The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The gales of November still rage with controversy and treachery, as shipwrecks and their grisly cargo become the hot new tourist attraction.

Back in 1966, Dennis Hale had been sailing for three years, all of them on the 580-foot freighter Daniel J. Morrell. The Morrell was in its sixtieth year, one of the oldest of the many freighters plying the Great Lakes. The ship had just finished its already long season, but when another freighter developed engine trouble, the Morrell was sent in to carry the load. It was late November.

In late November 1905, one of the worst storms still on record overtook Lake Superior in what became known as the “Mataafa Blow.” Just north of Split Rock, the steamer William Edenborn struggled along the North Shore on its way to Duluth, towing behind it the Madeira, a massive 436-foot schooner-barge. As the winds swelled to sixty miles an hour, the two ships were pounded closer and closer to the dangerous rocks along the coast. Hoping to save his own ship, A.J. Talbot, the Edenborn’s captain, decided to cut the Madeira free, leaving it to drop anchor and ride out the storm on its own.

When the Edmund Fitzgerald was launched in 1958, it was the largest ship to sail the Great Lakes. At 729 feet and able to haul more than 25,000 tons of iron ore, the freighter was dubbed “The Pride of the American Flag.” Year after year, the Fitzgerald hauled iron ore and taconite out of the Twin Ports, breaking records for tonnage along the way. But by 1975, the Fitzgerald was showing signs of age.

November is readily acknowledged as the stormiest month on the Great Lakes. Each year around the beginning of this steely month, over the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, two storm tracks converge. From the north bear down the Alberta Clippers, full of freezing polar air. From the lee slopes of the Rockies and across the prairie come the heavy, snow-laden fronts. When the storms hit the lakes, the cold air masses pass over waters that are still holding remnants of their summer warmth. The barometric pressure can plummet and the winds can whip up to hurricane force.