Even the staff of our student-run paper needs a break from the bustle of Marquette and NMU once in a while. This week, the North Wind headed east towards Grand Marais with an Olympus Camedia C-750 to research the memory of the Edmund Fitzgerald, hunt for rocks and lake slag and find long-forgotten relics in the woods.
In Grand Marais, where the lightkeeper’s house is closed for the season, the waves crashing against the breakwall drowned out the only beachgoers of the day, an overexcited retriever in the surf and its shivering owner on the chilly sand. The lighthouse’s Fresnel lens, a fifth order typically installed in channels and breakwater, still shines as brightly as it did when it was lit in the inner harbor light in 1898.
Grand Marais has always been designated a harbor of refuge for any ships seeking help on Lake Superior. Both the Edmund Fitzgerald and Arthur M. Anderson, local historians told us, should have turned into the harbor on November 10, 1975. The keepers have long been made obsolete but the twin lights in the harbor are still glowing through the fog.
In Munising, the drive to the beach at Hiawatha National Park is closed for the season, so it took a short walk to find the beach and cold fingers in the sand to find the lake slag, glassy and crumbling away. In the iron age of the U.P., furnaces separated out the iron ore and left everything else in the lakes and rivers, which tumbled the industrial waste until it become a kind of faux crystal, a Fordite for the north. Lime and oxides glimmer green and blue under the sun and chip away when they’re cleaned off in the cold lake and placed in the cupholder of a car for safekeeping.
Along the Lake Superior Circle Route, picnic tables and camping spots are locked away, scenic points sit behind DNR fences and public boat launches are shut until springtime. Ducking around safeguards, road trippers can see the lake deceptively calm and trickling chilly water through the soles of their shoes, the wind too loud for aesthetic videos.
And back in Marquette, at the end of the day, the leaves are turning gold and college life goes on.
