FRESH LAKE SUPERIOR FISH
I followed its pointing finger to a newer board with elegant, gilded letters:
DOCKSIDE FISH MARKET
FRESH & SMOKED
Painted on the window of the shop door were two golden herrings, each smiling, and inside beyond them, behind the counter lay rows of smoked herring and other species, some not native to Superior. I asked for ciscoes. “Oh my,” the clerk said in a kindness possibly trotted out to ease disappointment. “I don’t have any. It’s been some time. Years, I’d say.”
At the market, the only commercial smokehouse on the upper North Shore, I bought two herrings and walked toward the dock, stopping to look into a fish shed where Harley Tofte, a man of middle years, bright in orange waders, was cutting his catch of that morning, eighty pounds of herring, each fish about twelve inches long and weighing a pound or a little more. He deftly and nearly bloodlessly opened the bellies of the sleek and fulgent fish, removed innards while leaving head and tail, and into a bin tossed each one now ready for twelve hours in his small smokehouse, the penultimate stop on a voyage from 150 feet down in frigid Superior to a warm dinner plate. I said I was looking for ciscoes, and he mumbled, “So am I.” He scowled. “They’ve just kind of disappeared. What we get now is herring and lake trout and some menominee and whitefish. But ciscoes? Not a one.”
Next door was septuagenarian Tom Eckel’s cutting house where he, too, in orange waders was preparing what he’d just brought in, primarily trout. He grew up on a Superior island, something harder to do these days, and he was old enough to remember the area before World War II. His Gitche-Gumee pedigree was pure. I rephrased my question to reflect the sad news I was finding: Did he ever catch a cisco? He looked at me as if I’d asked “Did you ever catch a cold?”
With North Country politeness he said, “A long time ago,” and returned to a plump fish under his knife. Then, because I just stood there waiting for more, he added, “I don’t think you’ll ever see the ciscoes come back—not in this area. Too many predators.” When he put the fillet knife down a moment later he said, “But then, I didn’t think we’d ever see the lake trout come back like this.” Halfway through the next filleting, he stopped cutting. In Minnesota, a traveler learns conversational patience because the difference between a pause and a conclusion can be about a day. Eckel finished his muse and said, “The lampreys are under control, I think. Let’s hope they are. I know I’ve heard that ninety percent of our fish right here are natives again.”
Everyone’s commentary about ciscoes was historical, recollections of what had been. Worse, in less than an hour, I’d just talked to two-thirds of the commercial fishermen remaining in Grand Marais. As I left the cutting house I pointed to a long black sock tacked to the wall. Tom Eckel said, “Found it in the belly of an eight-pound trout.” When I reached the door, he added, speaking to himself, “Don’t know what happened to the rest of the guy.”
I sat by the lake in an easy breeze and opened my smoked-herring lunch. Excellent, but it wasn’t ciscoes. On the road, optimism can be useful, and something Eckel had said gave hope for yet finding a cisco: He preferred to go after larger species, but fishermen along the southern end of the North Shore, near Knife River, places closer to the old café where I’d first tasted cisco, those boys down there might think differently. “Who knows what you’ll find,” he’d said. “Maybe a smoked sock.”
After two days of wandering around Grand Marais and exploring the coast all the way north to the border at the Pigeon River, I turned around and headed southwest, my hopes further raised by a growing awareness that part of the difficulty in the search might be linguistic: One person’s cisco could be another’s chub (a name loosely applied), or a blind robbin, or (even more loosely) a whitefish. Who ever met a commercial fisherman using genus-species nomenclature to describe what comes up in the net?
I was looking for Coregonus artedi, the Latin name with a story attached to it: The latter term refers to a Swede, Petrus Artedi, father of ichthyology. After Artedi fell into a canal and drowned, Carl Linnaeus, coincidentally the creator of binomial taxonomy, wrote of his colleague: “Thus did the most distinguished of ichthyologists perish in the waters, having devoted his life to the discovery of their inhabitants.”
A cisco is also known as a lake herring, even though it isn’t a true herring but rather a member of the salmon family along with lake trout and various so-named whitefish of the Great Lakes. Overharvesting, pollution, the spread of invaders like lampreys and alewives all have affected smaller fish such as ciscoes and the larger species dependent upon them so that today certain fish have declined precipitously from their populations in, say, 1949. I also began suspecting that my quest would have gone better had I arrived in the autumn when ciscoes rise from the depths and cluster to spawn in warmer shallows. But, like a fellow whose inamorata slyly eludes him, I was drawn on by the challenge of the pursuit.
Late one afternoon near Knife River, I came to a beat-up tavern with a worn sign promising no ciscoes but at least smoked fish of some sort. The place was closed—it looked like for weeks—but I managed to raise Betty Kendall, the proprietor who lived next door in a trailer. The airless and dark barroom, redolent of years of cigarettes and spilled beer, was universally, dismally red—worn carpets, tottery chairs, ragged draperies—and decorated in hanging ball-caps and dozens of representations of Betty Boop, a comics character from an era Betty Kendall shared with her. Also a sign:
TO HELL WITH THE DOG
BEWARE THE OWNER.
By the look of things, experience suggested I should heed it.
Diffidently, I asked my question about smoked ciscoes. In weariness she said, “How many do you want?” Half expecting a laugh of derision to chase me out, I suggested enough to make a dinner. She disappeared into what I took for a closet and returned with several sheets of newspaper cradling golden ciscoes. She wrapped them. I asked were they fresh. “These were smoked yesterday at four o’clock. They come from over on the Wisconsin side.” I recited a nutshell rendition of my quest, and she said about her late husband, Smokey, “He used to eat three or four while he was smoking them. You would’ve thought they were popcorn. Now, only a couple of fishermen in Knife River still go after them.”
When I left, my wrapped ciscoes snug under my arm as if rare first editions of books long sought, I noticed across the road a second fish stand. It was shut down, but only a little farther along was yet another. I was in a hotbed of smokeries. Russ Kendall, brother of Smokey, had built his place as a proper market, small and plain but with appropriate glass-fronted cases, refrigeration, and a happy spread of smoked fish. He was old enough to know the cisco story through the whole of the twentieth century: from the time of abundance when a smoked-cisco stall would pop up about every fifteen miles of shoreline road, on to the near scarcity I’d been encountering. A local Ojibway showed Kendall’s father how to build a smokehouse. Russ said, “People don’t fish for them so much now because ciscoes are the most trouble and bring the least money, but I’ll tell you this: They’re good enough that, years ago, when this place was just a roadside stand and our catch was out in the open air before government regulations, one morning a cow wandered up and ate a couple ciscoes right off the table. Two days later the owner of the cow complained his milk tasted fishy.”
That evening I unwrapped packages from three different vendors and began a celebration of a memory, a fulfillment of what Lake Superior had written in me some half-century earlier. On the table lay slender, streamlined creatures, fish of classic symmetry, their round eyes blanched from the oven. I cut along the back and pulled free the scaled skin once nearly luminescent but now turned golden by smoke. Flesh, the color of parchment, lifted easily from insubstantial bones almost invisible. The ciscoes were so delicate it seemed wondrous they could survive in the dark and cold and eat-and-be-eaten deeps they spent most of their lives in. They were tender and moist—“oily,” people say on the North Shore—and reportedly rich with
salutary omega-3 fatty acids. Their sweet delectability made finishing one almost a regret; even having a dozen others iced down, enough for several more lunches and dinners, didn’t relieve my sense of impending cisco deprivation. But, beyond that, in mind was a wobbly café, a smiling father freed from a steering wheel, a smudgy window opening to a lake reaching out till it vanished, and I realized I’d followed a small, silvery, scrumtudious fish into a long corridor back toward 1949.
THE BECAUSE-IT’S-THERE ASSOCIATION
As a writer—and of late as a traveler—I prefer topics and places less frequented, as in “A Land for the Resolutely Curious.” The Because-It’s-There Association is an imaginary caboodle of those who recognize that any popularly supposed quarter of humdrummity (say, the state of Kansas) requires only an awakened curiosity to be worth a little exploration.
The venerable Delta Queen is now a permanently anchored hotel on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga. R.I.P.
A Land for the Resolutely Curious
Among the variety of American travelers, those who visit a somewhere ostensibly lacking any feature other than mere existence aren’t numerous, although perhaps they should be. The growing throng crowding national and theme parks and any piece of sand leading to waves anywhere can encourage a rambler to seek out the overlooked and presumed humdrum. Surpassing even the great Sir Edmund Hillary, this other kind of excursionist, resolutely curious, goes to a place truly “because it’s there” and not because it’s the highest mountain on earth. If the possibility of sixteenth-century-like discoveries—Vespucci, Verrazano, John Cabot—hardly exists any longer, the joy of personal discovery remains. A mundane locale, for one who’s never seen it, can surprise and satisfy as much as those celebrated and hawked.
These days I’m usually out to escape famous American destinations, not because they’re unworthy but because I’ve visited most of them more than once. After half a century I still dream of poking into every corner of America. From Underground Seattle to the turtle crawls in Key West, from the chamber of the Supreme Court in Washington to the bottom of the Deep Well near Chicago, from Mount Katahdin to the telescopes on Kitt Peak in Arizona, the lure of America is everywhere.
That’s how, near the last Christmas of the millennium, I came to be aboard the venerable steamboat Delta Queen as she pulled away from the Twenty-First Street Wharf in Galveston, Texas. We were bound for New Orleans, 350 miles distant, via the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, popularly called in its own territory the ICW. A few years ago, when one old pilot heard the Delta Queen was going to initiate an annual round trip on the ICW, he said, “What the hell for? Ain’t nothin but an industrial ditch.” To a member of the Because-It’s-There Association of Not-Yet-Jaded Travelers, such words are traveling orders.
In a massive, wet lowland where humans for two centuries have dug and dredged uncounted miles of ditches—some wide enough only for a canoe and others for a span of barges—the ICW is the lone watercourse there called the canal. It runs about a thousand miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande below Brownsville, Texas, to Apalachicola, Florida, most of it sheltered from the open water of the Gulf by slender islands and spits and peninsulas; in that way it resembles the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway running along the eastern shore. Nowhere else on the Gulf does the ICW get so far from ocean as it does between Galveston and New Orleans; over that route boats move entirely in a dug channel, something not true even for the Erie Canal which, by happenstance, is about the same length. Dredging the ICW made the Gulf coastland between those two cities effectively into an island, or, better, a chain of islands, the largest in the contiguous forty-eight states, a linkage unlike any other in the country.
Since its completion in 1949, you cannot in that section reach the open Gulf by foot or auto without crossing a bridge or getting onto a ferry. The entire ICW—elsewhere a conjugation of dug channels connecting dredged lakes and bays—is, in a nation of monumental navigational undertakings, among the most impressive constructions of the past century, the fulfillment of an idea that first appeared two-hundred years earlier. If engineers have not built the locks in the east Texas–Louisiana portion as big or numerous as those on the Erie Canal or on the Mississippi, Ohio, and Columbia rivers, these lesser locks have managed to keep the central ICW from being absorbed or dissolved by the thousand swamps, marshes, bayous, lagoons, and drainage ditches along its miles. To see the difficulty, imagine digging a trench in a shallow pond. So many different watercourses cross it, natural and engineered, that a traveler can wonder why it doesn’t drain itself into the Gulf, at one place only about five-hundred yards of low, sandy beach away.
Any passage humans create—whether footpath or superhighway—is never entirely benign to the land it traverses, but compared to other major arteries like the first transcontinental railroad or even I-95, the monumental Gulf ICW has untold capabilities to alter its natural realm, and that’s the reason construction of an extension of it across Florida was stopped in the early seventies and later turned into a greenway. It’s good to remember, though, that long before the canal existed, the Texas-Louisiana territory it crosses had been dredged and channeled for other purposes to a fare-thee-well.
Some time ago I came upon Jan de Hartog’s Waters of the New World, an account of his 1960 voyage with several companions in a seagoing barge from Houston to Nantucket. His description of crossing the portion of the ICW that the Delta Queen would soon cover surprised me, coming as it does from a Netherlander who says of himself, “I have lived most of my adolescent life on inland waters of the Old World and most of my adult life at sea.” Yet, this old salt didn’t find the ICW a comfortable route separated from the perils of the open Gulf, although he wasn’t bothered by the numberless canal hazards—heavy barge traffic, submarine pipelines, submerged pilings, cable ferries, pontoon bridges, drooping overhead powerlines, masses of water hyacinth, alligators, or the incredible and deadly suction created by tows under way. Rather, he was disturbed by a more ancient and less definable reason: a common European unease about American wildernesses extending in pieces from the Adirondacks to the Olympic rain forest—and at times even into the Hell’s Kitchen of a city.
That Old World response has been around at least since the Puritans who equated deep Massachusetts forests and their natives with natural evil; in their seventeenth-century minds, to subdue the dark wilderness and its inhabitants was to quell the Devil and to bring all into Christian luminance. In his chapters on the ICW, de Hartog uses words like lonely, terror, hostile, desolation, creatures of the night, nightmarish country, the heart of darkness, a glimpse of purgatory, paradise lost, an atmosphere of something beyond evil. Such language can lure a Because-It’s-There associate into a five-day passage through a terraqueous place alleged to be riddled with shadowy creatures creeping a lost paradise beyond evil.
On several occasions, I’d been near that reported heart of darkness but by auto and foot and never into places only the canal can take you to. A road map of the region reveals an intriguing blankness of humanly unhabited waters surrounding much of the canal. South of the ICW, in the Louisiana parish of Terrebonne, for example, are some thousand square-miles without a highway. If such wildness was hostile desolation to a European visitor, its Cajun settlers found that terre tremblante indeed to be also “land-good.”
The Delta Queen, built in 1926 and a National Historic Landmark (strange terminology for a boat), has a history of one narrow escape from destruction after another. Her fortune, for now, is mostly opposite the fate of her “brother” vessel, Delta King, now a hotel stuck to the shore in Sacramento, California. The lower Sacramento River was also home port for the Queen until 1947 when she survived being towed some seven-thousand miles down the Pacific Coast, through the Panama Canal, and up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to a refurbishing in Pittsburgh. Because of her appealing lines, steam-powered paddlewheel, and rather long operating history, she’s arguably become—along with the USS Constitution—one of the most beloved vessels in Ame
rica. I’d been aboard her from New Orleans to St. Paul, from Cincinnati almost to Pittsburgh, and I know of few other vehicles that can so transport a traveler into our landscapes and history. She is, as her captain told me, “a time machine.” To see from her historic decks the nineteenth-century Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis, for example, is to catch a waft of time gone.
On an early December afternoon the Queen got under way from Galveston, moving at five miles-an-hour up the channel behind Pelican Island, and there she crossed the outlet to the Gulf called Bolivar Roads to gain the Intracoastal Waterway proper. To the starboard side lay a twenty-five-mile peninsula of sand which in places is barely broad enough to separate the canal from the Gulf. Beyond the abandoned lighthouse at Port Bolivar, she entered a twenty-two-mile-long channel that, but for one slight dogleg, deviated from straightness no more than a laser beam, our course lying between grassy shores and marsh, a few of them given to oyster beds.
Eastward was an old Indian graveyard, and everywhere dead-end drainage ditches, each parallel to the next in such a way that the peninsula was a place neatly and unnaturally scotched by water. From the highest deck of the boat, I could see at Rollover Bay the Gulf only a few-hundred yards distant, but from that point on I’d catch only rare glimpses of it. The canal bends twice at High Island—High there meaning twenty-five feet above sea level—to enter the country of Mud Bayou that drains Mud Lake through long, crooked, and unhurried miles even though the Gulf lies only eight-hundred yards south. The nature of slow-moving water is to turn upon itself, and, in that land of twisted creeks and bayous, straightness is the signature of human hands.
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