred-foot cliffs bordering Superior. The Equinox steamed through the middle of the lake. Just the smokestack poked through, making a long furrow in the mist. It was a clear night above and a whiteout below. Lights flickered onshore. Cars zipped along highways. America went on as usual while the giant ship slid through the silver light.
TWO MASSIVE CLIFFS PASSED BY my porthole the next morning. They were too close. It looked like we were going to hit. Captain Ross was at the helm when I got to the wheelhouse. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and had a cup of coffee in his hand. The ship powered down, skirted the cliffs, and made a long, slow turn toward a grain elevator onshore.
“There used to be a lot more of them,” he said. “Every year another one shuts down.” During the wheat boom in the early 1900s, grain elevators lined Thunder Bay’s shoreline. Demand for wheat in Europe hit an all-time high, and wheat coming out of the northland made up a third of the world’s supply. (In the 1970s, the US share of world wheat exports hit 50 percent.) The Canadian Pacific Railway double-tracked its Winnipeg–Thunder Bay line to carry grain. The Canadian Northern Railway established facilities there, and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway opened a route as well.
Ross eased up to the pier, and deckhands tossed ropes and cables at a few workmen onshore. After all the technological advancements the modern world has seen, the shipping process on the lakes is pretty much the same: tie up to shore, load cargo, seal it in the hold, float it somewhere that people need it.
There were fifty silos on the dock, all flat gray and topped by a rusting superstructure. The crew secured the lines, and I grabbed my bags and said goodbye. Ross asked me to stay in touch. No one else said a word, so I rolled my bag through a web of mooring lines and hatches to the gangway. A few men in hard hats walked up the stairs to start loading. In eighteen hours, the Equinox would be on its way again, this time headed east with its holds full of grain.
A taxi waited for me at the end of a long, dirt parking lot. “End of the line?” the driver asked. It was a Tom Petty moment. I told him I was flying home, and he smiled like he’d seen a lot of sailors happy to be getting off a ship.
“Sad what’s happened here,” the driver said on the way to the airport. A nearby mill had burned down earlier that week. It burned for a day before the fire department came to put it out. Homeless Ojibwe Indians had been trying to keep warm inside with a fire. They fell asleep, and the fire spread. The Ojibwe had it worse than anyone, he said. “They found chromite on Indian land up north. Gold, diamonds, everything. They found it years ago, but no one will help them get it.”
My flight from Thunder Bay International Airport was delayed by an hour that afternoon. Passengers sitting at the gate moaned and looked for alternative itineraries on their cell phones. I wondered how sixty minutes was going to change their lives. A skinny, middle-aged woman with an expensive handbag cut the line at the ticket counter and barked at the gate agent: “I have a dentist appointment. Can you fly me to a nearby city?”
We ended up boarding the plane early and leaving on time. The Equinox was still loading when we flew over. The ship looked like a toy. I could make out someone in a blaze-orange suit sweeping the deck. To the west, the forest circled Thunder Bay. I looked for the lumber roads and hidden lakes that Richard Shuh had told me about. The canopy was thick and green. I spotted a single brown line winding northwest. Farther out was a deep blue lake, maybe the one Richard and his wife had found in their VW, canoe on top, Bob Dylan on the radio, counting the miles between them and civilization.
PART III
BOUNDARY WATERS
8
THERE ARE NO ROADS. NO TOWNS OR AIRPORTS. THERE ARE NO people, gas stations, businesses, cars, airplanes, electricity, phone service. There is water. If you’re not on it, you’re in the woods. Forests in Minnesota’s northland are not as dense as those in the East. There is some light there. Looking down from an airplane, you see a landscape that is marbled blue and green, water and trees.
The Holocene created this wilderness. The Southern Ocean began releasing CO2 about twenty thousand years ago. The planet warmed and glaciers melted. Bare earth beneath the ice was soggy and barren. It took decades for young spruce and tundra grasslands to crop up. Prickly pear cactus and burr oak spread across the receding glacier’s path at a rate of fifty miles per century. White and red pine, spruce, cedar, and hemlock took root. Paper birch and upland maple turned the canopy red and gold October through December. Blueberries appeared in fissures between granite slabs. Thorny raspberry bushes and wild strawberries tangled in clearings. Moose, beaver, bear, deer, bobcats, Canadian lynx, and the largest population of wolves in the continental US live there now. You rarely see them. There is too much backcountry to disappear into.
Minnesota’s Boundary Waters is still primitive, carved by nature, and untouched by humans. The watery landscape that flanks the northern border west of the Great Lakes predates Paleo-Indians, Hopewell culture, and the local Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribe. It is unfamiliar to modern man. It wasn’t always that way. Commercial logging, fishing, mining, and railroads infiltrated and stripped the northland from east to west in the 1800s. Timber companies built railroads and ice highways deep into Minnesota’s backcountry to harvest millions of trees. Miners plowed through the state’s Arrowhead region—a triangle of ferrous earth wedged between the Boundary Waters and the northern shore of Lake Superior—searching for iron to feed America’s booming steel industry. In 1884 the Minnesota Iron Company completed a railroad between Superior and the Boundary Waters and started loading ore directly onto freighters. Minnesotans in the Iron Range have a saying: half their state is sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where armaments from World War II landed.
Relentless resource extraction along the northern border helped spark the nation’s first major conservation movement. President Teddy Roosevelt created the 3.9-million-acre Superior National Forest in 1909 to protect the Boundary Waters. US agriculture secretary W. M. Jardine added a 640,000-acre “roadless area” within the national forest in 1926, and in 1941 the Forest Service outlawed cutting along most of the borderline. The region was renamed the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in 1958, and six years later it became the second-largest land parcel protected under the Wilderness Act. The act’s definition of wild land: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
The million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area, which includes a thousand lakes, is now one of the most protected territories in America. Outboard engines, bicycles, paddleboats, and any other form of mechanized travel is forbidden, except on a few perimeter lakes. All visitors must have a permit. Most homes and businesses operating in the area have been closed and the buildings knocked down. Even the air is protected: airplanes over the region are not allowed to fly below four thousand feet. The effect has been to reverse time, remove humans, and return the Boundary Waters to the da
ys of the Holocene. Today, the only way in is with a canoe.
I didn’t arrive by canoe. I traveled by jet to the Minneapolis airport. The pilot told us to observe the crop art on the way in. An artist had planted five acres in the likeness of Van Gogh’s Olive Trees. The image of twisted branches draped under a swirling sun passed beneath the plane on the approach. The palette was brown and pale green. The image was framed with a grass path where visitors could walk.
The drive north was fast and straight. I passed over the Saint Louis River at seventy-five miles per hour. Three hundred years ago, Indians, explorers, and traders paddled the Saint Louis from the Mississippi to the Great Lakes. During border negotiations in the 1800s, the river almost became the southern boundary of Canada. The Treaty of Paris mandated that the border follow the main trade route through the Boundary Waters. A flawed map and ambiguous language in the agreement led surveyors in the 1820s on a goose chase, searching for fictitious islands and lakes. They drew three possible lines—along the Saint Louis, Pigeon, and Kaministiquia Rivers, from south to north. (The middle boundary, the Pigeon, was eventually chosen.)
A concrete bridge spans the Saint Louis now. A dozen plastic shopping bags hung from the piers. It was mid-September and still hot out. Dry too. Brittle sedges grew along the soft shoulder, and the paled tips of pine trees were nearly white. Three SUVs loaded with kids and canoes cruised in the right lane. The golden hour was coming on: late afternoon, setting sun, lodgepole pines splitting the light. A pink glow spread over a lakeside cabin. A lantern and two Adirondack chairs sat on a dock in front of it. I knew this scene. It could have been Maine. A firefly bobbed through the trees. I heard the crack! of a screen door slamming shut. The smell of smoldering charcoal drifted in the car window. The last beams of the day froze the picture: dock, trees, chairs, sun flare, three soggy children wading to shore.
