Chapter 1LAKE MICHIGAN
Size Matters ♦ A Child’s View of Lake Michigan ♦ What Tocqueville Missed ♦ The Beach at Good Harbor ♦ A View of SuperiorTo appreciate the magnitude of the Great Lakes you must get close to them. Launch a boat on their waters or hike their beaches or climb the dunes, bluffs, and rocky promontories that surround them and you will see, as people have seen since the age of glaciers, that these lakes are pretty damned big. It’s no wonder they’re sometimes upgraded to “Inland Seas” and “Sweetwater Seas.” Calling them lakes is like calling the Rockies hills. Nobody pretends they compare to the Atlantic or Pacific, but even the saltiest saltwater mariners have been surprised to discover that the lakes contain a portion of ocean fury.
The first time I saw Lake Michigan, I thought it must be an ocean. I was five years old, and my family had just moved to the Leelanau Peninsula, the little finger of Michigan’s mitten, and rented a hilltop house with a view of the lake. In the living room, centered before the picture window, was a brass telescope mounted on a pedestal, where I would stand on a chair at night and peer at ships on the horizon, each lit as brightly as a small city. My father told me that they were ships five hundred to a thousand feet long, with cargo holds that could carry a hundred trainloads of wheat or iron ore. If they were headed south, they were probably bound for Chicago; if north, for Detroit, New York, London, Hong Kong. I would stand in our house and watch those large, bright, slowly passing vessels and sense connection with the world.
It was a magical place to live. Our yard ran in a long slope down to the lily pads of South Bar Lake, with Lake Michigan a stone’s throw beyond. At the big lake was a beach empty of people most days and a playground of sandblasted swings and teeter-totters set precariously a few feet above storm waves. My memories of that summer are filled with painted turtles and water snakes, with excursions down the beach in search of treasures, with ominous dark thunderstorms passing over the lake, lightning flashing in the distance. My mother had grown up a few miles down the shore in Glen Arbor, and my father’s parents owned a cherry farm and sugarbush a few miles inland, so for them it was a homecoming. For me it was a revelation.
I remember standing in the sand, feeling very small. Gulls kited stationary above me, then banked their wings against the wind and soared away. The wind was cool and fresh and smelled like rain. A wave curled and broke; water rushed up on the sand, spread thin, and sank. The shore stretched for as far as I could see, from the haze-obscured curve of Platte Bay to the massive yellow flank of Sleeping Bear Dunes. The lake was too vast for comprehension. It was nothing but water to the edge of the earth. I thought sharks swam out there, and pirate ships sailed, and on its far shores lived people who spoke strange languages. I assumed the water was salty.
That summer my mother led my brother and me up a trail to the summit of the Empire Bluffs, a mountain of sand shoved up thousands of years ago by glaciers. It was grown over with stunted trees and dune grasses and capped with the long-dead trunks of ancient cedars bleached pale by time and weather. The view from the top was stunning. Down the shore was a strip of yellow beach between the lake and the bunched-up hills of forest, with the dunes looming beyond.
The bluff beneath us was so steep it was disorienting. I threw a stone thinking it would soar to the lake, but it struck sand a ridiculously short distance below me. I looked down at the water near shore and saw three black fish as big as logs patrolling in the shallows. Sturgeon, I now realize—the largest inhabitants of the Great Lakes and rarely encountered, though a century ago they were so abundant that farmers around the lakes pitchforked them during their spawning runs and used them for fertilizer. The image of the gigantic fish had mythic weight. For years I wondered if I had dreamed it.
Now, forty years later, the Empire Bluffs are sheltered within Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and are visited more frequently than when I was a child. Not much else has changed. The Bluffs are still topped with a ghost forest of cedars, lake and sky merge seamlessly at the horizon, Sleeping Bear Dunes tip to the water like a large golden pyramid. No sturgeon swam into view the last time I visited, but I expected none—not many remain in the lake. Down the shore, the beach in Empire was crowded with people, but I expected that also. As I looked over the water, a British tourist in shorts and hiking boots climbed huffing behind me and asked in a Piccadilly lilt, “Can one see Wisconsin?”
No, sorry, one cannot. Not even with the strongest telescope. Cross Lake Michigan by boat—cross any of the Great Lakes—and most of the way there’s nothing to see but water and sky. Here if you head west the crossing is roughly sixty miles of open lake to Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, with Green Bay beyond it. Green Bay, incidentally, is where the French trader Jean Nicolet, who was probably the first European to enter Lake Michigan, went ashore in a canoe in 1634 firing pistols in the air and wearing a silk robe embroidered with flowers and birds. He thought he had reached China. When no representatives of the Khan showed up to welcome him, he marched into a nearby Winnebago village and repeated his performance, no doubt providing much entertainment for the locals.
Those of us who live near the lakes take their great size for granted. We also take for granted that travel in the region is made inconvenient by water, and that in winter we’re likely to be buried in “lake-effect” snow when cold, dry Arctic winds pick up moisture and heat as they pass over the lakes, conjuring ten, twenty, and in a few places as much as thirty feet of snow a year along our coastal snowbelts. We learn in elementary school that the acronym HOMES is a handy way to remember the names of the lakes. We’re taught that their surface area of 94,676 square miles is roughly the size of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined (and is slightly larger than England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland); that the shorelines of the five lakes extend for more than 10,000 miles, about equal to the combined Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States; and that Michigan alone is bounded by 3,200 miles of coastline—only Alaska has more.
Give us an opportunity and we’ll remind you that the lakes contain nearly a fifth of the freshwater on the surface of the planet; that if it were possible to pour all the water from all the ponds, lakes, rivers, and reservoirs in the United States into a hundred gigantic buckets, ninety-five of them would be filled by the Great Lakes; that if you distributed the water from those ninety-five buckets evenly across the land, it would cover the lower forty-eight states in a lake ten feet deep.
We can be fiercely protective, as politicians have learned, sometimes to their dismay. When Texas congressman Dick Armey came to Michigan a few years ago to endorse a local Republican candidate for Congress, he looked at Lake Michigan and said he knew a few ranchers back home who’d like to poke a siphon in that. Cribbing clumsily from Mark Twain, he said, “I’m from Texas and down there we understand that the whiskey is for drinking and the water is for fighting over.” His point was that if we were to give up local control, Washington bureaucrats would be sure to take charge of the water. “If we get it in Washington,” Armey said, speaking for thirsty Texans, “we’re not going to be buying it. We’ll be stealing it. You are going to have to protect your Great Lakes.” By “protect” he meant, of course, defend our right to profit from it. But Great Lakes water is not Texas crude, and it’s not for sale. His candidate lost.
* * *
The lakes extend 575 miles from the north shore of Lake Superior to the south shore of Lake Erie, a spread of eight degrees in latitude. From west to east they stretch nearly eight hundred miles. Their drainage basin encompasses 200,000 square miles, an area almost as big as France. In that basin live thirty-four million people, each of them affected in ways large and small by the lakes.
Anywhere you go in the region, the vernacular designates the nearest Great Lake as “the Big Lake.” Each Big Lake is different, with its own character and characteristics, but the same water flows through them and they share many qualities. All five shape the land and alter the weather and define the journeys of those who live nearby.
Circumnavigation is an ambitious undertaking. From where I live, in the northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, I can fly in a commuter plane across Lake Michigan and be in Milwaukee in less than an hour. Or if it’s May through October, I can book passage on a car ferry, the SS Badger, and cross from Ludington to Manitowoc in four hours. If I choose to drive to Milwaukee, I can go south around the bottom of the lake, through Chicago, then up the coast of Wisconsin; or go north around the top of the lake and down Wisconsin. Either way, the trip is four hundred miles. That’s half the distance around just one lake, and not the largest.
Drive U.S. highways from the eastern end of Lake Ontario to the western end of Lake Superior and you pass through upstate New York, a corner of Pennsylvania, most of the length of Ohio, sections of Indiana and Illinois, a good share of Wisconsin, and the slanted northeast border of Minnesota; take the shortcut through Michigan and you have to drive the length of both peninsulas. Returning by the northern route, it’s all Ontario. From north to south and west to east you pass through distinct ecological zones, from boreal forests to hardwood forests to till plains to clay plains to cornbelt plains to lake plains—forests in the north, farms and industry in the south, with abandoned cutovers and vestigial prairies and abundant wetlands throughout.
Alexis de Tocqueville sailed on the Great Lakes in 1831, when he was twenty-six years old, during the tour of the United States that inspired his book, Democracy in America. While aboard the steamboat Ohio, bound for Detroit along the south shore of Lake Erie, he wrote in a letter: “This lake without sails, this shore which does not yet show any trace of the passage of man, this eternal forest which borders it; all that, I assure you, is not grand in poetry only; it’s the most extraordinary spectacle that I have seen in my life.”
Young Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave Beaumont, crossed Erie to Detroit, coasted the west shore of Lake Huron and steamed up the St. Mary’s River to the village of Sault Ste. Marie, where they glimpsed Superior (“This lake much resembles all the others,” wrote Beaumont, but he was mistaken), then returned to Huron, passed through the Straits of Mackinac, and crossed Lake Michigan to Green Bay. They witnessed wonders, but they missed more than they saw. They did not see Lake Ontario, with its wooded shores and cobblestone beaches, the clay faces of the Scarborough Bluffs, the thousand islands at the lake’s outlet to the St. Lawrence. They missed Lake Huron’s Bruce Peninsula, with its limestone cliffs tumbling to the water, and enormous Georgian Bay and its thousands of clustered islands, its fjords, and its water-sculpted escarpments. They missed the sand mountains along the east shore of Lake Michigan, and the young city of Chicago, which in 1831 was on the verge of booming. Especially they missed Superior. They never saw the mountain range called the Sleeping Giant, its peaks a clear profile of feet, knees, belly, chest, and face. They missed the mineral-stained Pictured Rocks, storm-battered and brilliant with colors; the wild and lofty Palisade Head cliffs; the pine-covered Porcupine Mountains, which though only two thousand feet above sea level were once as high as the Rockies. They missed most of the wildlife—the Atlantic salmon that ran up Lake Ontario’s rivers to spawn, the whitefish and lake trout and sturgeon in all the lakes, the deer and moose, the bear and wolf, the flocks of passenger pigeons that migrated in numbers so vast they blackened the sky for days as they passed, yet would be gone forever by the end of the century. And they missed the changes of the seasons—never saw maples turn scarlet in October or trilliums fill the woods with blossoms in May, did not witness snow squalls racing across the lakes or surf exploding against mountains of ice along shore.
* * *
Though I’ve lived near the Great Lakes most of my life, there came a day a few years ago when I realized how little I knew of them. To get better acquainted, I drove around each of their shores. Eventually I drove around them again. I explored beaches and shoreline villages and city lakefronts. I met passionate people who showed me the places they loved and were fighting to protect. I filled boxes with brochures, pamphlets, reports, books. I took notes and photographs. In the end I got to know some of the people, cities, and roads—but not the lakes.
For a month and a half I stayed alone in a house on the north shore of Lake Michigan. Mornings I worked at a desk in front of a sliding-glass door with a view of North Manitou Island, low and darkly wooded, and beyond it the horizon of the open lake blurring with the sky. Afternoons I walked the beach. It was February and March of an unusually warm winter, and I had the shore to myself. I would follow a trail from the house to the foredunes, walking through snow in February, then, in March, after the snow melted, on sand. Pausing at the bluff, I would look up and down the length of the bay. A few miles to the north was Whaleback, a wooded promontory in outline shaped like a giant sperm whale—Moby-Dick beached and grown over with forest, his blunt head yearning lakeward, his fluke raised behind. To the south, beyond the long swerve of the bay, was Pyramid Point, a raw sandy dune topped with forest. From a distance the Point looks like someone once tipped a knife at an angle and carved it smooth.
Every afternoon I walked along the same stretch of uninhabited beach and watched the ways it changed. I became interested in the relationship between sand and wind. High on the beach, where the sand was dry, was a lunar landscape I had never noticed in my years of exploring Lake Michigan beaches. Scattered across it were thousands of stones the size of golf balls, each stranded on a pedestal of sand and casting a thin shadow. I learned that geologists call the stones “lag gravel,” and that they are stranded there when wind blows the sand away from them. Larger stones that stay in place for years become faceted on the side facing the prevailing wind. Geologists call them “ventifacts.”
I became interested also in the kinds of waves I saw. The smallest were capillary waves, hardly more than wrinkles on the surface of the water, which act like tiny sails to catch the wind and make larger waves. Gusts blowing over the land plummeted to the water, flurried into cat’s-paws, then gathered force and raced away toward Wisconsin. Whitecaps marched across the bay and pumped up and down against the horizon line, their tips bright as snow against the blue of the lake. Breakers purled and galloped down the shore. Low swells made sluggish by the cold seemed to rise from the bottom of the lake and crawl to shore, finally collapsing on the sand like exhausted swimmers.
From Walter J. Hoagman’s genial little guidebook, Great Lakes Coastal Plants, I learned the parts of the coastal zone. The fringe where the sand is always wet is called the “swash zone.” The dry beach, above the reach of ordinary waves, is the “backshore.” “Bluffs” are banks built over millennia, rising a few feet to a few hundred feet above the backshore. “Foredunes” are uneven hilly dunes, well above the high-water mark, scattered with coastal plants. “Backdunes” are larger hills of sand, where trees and shrubs live among coastal flowers and grasses, punctuated by “blowouts” of barren sand, eroded by wind.
In the foredunes and backdunes I examined winter weeds, trying to identify by stalks and dried leaves such plants as sand cress and sandwort, fringed gentian, yarrow, false heather, and silverweed. After a few weeks I was as enchanted with the names as I was with the plants they designated. Guidebook in hand, I walked the beach, reciting into the wind:
Lake tansy, calamint, Queen Anne’s lace.
Little bluestem and horsemint.
Mossy stonecrop.
Starry false Solomon’s Seal.
Sea rocket and beach pea.
Soapberry, pigweed, and spiked lobelia.
Indian paintbrush.
Seaside spurge.
Bugleweed, horsetail, windflower.
Six weeks on the beach, and I never got tired of it. On the contrary—I wanted more. I wanted to see it all and know everything about it. Gradually I began to know those two miles of beach and dunes. But of course it wasn’t the same as knowing the lake.
The following summer I stood on a ledge looking into the deep, clear water of Lake Superior. I was on its largest island, Isle Royale (pronounce it “I’ll Royal”—“Eel roy-AL” brands you an outsider and a fancy-pants). It’s a big place, ten times the size of Manhattan, and raw with rock and bog and impenetrable spruce forest. It is among the least visited of our national parks, but it can’t bear much use, and the few hundred visitors who come each day in the summer are probably too many. The island is home to moose and wolves—their dynamic here is among the most carefully studied in the history of wildlife biology—and is dotted with inland lakes and long protected finger-bays of Superior where loons warble and moose wander down in the evenings to drink. My wife and I had come to canoe, hike, and camp. We never wanted to leave.
One day Gail and I walked a portage trail with three young biologists who were on the island studying loons. They were bright-eyed and tanned and wind-burned, glowing with that radiance you encounter now and then in people who are doing exactly what they were put on earth to do. They told us in detail about their work, about banding loons and following them from bay to bay around the island, keeping a careful distance while observing them through spotting scopes mounted on their kayaks. They’d been tracking the same birds for three years. Curious to see their reaction, I asked, “Honestly, don’t you ever get a little tired of loons?” and they looked at me with their mouths hanging open. Finally one said the words that all three were thinking: “Are you crazy?”
Maybe. I’d been tracking the Great Lakes for three years by now and was beginning to think the task was hopeless. I’d become lost in the parts. Wherever I went, I wanted to know the water and everything in it and near it. I wanted to know the rocks around the shore, the insects that lived among the rocks, the birds that fed on the insects and nested in the trees, the trees themselves. And not just their names. Their life histories, their places in the whole, the poetry, philosophy, and science they had inspired in people like the loon researchers, who had devoted their lives to them. And I wanted the words to put it all together—every place, every moment, and all they signified.
It had become overwhelming. The water alone was defeating me. How do you describe water? What words can evoke those spangles of sunlight, those shifting wave shadows, those pellucid blue depths? I lacked the vocabulary. I wanted to take hold of the immediate world, see it independent of the names we give it, then give it name. But I couldn’t grasp it. People five thousand years ago rode these same waters in canoes, then painted rocks with images of what they saw. I suspect that they too were unable to grasp the whole.
Emerson said the world lacks unity, or seems to, only if we have lost unity within ourselves. He thought a naturalist might learn to see the world whole, but only if all the demands of his spirit were met. “Love,” he wrote, “is as much its demand as perception.”
I had the love, I think, but not the perception. I couldn’t see far enough. And I couldn’t unite what I saw with what I already knew. I stood on that ledge above Lake Superior and looked down through the water at rocks the size of houses, but I couldn’t get to them. I couldn’t get to anything. Before me was water, billions of Mickey Mouse molecules in every drop, and every drop as pristine as mountain air, flavored with cedar and feldspar, colored with sky, granite, and spruce. I didn’t want to trivialize what I saw, and to dissect it would murder it. I’d done enough dissecting. I was reaching for something else entirely. I wanted to hold what I saw, felt, heard, tasted, and scented, and to possess it always—not like a tourist snapping photos, but literally, taking possession of its physical fact and keeping it with me always—yet I couldn’t get my arms around it.
It occurred to me that I should strip off my shirt, raise myself on my toes, breathe deeply, and dive. Immerse myself. Swim down into emerald depths until the weight of the lake embraced me and I could run my hands over granite blocks that had never been touched. It would have been still and cool down there, and very quiet.
But I lacked courage. The water was too cold by far. I thought the shock might burst my heart.
So I stood safe and dry on shore and looked across all those miles of Lake Superior and saw all that I was missing—and decided I needed a boat.
Chapter 2LAKE MICHIGANA Meeting on the Malabar ♦ The History of a Concrete Boat ♦ A Providential Seiche ♦ We Begin Our Voyage
Hajo Knuttel knew the lakes were big, but not that big. Hajo—pronounced HI-oh, “like Ohio, without the first O”—was a fifty-year-old freelance ship’s captain from Connecticut who had spent most of his life sailing the oceans but was seeing the Great Lakes for the first time. He was surprised at the blueness of the water, which he compared to the Caribbean, at its apparent cleanliness, at its magnitude. “Pretty big ponds,” he would say a dozen times during the weeks I sailed with him across four of the lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, and Erie—until he visits Superior, HOME is all he knows). He would be deeply curious about the human and geological histories of the lakes, about the plants and animals that live in and around them, about their environmental and biological degradations.
Hajo and I met one cold and gusty afternoon in April 2000 at Harbor West Marina on Grand Traverse Bay, near Traverse City, Michigan, where I live. I had walked the length of the marina dock, past pleasure cruisers and private sailing yachts, to a handsome, tall-masted schooner teed at the end. At more than a hundred feet in length, with a pair of sixty-foot masts, and displacing seventy-four tons, the Malabar dwarfed every boat in the harbor.
I was no sailor, but I knew enough to seek permission before stepping aboard. The deck was strewn with 55-gallon drums and stacked with cans of paint and coils of rigging, but nobody was in sight. I stood on the dock for a moment and finally called out, “Anybody home?”—a landlubber’s expression for sure. A man popped his head through a hatch in the deck and appraised me.
He had blue eyes and longish blond-gray hair parted boyishly off center. On his cheeks grew muttonchops of the sort you’d expect to see on eighteenth-century sea captains. His expression was curious but guarded.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you Hajo?”
“Who are you?”
I explained that the owner of the boat had suggested I talk to him. I knew he was sailing the Malabar through the lakes and ultimately to Maine, and I was hoping to catch a ride part of the way. I was writing a book and thought a schooner might offer an interesting view of the Great Lakes. With his permission I would like to go as far as the St. Lawrence River, then jump ship and catch a plane back to Michigan.
“You willing to work?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Stand night watch?”
“Yes.”
“Because this isn’t a pleasure cruise. There’s a lot of work to be done, and everyone has to do his share.”
“I understand.”
“Come aboard, then.”
He led the way down a ladder into a large and cluttered cabin paneled all around with knotty pine. “Sit down, sit down,” he said, pointing to a bench at a table. A doorway led to a darkened room, where I could see a bunk heaped with clothing—the captain’s cabin. Another doorway opened into a galley dominated by a stainless-steel stove. Woodwork everywhere was varnished to a gleam. One wall was covered with dials and gauges. Another was pinned with a large road map of the eastern United States, the Great Lakes prominent. All around the cabin were recessed berths, enough to sleep a dozen or more, each stuffed with tools, boxes of groceries, stacks of orange life jackets. A pair of tables filled most of the floor space. They were covered with books, charts, manuals, wrenches, screwdrivers.
“You’re writing a book? About what?”
The Great Lakes, I said, a sort of biography. It was hard to explain. He asked me to try, so I told him a little about my research so far.
He admitted that all he’d seen of the lakes was a bit of Erie from the window of his jet as he flew to Detroit, and a glimpse of Lake Michigan as he drove into Traverse City. Most of the view was obscured by a snowstorm.
“They said it was something called lake-effect snow. What’s that?”
I explained it as best I could. For it to occur, a rare set of circumstances must be met. A body of water has to be located at a latitude cold enough to produce snow—but not so cold that the water freezes over—and must be large enough to warm the air that passes over it—but not warm it much above freezing. Also required is a mass of land that supplies cold air upwind of the water. Such conditions are met only in the Great Lakes and along a few ocean coasts—the east shore of Hudson Bay, for instance, and the west coast of the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. Generally, the greater the temperature difference between the water and the air, the greater the snowfall. It also varies with fetch, or the distance the wind travels over open water. Places downwind of the longest fetches—the south shore of Lake Superior and the east and south shores of the other lakes—receive legendary snows. Buffalo gets buried. So does Rochester. The most snow on record is on the Keweenaw Peninsula, at the Superior shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where more than thirty-two feet fell in the winter of 1978–79.
Hajo considered this information. He was a careful listener. In the month and a half that he had been living aboard the Malabar he’d become deeply interested in his surroundings. He was intrigued, for example, by the clarity of the water in the harbor. He could look over the side of the boat and watch trout and pike swim past on the bottom. It surprised him. He’d heard the Great Lakes were polluted.
The lakes were clearer now than at any time in our lives, I said, partly as a result of more stringent pollution controls, but also because of the zebra mussel, an invader from Eastern Europe that had spread throughout the lakes and was filtering organisms from the water. This too interested Hajo. It turned out that he had a bachelor’s degree in marine biology, read widely on the subject, and could rattle off both the common and Latin names of many plants, fishes, birds, and microorganisms of the sea. But freshwater organisms were less familiar to him. He seemed ready to roll up his sleeves and begin learning.
Suddenly Hajo lunged into the captain’s cabin. He returned with a book in his hand. “Have you read this?” he asked, and thrust it at me. Before I could answer, he dove into the cabin again and returned with two other books. He pressed them upon me, extolling enthusiastically. “You have to understand,” he said. “I would die without books.” I glanced at them: Villiers, Forrester, and Ting. All three were maritime classics.
Pacing back and forth in the cabin, he told me that he’d been sailing tall ships for years, earning his living as a captain for hire when work was available, doing deliveries and charter trips. Between jobs he was a lobster fisherman in Connecticut coastal waters near his home. He explained that there had been worldwide interest in tall ships in recent years, but America was lagging behind other countries and needed to get more committed if it wanted international respect. He talked about the magnificent “tea clippers” like Cutty Sark, that even after the demise of most other commercial sailing vessels in the late nineteenth century continued to race across the oceans to get the best prices on their cargoes of tea. He told me amazing stories of his childhood on the island of Sumatra, where his best friend was an orangutan, and of the many trips his family took by ocean liner to visit relatives in Holland. He had passed through the Suez Canal two dozen times before he was eight years old, twice a year across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea and North Atlantic, and in all the years since had felt the open sea pulling with an insistence he was powerless to resist. At eighteen he let himself be pulled for good, and would never feel at home on land again. The ocean had magic in it. He described dolphins leaping ahead of the bow wave one moonless night on the Atlantic.
“In the darkness the dolphins appeared black,” he said. “But as they swam they were surrounded by phosphorescence that made them shimmer in outline. They looked like leaping constellations. Have you spent much time on the ocean?”
“Very little.”
“You can smell land,” he said. “You don’t realize it while you’re living ashore, but after you spend even a few days on the open sea where there’s nothing to smell but salt water and the stink of your own body, when you get near land again you can smell the dirt and the trees.”
(And that June, after an open-sea crossing of the Gulf of Maine, Hajo and I would stand together on deck as we approached land at midnight, with the full moon straight overhead and the muscular coast of Maine silhouetted against the sky, and catch a sudden warm shore breeze laden with the odors of woodsmoke and balsam—not dirt, because dirt lies thin along that coast, but the products of it—and Hajo, standing alert at the helm, would turn to me and say, “There! Smell it?” as if our conversation had taken place minutes ago, not eight weeks earlier and seventeen hundred miles away.)
Hajo took the job on the Malabar because he was curious to see the Great Lakes and eager to know how this boat performed. But before she could be sailed, she needed repairs. The work so far had been grueling. At first he labored alone, but for the past several weeks he had been assisted by a first mate, Matt Otto, who had flown to Traverse City from Baltimore to help with the repairs and delivery. The weather that March and April had been typically cold, and the only heat on the boat came from the diesel cooking stove in the galley. Working twelve-hour days, Hajo and Matt had refitted the rigging, reconditioned the engine, and reconstructed the cabins. But by far the most difficult job was repairing the ferro-cement hull, which had decayed so badly that an inspector hired by the previous owners had condemned the boat and recommended she be scuttled. Hajo and Matt had already patched and rebuilt large sections of hull.
“Where’s Matt now?” I asked.
“In the bow. Come and meet him.”
I followed Hajo up the ladder, forward across the deck, and down another companionway ladder. Matt was crammed inside a tiny collision bulkhead in the bow of the boat. He extended his arm with difficulty through the access hole and I shook his hand. Later, when I met him again, I would see that he was tanned and fit, a thirty-year-old with a young man’s aggressive restlessness. Now I saw only that his hand was callused and covered with cement dust.
Near the bulkhead, wooden berths had been removed from the walls and the hull was demolished. It looked like a bear had gone at it searching for hidden groceries. The cement was ripped away, revealing steel reinforcing rods and a meshwork of chicken wire. Some large sections had already been repaired and were patched with freshly applied mortar.
Though I knew the boat was damaged, I was surprised at its extent. For a dozen years the Malabar had offered evening cocktail-and-dinner cruises on Grand Traverse Bay, often with live traditional music performed by a popular local band called Song of the Lakes. Afternoons during the school year, volunteer instructors used the boat as a floating classroom, taking groups of schoolchildren out on the bay to introduce them to basic limnology and aquatic biology. An entire generation of kids in the Grand Traverse region learned on the Malabar to use Secchi disks to measure water clarity and microscopes to identify rotifers and copepods and other tiny aquatic animals. Thousands of adults had relaxed aboard her while watching the sun set over the hills of Leelanau County.
But in the last couple years the Malabar had been neglected. Water had seeped beneath the teak deck and entered fissures in the hull. That winter I had noticed her resting at anchor in the harbor, her cabin tops piled with snow, her hull listing alarmingly. The local newspaper reported that the owners of the boat had decided the decay in the hull was too extensive to fix and they planned to tow her into the bay and sink her to the bottom, where she would become a divers’ attraction. That would have seemed an ignominious end to a boat that had served the community with dignity, so I was pleased when I read a few months later that a businessman from Maine named Steve Pagels had purchased the boat and planned to put her back in service.
Pagels, who already owned several tall ships on the East Coast, had heard about the plight of the Malabar and flown to Traverse City to look her over. On the recommendation of an acquaintance he contacted Hajo, who had a good reputation as a surveyor and captain and was experienced in building ferro-cement boats. Hajo flew to Traverse City, inspected the boat, and agreed with Pagels that most of the damage to the hull was superficial, though Hajo was concerned that the steel framework—the ferro in ferro-cement—might be weakened by corrosion. Nonetheless, Pagels made an offer to purchase the boat. The deal went through, and he hired Hajo to oversee repairs and sail her to Maine.
It would complete a circle for the Malabar. She was built in 1975 at the Long Beach Shipyard in Bath, Maine, as a replica of the coasting schooners once common along the East Coast. Initially christened Rachel Ebenezer, she was put to work doing day charters, first along the East Coast, then in Key West and the Virgin Islands. She was later renamed Malabar, and in 1987 the Traverse Tall Ship Company purchased her, sailed her to Lake Michigan, and put her to work in Grand Traverse Bay.
Schooners very much like the Malabar had once worked the lakes by the thousands. They and the “packet” steamers of the nineteenth century carried cargo and passengers and were the tractor trailers and Greyhound buses of the inland seas. Larger vessels, like the 350-foot, 288-passenger SS Keewatin, which is now moored as a floating museum in Kingston, Ontario, were more luxuriously outfitted, with ballrooms, lounges, and elegant cabins that rivaled the cruise ships of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Around the turn of the twentieth century, at the peak of the excursion boom, thousands of passengers a year embarked from major ports for such destinations as Mackinac Island and the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River, as well as to dozens of lesser known lakeside resorts and amusement parks around all five lakes. In 1987, the Malabar had been at the forefront of a resurgence in passenger cruise vessels in the Great Lakes. In the 1980s and ’90s, several cruise lines would launch luxury excursion tours on the lakes. Only one or two were still in operation by the end of 2001.
In an odd coincidence, Hajo lived in Bath, Maine, in 1975 and often visited the boatyard to watch construction of the Malabar, née Rachel Ebenezer. He would stop by and observe the workers, picking up construction tips, now and then volunteering to help. What he learned he would put to use building his own first boat, his dream since childhood. After reading every book on boatbuilding he could find, he concluded that ferro-cement was the only hull material he could afford. In those days of hippie community spirit, boatbuilders up and down the East Coast converged for “plasterings,” the community barn raisings of the coast, where everyone pitched in to slap cement over steel framework, which is the critical stage of ferro-cement construction. With the experience he gained from several plasterings, including the Malabar’s, Hajo built his own ferro-cement boat, a 37-foot sloop he named Swallowtail. During the year he spent sailing her up and down the coast of Maine, he got married, and he and his wife, Lee, lived aboard during their first winter together. A coal stove in the galley provided the only buffer against the damp Downeast cold.
So Hajo was experienced with ferro-cement—had experience building this very boat. He showed me what he and Matt had accomplished so far. “We’ve figured out how to patch her, but it’s been very laborious. Most of it’s been a bloody lark. Nobody knows much about repairing ferro-cement, and I don’t know if what we’ve done is right. Ask me in ten or fifteen years. My philosophy is to put cement on cement, not epoxy on cement, and it seems to be working.”
I said cement seemed a bizarre choice for hull material. It sounded like a stunt, like the cement canoe races staged by engineering students every spring at Michigan State University. Hajo grew adamant.
“Ferro-cement has a bad rap,” he said. “People call cement boats ugly boats, but they’re being ignorant. If the boats are ugly, it’s because the people who built them didn’t have the money to finish them properly. But damn it, the hulls are still here. They last. They’re durable. Say what you want about steel and wood, but ultimately ferro-cement might prove to be the most redeemable material out there. It’s inexpensive. It doesn’t rust or rot. It’s easy to repair.”
Most of the damage to the Malabar’s hull was spalling—pieces of the original cement flaking and falling away where water had infiltrated. Hajo and Matt tapped every square inch of cement above the waterline with ballpeen hammers, listening for sounds of decay, then tore out paneling, bunks, and cabinets, and tapped every inch of the interior hull. “Good cement has a lovely resonance,” Hajo said. “Bad cement thuds. We sounded the whole boat and marked the thuds with chalk. The worst damage was on the bow. There were places where we could have kicked through it. My first reaction was horror. It was all spalled. It was scary.”
Luckily, most of the spalling proved to be in the quarter-inch skim coat. They re-skimmed with high-adhesive cement and experimented with acrylic fortifiers to increase adhesive properties and make the cement more flexible. The macro-epoxy fortifier they finally settled on worked also as a penetrator to help seal the hull.
The work required analytical problem-solving of a kind Hajo enjoys. He kept a file of the spec sheets for every product they tested during the trial and error process. He and Matt bent reinforcing rod to match the shape of the hull, attaching mesh wire to it with hog-ring staples and adhesive caulk, then applied bag after bag of their cement/epoxy mix, several tons of it. They rebuilt the hull to be “seriously sturdy,” in Matt’s words, “like a rock, for our own peace of mind.” The consequences of failure were too serious to allow carelessness. “My ass is on the line,” Hajo said. “Do you think I want to die on Lake Erie?”
The repairs did not always go smoothly. Once Hajo spent an afternoon standing in the yawlboat, spreading cement above his head onto an overhanging expanse of the bow. Several onlookers watched from the dock. When he had finished he stepped back, pleased with the job, and the entire structure collapsed, hundreds of pounds of cement slumping and falling into the yawlboat and exploding in the water around it. To make matters worse, he and Matt began to annoy each other. They were living in too close proximity, working too many hours together on a difficult project. Some days the threat of murder filled the air.
But they persisted, learned how to get along, and in time learned how to fix the boat. They discovered that cement when mixed to the consistency of Silly Putty would adhere even to the overhanging bow. They repaired all the decay above the waterline. Below the waterline was another matter. Nobody knew how bad the damage was there, and Steve Pagels was not willing to pay to have the boat hauled out and inspected unless he absolutely had to (it would be necessary in Maine before the U.S. Coast Guard would grant approval for chartering). Below the waterline was the unknown factor. Everything else they put in order. They painted the exterior hull and reassembled most of the walls and berths in the interior. They cleaned and lubricated the diesel engine, a 136-horsepower Ford Lehman. They restored the galley and one of the heads to working order, and were ready to start on the rigging.
Hajo and I climbed the ladder to the deck and looked up at the masts. They stood as bare as telephone poles, and shared their approximate dimensions. All the spars and booms lay piled on the deck. Hajo explained that the boat was 105 feet long (including her bowsprit and the main boom that hung over her stern), displaced 74 gross tons, was gaff-rigged, with topmasts and topsails, could carry 3,000 square feet of canvas, and could sleep twenty-one people. He said he planned to have her ready to sail by the middle of May. I was welcome to join the crew.
* * *
Two days before departure, I returned to the Malabar and threw myself into preparations. Already aboard was Harold Kransi, a recently retired placement counselor for a technical school in Kalamazoo. Even-tempered, heavyset, always ready to laugh, he described himself as a “gentleman adventurer” and said he was determined to make excellent use of his retirement. Like me, he had volunteered to be a deckhand. He too first heard about the trip from a newspaper article and had called Steve Pagels to offer his services.
Harold and I worked together most of the day rebuilding the forecastle bunks (Hajo and Matt had torn them out of the way to get at the hull) and replacing cabinets and countertops in the forward head. Harold is a former U.S. Navy man and knowledgeable about the lore of the sea. Toilets are called heads, he said, because in the old days sailors relieved themselves from the bowsprit shroud, near the figurehead. We reassembled the cabinets and bunks, then cleaned the forecastle and the small cabin aft of it. They would serve as our primary storage areas during the voyage.
The second day, Harold joined Hajo and Matt on deck putting up the rigging, and I worked alone trying to install the toilet in the forward head. It had been dismantled and stored in the forecastle after Hajo determined that the plumbing didn’t work. It didn’t work, I discovered, only because it had been winterized with packing grease. I inserted a length of wire with a rag tied to the end and plunged the copper intake pipe. A black wad the size of a cigar shot out the end, followed by a jet of clear water.
Hajo, Matt, Harold, and I spent the night on board, Thursday, May 18, planning an early start Friday morning. Hajo’s quarters were in the captain’s cabin, attached to the main, aft cabin. The rest of us selected cabins from the six below deck in the midships compartment. One had already been claimed by the fifth and final member of the crew, Tim Smith, who would arrive tomorrow. He had come the day before and decorated his cabin with pictures on the wall, a vase of flowers on a shelf, and heaps of down comforters and pillows on his bunk.
I chose a middle cabin and moved my gear in, tossing my sleeping bag on the bunk and hanging my foul-weather gear on hooks on the walls. I lashed a milk crate to another hook and stacked it with books and personal items. The cabin was small, with a tiny nonfunctional sink on one wall and barely enough floor space to stand in. A small hinged window above the bunk provided a view of the feet of anyone walking past on the deck. My cabin and Hajo’s would prove to be the ones that leaked the least in storms.
As night fell, we sat on deck and talked. The evening was clear and turning cold. A few stars showed in the sky, and the moon rose early. Tomorrow night the moon would be full. Everyone was tired and we went to bed before ten o’clock.
At dawn, I woke to the sound of Hajo walking overhead. The morning was bright and cool, the wind light. We did last-minute chores—pumping the bilges, sponging the yawlboat clean and hoisting it to hang securely from the stern of the schooner, lashing to the deck five 55-gallon drums filled with diesel fuel. We stowed loose gear below deck and installed a new Garmin GPS unit in the main cabin and screwed its antenna to the deck railing up top. We chatted with well-wishers who came for a final look at the Malabar. Tim arrived about nine, grinning under boxes of groceries. He was tall and lean, a happy Ichabod Crane, fifty-five years old, accustomed to being listened to, bubbling with talk and good cheer. Already he had stocked every storage space in the galley and main cabin with food. He announced we would be eating like kings.
With departure approaching, we faced a problem. For weeks the harbormaster, Gary Hill, had expressed concern about the depth of the water. The Great Lakes were at near-record low levels, a consequence of irregular long-term cycles that might or might not have something to do with global warming, and the harbor was shallower than it had been in decades. The Malabar draws eight and a half feet of water, and no matter where Gary sounded bottom, he could find it no deeper than seven feet.
Hajo refused to take the problem seriously. It was characteristic of him. He was a 1960s flower child and has kept some of the philosophical remnants. Be cool, trust the universe, don’t worry about what you can’t control. He was confident that everything would work out for the best. His relaxed attitude extended to plans both short and long term. He remained undecided, for example, whether we would ultimately leave the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic, or take the Erie Canal to the Hudson River. The St. Lawrence was the longer route and more scenic, but it led north to a latitude where in this season we were likely to encounter icebergs. The Erie Canal is a shortcut, but it would require stepping the masts, not an easy job on a boat the size of the Malabar. Hajo’s tendency when faced with this sort of dilemma was to postpone it. “Not a big deal,” he said. “We can decide when the time comes. In the meantime, the important thing is to get under way.” But first we had to get more water under the hull.
A breeze came up from the east, an unusual direction on this coast, where the predominate winds are from westerly quarters. If wind blows from the east it’s often the leading edge of a cyclonic storm front, with severe weather to come. But this easterly came fresh on a clear day, with a forecast of more clear days ahead. It blew a two-foot chop across the bay and pushed a surge of water into the harbor.
Such surges are common in the Great Lakes, and are either a “wind setup,” caused when a large volume of water is blown to the windward shore, or a seiche (pronounced “saysh”), a word coined in the early nineteenth century to describe the oscillating waves that periodically cross Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Seiches are caused by sudden changes in wind and barometric pressure that displace water from one shore to the other, an effect similar to that achieved when you blow across the top of a glass of water, then stop. The water piles up on the far side, but when the wind (or barometric imbalance) ceases, the water is released, bounding back in its quest for equilibrium. The Great Lakes don’t contain enough mass to generate measurable tides, but setups and seiches can raise and lower water levels by several feet from day to day or even hour to hour. Seiches in Lake Geneva are often about three feet high. The largest in the Great Lakes usually occur on Lake Erie, where they’ve been recorded as high as thirteen feet. Usually they’re harmless, though sometimes they force ships to wait a few hours before entering or leaving a harbor. But on rare occasions they can be dangerous. When a storm is severe enough, it can create an “edge wave” at the front of the seiche that rushes without warning across the lake. Such a wave killed ten beachgoers in Lake Michigan on the Fourth of July, 1929. A similar incident occurred along the lake’s eastern shore on an otherwise calm day in July 1938, when sudden ten-foot waves appeared, washed over the beach, and drowned five swimmers. After a severe thunderstorm in June 1954, a ten-foot seiche struck southern Lake Michigan, washing dozens of people from piers along the Chicago waterfront, killing eight of them.
We stood on the deck of the Malabar and watched the water rise on the pilings across the channel. It climbed a foot, a foot and a half. We could have been watching a reservoir fill. Suddenly, just in time for our noon departure, the harbor was deep enough to allow us to leave.
Hajo seemed unsurprised by this good fortune. He started the engine, ran down the companionway ladder to check the gauges, and ran back up to the helm and adjusted the throttle. Someone handed us the dock lines, and Harold, Tim, and I tossed them on the deck. “No, no, like this,” Matt said, and made us coil them properly.
Gary, the harbormaster, zipped around the schooner in his Zodiac raft. He nudged the bow at the waterline, bounced off, nudged again, and accelerated his outboard to a whine. It churned the water, and slowly the bow of the Malabar swung away from the dock. When the bowsprit pointed into the channel, Hajo shifted the engine into gear and the boat crept forward. We eased over the shallow bottom without touching and entered the channel leading to the outer harbor. Other boats in the marina blasted their air horns in farewell. People on the docks waved and applauded and took photographs. Two television crews recorded the event for that evening’s twenty-second nod to posterity. A woman cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted: “Thank you for saving the Malabar.”
Chapter 3LAKE MICHIGAN
Ancient Oceans ♦ How the Lakes Were Formed ♦ First People ♦ Hemingway Country ♦ The King of Beaver Island ♦ We Reach the Top of the Horseshoe
As we headed up Grand Traverse Bay, with a world of freshwater opening before us, it was easy to forget that this was ocean once. Six hundred million years ago a shallow warm saltwater sea covered much of Laurentia, the ancient continent that would become North America and Greenland. The sea advanced and withdrew at least ten times during the Paleozoic Era, the age of ancient life, which began with an explosion of marine organisms and ended three hundred million years later with our planet’s greatest extinction event. The continent that was to become North America straddled the equator then, and the sea that inundated it was warm and fertile, rich with corals, mollusks, brachiopods, trilobites—a variety and abundance of life forms so profuse that when they died, they settled to the bottom and were compressed by their own weight into beds of limestone hundreds of feet thick.
Fossil remnants of that Paleozoic sea can be found everywhere along the coast of Lake Michigan. The most sought after is the so-called Petoskey stone, a fragment of fossilized coral that when polished by waves or hand reveals a pattern like honeycomb. The deposits of salt left behind by the ancient seas are now mined from beds deep underground. Sand that accumulated on Paleozoic beaches is excavated and sold to industries that prize its cleanliness and uniformity of size.
Before the sea, there was only rock. Three billion years ago, during the Precambrian Era, volcanoes erupted and released magma to the surface. As the magma cooled and hardened, tectonic stresses folded it beneath other rock or lifted it into mountains. In time the mountains eroded and became the Canadian Shield—that broad, low, relatively flat region of exposed bedrock stretching from Canada to Greenland and bordering much of the northern and northwestern shores of Lake Superior. South of there, around the rest of the lakes, the bedrock lies buried beneath sedimentary remnants of the ancient ocean and beneath the glacial debris that came later.
Long after the lava stopped flowing and the saltwater seas receded, a broad circular belt of shale was left at the center of what would become the Great Lakes region. Because shale is soft, it eroded, forming river valleys surrounded by escarpments of hard limestone formed from the skeletons of the creatures that had died in the old ocean. The winters grew colder. Snow fell where once the weather had been tropical. The snow fell faster than it could melt and accumulated, the weight of it compressing the old snow into ice. It accumulated most heavily near Hudson Bay, where the ice grew to be two miles thick and was so heavy that it could not support its own weight and began to flow a few inches a day southward. Eventually the ice moved in sheets hundreds of miles across and a mile or more high.
As the ice advanced, it pulverized slate and other soft rocks and fractured and bulldozed bedrock and pushed it away or carried it along. The ice was diverted from highlands of resistent bedrock and limestone, separating it into lobes that plowed through the river valleys, scouring them deeper. It dredged thirteen hundred feet deep into what is now Lake Superior; nine hundred feet into Lake Michigan. Debris was carried to the edges of the lobes and deposited as the ice melted, forming hills of undifferentiated till—a mix of gravel, clay, sand, and boulders of all sizes.
The first glacier probably came about 1.8 million years ago and lasted a few thousand years before the climate warmed again, the ice retreated, and plants and animals returned. Other glaciers advanced and retreated many times during the Pleistocene Epoch. Geologists for decades counted four major advances: the Nebraskan as the oldest, followed by the Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsin, named for the states where they made their last stands. Now they think that ten or more advances reached the Great Lakes region, each obliterating most of the evidence of the previous ones. At their peaks, the ice ages had enormous impact on the planet. So much of the earth’s water was locked up in ice that the oceans shrank three hundred feet below their current level. The weight of the ice compressed the land two thousand feet lower than it had been. With each retreat of the glaciers, the land would spring back at the rate of a foot or so every century. Some of it continues to rebound to this day.
Scoured deep by the glaciers and sinking beneath the weight of the ice, the old river valleys became reservoirs that filled as the glaciers melted. Those reservoirs became the early Great Lakes. Countless other lakes were formed this way, from the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota and Ontario, to the Finger Lakes of New York, to Lake Champlain and Walden Pond, to Lake Geneva and the fifteen lakes of the English Lake District. When ice blocked the northern portions of the Great Lakes, water sought to escape south. Lake Superior poured through a valley across the central Upper Peninsula of Michigan and emptied into Lake Michigan; today only the little Whitefish River flows there. With what would become the St. Lawrence River blocked by ice, Lake Ontario escaped south through the Hudson River valley. Lake Michigan flowed southward through what is now the Chicago River and joined the Mississippi. Finally, seven to ten thousand years ago, when the last glacier retreated north, the river we now call the St. Mary’s opened, connecting Superior to Lake Huron, and all the lakes found an outlet through the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Like glacial lakes everywhere, the Great Lakes are geological adolescents, especially when compared to the earth’s other great freshwater sea, Russia’s Baikal, which formed in a rift in the earth’s crust twenty-five million years ago. In the grand scheme, the Great Lakes are barely out of diapers.
And they look young. Limnologists classify them as oligotrophic, meaning they are clear, cold, and relatively barren of life. Organisms don’t thrive in oligotrophic lakes because their bottoms are composed mostly of sand and rock too clean of sediments to allow plants to take root, and because their waters, though rich in dissolved oxygen, don’t contain enough nutrients to be highly productive of algae and other organisms. There are exceptions to this rule in the Great Lakes, most notably in bays like shallow and naturally fertile Green Bay, which was named early in the nineteenth century in reference to the algae that periodically tint its waters. A larger exception is Lake Erie. The ecological devastation that struck Erie in the 1960s was caused by an influx of nutrients from fertilizers, detergents, and municipal and industrial waste that essentially made the lake old before its time. Erie’s recovery in the last thirty years has been dramatic, though the lake still has serious problems. All five of the Great Lakes have suffered much environmental damage, but their waters remain mostly clear. Portions are as clear today as they were hundreds and perhaps thousands of years ago.
The earliest people to see the Great Lakes probably arrived near the end of the last Ice Age and migrated north as the glaciers receded. Like today’s northern tundra of Canada, the land around the lakes was exposed to wind and was grown over with Arctic grasses and thickets of dwarf willow and birch. At about the same time that the first small cities were appearing along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the people of the Great Lakes were trailing herds of woolly mammoths, musk oxen, bison, and caribou, which themselves were following the grasses that had begun colonizing the newly open land. As forests succeeded the tundra, wildlife patterns changed and the people changed with them. The Plano culture of the Paleo-Indian period was replaced by the Shield culture of the Archaic period and finally by the Algonquian culture of the Woodland period. By the time European explorers arrived in the early 1600s, native traditions went back five hundred generations.
The explorers who came first were searching for a shortcut to Asia. Later, when it was apparent that no shortcut existed, they came for the wealth that could be extracted from the enormous new continent. The waterway leading to its heart made a convenient highway.
* * *
The Malabar motored into a moderate northeast breeze. The wind was colder than it had been on land; we went below and put on jackets and hats. Hajo decided not to raise the sails until we became more comfortable with the boat and with one another. The engine throbbed effortlessly and a small wake veed away from our stern.
Matt had announced that one of us must always stand bow watch to keep an eye out for debris in the water and oncoming boat traffic. I stood beside the bowsprit scanning the lake. In the water ahead I saw a small weathered board and watched it slide past the bow and travel slowly the length of the hull and disappear gradually behind us. I wondered how I would find the patience to cross four Great Lakes at this pace.
Grand Traverse Bay is the most prominent bay on the mostly uninterrupted Michigan side of Lake Michigan. It’s a deep cleft in the shore, about thirty-five miles from head to foot and fifteen miles wide where it opens into the lake. Early travelers in birchbark canoes avoided the detour around the bay by making an open-water crossing at its mouth. The French fur traders called it la grande traverse. A shorter crossing to the north, at the bay in Petoskey, was la petite traverse. The voyageurs, like Native American paddlers before them, often camped at the headlands on one side of the bay or the other so they could make the crossing early in the morning, when the wind was likely to be down.
Most of its length the bay is divided into two nearly equal halves by Old Mission Peninsula, a twenty-mile-long and two-mile-wide finger of rolling hills covered with cherry orchards, vineyards, woodlots, and houses. The tip of the peninsula touches the 45th parallel, the halfway mark between the equator and the North Pole. At the foot of the peninsula is Traverse City, established about 1840 as a lumber town, but long since grown up into a resort metropolis of twenty thousand or so, with another forty thousand living in the surrounding county. The economics of the region are complicated. Tourism is the main industry, which means that seasonal jobs abound, but not many pay well. People who abandon careers in Detroit or Grand Rapids to move to northern Michigan must often make significant financial sacrifices. We have an expression: “A view of the bay is worth half the pay.”
Until recently, our local economy depended upon agriculture as much as it did tourism. The bays are near the northern limit of Michigan’s fruit belt, which extends for a couple hundred miles along the shore. The wind off the lake moderates the climate, making summers cooler and winters milder than they are even a few miles inland. South of the Grand Traverse region, apples, peaches, and grapes predominate. Around the bays, especially on the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas, cherries are the most common crop. Traverse City bills itself as the “Cherry Capital of the World,” though more of the fruit is now grown elsewhere and a fickle market increasingly prompts area orchardists to uproot their trees and replace them with grapevines.
The lake here, as along much of the Great Lakes, is bordered by rolling hills that were pushed up long ago by the glaciers. Even now, ten thousand years later, you can see where meltwater once surged between the hills, carving valleys, and where debris was dumped from the ice to form the low hills called moraines. Look at the land long enough and you begin to realize that it was devastated by glaciers. They ripped it apart and left it a wasteland. Bulldozing forward a few inches or a few feet a day, they eventually departed and left heaps of rock, gravel, sand, and clay behind. Over the centuries, water and wind smoothed the edges, and vegetation covered most of the land with raiment. But you can still see the bones and sinews beneath.
You can also see the terraced levels of former beaches, where the water stood fifteen or thirty or fifty feet higher during various times in the past few thousand years. The terraces are easiest to see from the lake, especially when leaves are down in November and a dusting of snow highlights the ground’s contours. For the last four thousand years most of the region has been covered with forests of pine, spruce, hemlock, oak, maple, aspen—at least until loggers arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and decimated them. Now the shore is cloaked with second- and third-growth woods.
From below deck, Tim shouted that lunch was ready. We would eat in shifts. Matt, Tim, and I went first; then Hajo and Harold. Tim, grinning, met us at the bottom of the stairs. He wore an apron and had draped a towel over his arm—the chef of Chez Malabar. On the table sat plates of Greek-style egg salad, loaves of French bread, slices of tomato seasoned with basil leaves and feta, and asparagus spears. On every plate was a sprig of rosemary, and in the middle of the table sat a vase of flowers. We took our seats and dug in. The meal generated a higher level of optimism.
Tim lives in Traverse City, where he once owned a successful interior furnishings business. A few years ago he wrote a children’s book entitled Buck Wilder’s Small Fry Fishing Guide. It proved wildly popular, and he now works full time writing and marketing a series of Buck Wilder books. Like Buck himself, Tim is irrepressibly cheerful and energetic. As we ate, he told me that he learned about the Malabar’s upcoming journey to Maine while getting his hair cut at Robertson’s Barbershop in Traverse City. A scruffy guy sitting in the chair next to his had a wild tale to tell about a pirate ship he was sailing to the ocean. The scruffy guy was Hajo. By the end of the haircut Tim had signed on as cook.
After lunch, we gathered on deck. Matt took bow watch; Harold and Tim and I sat on the deck rails near Hajo at the helm. The Malabar rode easily over a two-foot chop. The wind remained light and chilly from the northeast, under a bluebird sky that promised days of good weather ahead. May is a fine month to be on the Great Lakes. Nights are cold, but the days are mild and storms are less common than in the summer and autumn. We looked out across the lake, talked, looked some more.
Hajo said quietly that perhaps it was a good time to discuss a few rules of the boat. First and foremost, the captain’s word is law. No arguments, no appeals. Second, if you don’t know how to do something, ask. There’s no shame in not knowing, but harm can be done if you try to bluff your way through. Third, no consumption of alcohol while under way. Save it for the dock. Fourth, no pissing from the boat. Most male drowning victims are found with their zippers open; use the head. Fifth. Well, maybe there wasn’t a fifth. The fifth rule was to remember the first four.
At the mouth of Grand Traverse Bay the horizon spread out before us and we entered Lake Michigan. The name of the lake is derived from the Algonquian word michigami or misschiganin, meaning “big lake.” Europeans knew it first as the Lake of the Illinois, named for the people who lived along its southern shores and who were eventually overrun and nearly annihilated by the Iroquois. It’s the only Great Lake that does not share a border with Canada.
We followed the coast north, past the resort town of Charlevoix, named for the French Jesuit who coasted these shores in a canoe in the 1720s. Even staying close to shore and with the wind light, it was obvious that we were on a sizable body of water. With a length of 307 miles, a maximum width of 118 miles, and a surface area of 22,300 square miles, it is the third largest of the Great Lakes, and the sixth largest freshwater lake in the world. And it’s deep: the average depth is 279 feet, and the deepest spot is 923 feet.
We passed Little Traverse Bay. Tucked away at the head of it are the small cities of Harbor Springs and Petoskey, at this distance appearing as not much more than a bit of glitter and some geometry on the hills. With binoculars we saw rows of tiny condominiums at Bay Harbor, said to be the largest resort complex in the Midwest.
Students of twentieth-century literature know this shore as Hemingway Country. Though he was born (in 1899) in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and went to school there, the young Ernest Hemingway spent his summers at the family cottage on Walloon Lake, a few miles from Petoskey. Those summers on the lake provided much of the raw material he would shape into his early stories. In Paris in the 1920s, he pinned a map of northern Michigan on the wall above his writing table and set to work with the intention, as he later described it, of making every word count, making every detail add to the overall structure of a story. He wrote about the places he remembered: Walloon Lake, Lake Charlevoix, Horton Creek, and the rivers—the Sturgeon, Pigeon, Black, and, especially, the Fox, which would be transformed into the Big Two-Hearted. The words he laid down on the page brought to life the waves running up the beach, the burned-over hills, the stands of pine with the wind high in their branches, capturing northern Michigan more truly than anyone has. In a fragment unpublished until it appeared in a 1972 collection, The Nick Adams Stories, Hemingway wrote: “He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it. It was deadly serious. You could do it if you would fight it out. If you’d lived right with your eyes.”
Years ago I knew an old man named Bud Schulz who had lived in Petoskey all his life and was a child when Hemingway was there. He remembered the talk around town after the young author began making a name for himself. A few of the stories in the first collection, In Our Time, were scandalously suggestive of sexual matters, inciting some locals to refer to Hemingway as “Dirty Ernie,” though as time passed and his fame grew they became more tolerant. Bud was friends with Hemingway’s younger sister, Sunny, who continued to live in Windemere, the old Hemingway cottage on Walloon Lake, until her death in 1995. Bud, who at age eighty thought nothing of throwing an aluminum canoe on his shoulders and humping it down the bank to the Bear River, urged Sunny to invite me to the lake to go canoeing with her. She cordially declined. It was well known by then that she had been harassed so often by Hemingway worshipers that she refused to talk about her brother at all, and she probably assumed I was mining for family secrets. It was a bad idea, anyway. She was in her eighties by then, and Walloon can get choppy.
After Sunny’s death, her son Ernie Mainland inherited Windemere, where he lives today with his wife, Judy. Not long ago Ernie invited several authors for a private tour of the cottage. He’s a stout, red-faced, robust man in late middle age who bears a striking resemblance to his uncle. He met us on the dock—we arrived on a pontoon boat from across the lake—and shouted, “This is not the Hemingway cottage! The Hemingway cottage is down the lake!” He laughed at our perplexity and bellowed, “This is the right place! Get your asses ashore!”
He served us wine and hors d’oeuvres and showed us around his home, pointing out his uncle’s ancient baitcasting rod and reel hanging on a wall and the hundred-year-old landscapes painted by Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, who signed them “Hall Hemingway.” We examined a doorframe where incremental pencil lines and dates recorded the growth of young Ernie and his siblings, and studied a map of Walloon for landmarks mentioned in the Nick Adams stories. Ernie Mainland explained that he had not been aware of his uncle Ernie’s celebrity or his impact on American letters until he was in college and learned he could trade on it to his advantage. “It got me a few Bs when I deserved Cs,” he said. He admitted without apology that he had read only one book of Hemingway’s short stories (and couldn’t remember which one) and had never cracked the covers of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or any of the other novels. Ernie invited us to take turns sitting for photos in the old two-seater outhouse, where ERNEST HEMINGWAY SAT HERE had been painted on the door.
* * *
To the northwest, land emerged on the horizon, low and darkly wooded, growing larger as we approached. This was Beaver Island, Lake Michigan’s largest island at fourteen miles long and seven wide, home to about 450 year-round residents and four times that many in the summer. Long before the island was a summer getaway, it was the scene of a bizarre episode that culminated in its being declared the only independent kingdom in U.S. history. The ruler of the kingdom was a renegade Mormon named James Jesse Strang, who’d been born in 1813 in the northern New York village of Scipio. Strang became a lawyer and a teacher and migrated to Wisconsin in 1843, where he converted to Mormonism. A year later he visited church founder Joseph Smith at the Mormon capital of Nauvoo in western Illinois, and was named a Saint of the church. When a mob of Gentiles murdered Smith later that year, Strang stepped forward and claimed that God had spoken to him in a vision and declared him the new ruler of the Mormons. Church elders disputed his claim and excommunicated him, and the church became factionalized. Most members joined Brigham Young and followed him to Utah to found Salt Lake City, while others took the side of Joseph Smith, Jr., and broke away to form the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a denomination still active today. A few hundred others were convinced that James Jesse Strang had experienced an authentic vision and in 1847 followed him to remote and sparsely populated Beaver Island. They drove off a handful of previous settlers, mostly Irish immigrants who supported themselves by fishing and selling firewood to passing steamships, and began construction of a utopian community.
For a few years the colony thrived. By 1849, fifty families had settled around the harbor at the island’s north end, forming a town they named St. James. Strang ruled absolutely, forbidding polygamy among his followers but taking five wives for himself, and handpicking a cabinet of trusted elders. He traveled to Washington, D.C., and lobbied successfully to have ownership of Beaver Island granted to him and his followers. Along the way he gathered converts. During his travels he was accompanied by a prospective wife, eighteen-year-old Elvira Field, who to avoid scandal dressed as a boy, posed as his nephew and secretary, and went by the name of Charles.
Back on the island, Strang claimed to have another vision. This time God disclosed the whereabouts of an ancient holy text, The Book of the Law of the Land, which named Strang “King of all the Earth” and awarded all the islands of the Great Lakes to his church. His coronation took place on the shore of Beaver Island in July 1850, with four hundred followers as witnesses. The new king quickly established settlements on nearby islands and the mainland, diversifying his influence. He established northern Michigan’s first newspaper, The Northern Islander, and put it to use promoting his mission. In spite of federal charges that he had overstepped his authority, he campaigned successfully in his legislative district, which included the mainland town of Charlevoix, and was elected to the Michigan house of representatives. He maneuvered to get St. James named the seat of government in Emmet County, giving him power over the hostile Gentiles eighteen miles away on the mainland. He was fearless and tireless, but everywhere he went and with every accomplishment, he made enemies.
They caught up to him in 1856. Two of his own flock ambushed him on the dock in St. James and shot him in the back of the head. Mainlanders immediately sailed to the island and drove the Mormons away, stealing their possessions and claiming their property. The Irish settlers returned, and for the next hundred years the island was inhabited mostly by commercial fishermen.
* * *
Beaver Island slipped away to the stern, and the sun dropped below the horizon. The evening quickly turned cold. I had volunteered to take the midnight to 4:00 A.M. watch, so I went to bed at eight o’clock and read for a while in my sleeping bag. The boat rocked gently and the engine made rhythmic sounds through the hull.
I woke in darkness and turned on a flashlight to check my watch. Twelve-thirty. Late by half an hour. Nobody had come to wake me, and I was afraid that Matt’s thoughtfully planned watch system was already falling apart. The plan was for Matt and Hajo to operate on six-hour shifts, one of them always at the helm. Tim was exempt from night watches because he stayed busy all day cooking and cleaning in the galley, so Harold and I would alternate four-hour shifts through the night. But those first few nights, whoever was fresh took over the watch while the other slept.
I climbed to the deck, into cold night air, and everywhere I looked was water flowing silver with moonlight. The moon was full. It hung high between the masts, throwing crisp shadows across the deck. Shore showed as a low black band to the east.
Harold, grateful for relief, was ready to go below and sleep, but first he walked me through the duties of night watch. He and Hajo had worked out a routine that we would follow for the remainder of the trip. Once each hour whoever was not at the helm went forward with a flashlight. He climbed down the steep narrow ladder to the forecastle, raised the hatch at the bottom of the ladder, and shone his light inside to see if the level of filthy water in the bilge was higher than it had been an hour ago. He repeated the procedure at midships and again in the main cabin at the stern of the boat. The gauges on the wall beside the galley must then be checked, and the data entered into the logbook: the exact time of inspection, the location (longitude and latitude in minutes and seconds from the readout on the Garmin), the speed in knots, and our heading. The voltmeter was crucial. If it indicated weak batteries—and it often did, since the running lights drained them every couple hours—the gasoline generator on the forward deck had to be started and run until the batteries were charged.
I finished my first entry in the log, and Harold wished me goodnight and stumbled away to his berth. I returned to the deck. Hajo held the helm while sitting on the small wheelhouse. He was bundled in clothing, the hood of his jacket cinched tight around his face. “There’s coffee below,” he said.
“Want a cup?”
“Sure.”
I climbed down to the galley and filled two cups from a pot Tim had left simmering on the stove. I discovered I could carry just one at a time up the ladder.
“Nice night.”
“Glorious.”
Glorious but cold. Winter still lingered in these waters, two months after the ice left. Most of the lakes stay open all year, but this northern portion of Lake Michigan usually freezes over in January and February. I wore several layers of capilene and fleece, a sweater and an overcoat, a stocking hat and gloves, and still wished I had dressed more warmly. I whistled a one-note, “boy, it’s cold” whistle. A mistake.
“Never whistle on a boat!” Hajo snapped.
I had already learned that he was superstitious. It worried him that we began our trip on a Friday, on a boat whose name was once changed. Both are considered unlucky in seaman’s lore. While we were still in Traverse City a friend had given him a Sacagawea dollar for luck; this morning, as we were about to leave the harbor, Hajo slapped his pocket, said, “Where’s my coin?” and bounded down the ladder to his cabin. When he returned, he said, “I go nowhere without Sacagawea,” a promise he would honor the entire journey. On deck he always wore his Annie hat, a souvenir from a New Haven oyster boat that he admired and considered lucky. Above the door of his cabin he had nailed three wishbones from chickens. There too was a needlepointed representation of a gnomelike creature, the Dutch equivalent of a leprechaun that according to legend came to the New World with the first Dutch explorers. When I asked Hajo about it, he said, “They bring good luck if you see them. I’m positive I think I almost saw one when I was a kid, and I know for a scientific fact that they’re in Michigan.” His eyes twinkled. He asked if I’d noticed the horseshoe nailed to the samson post in the bow of the boat.
“I noticed it back in the harbor.”
“It’ll help us make the trip safely,” he said with certainty.
He was less certain about another horseshoe, one with a reputation for bad luck. For two centuries Great Lakes mariners have feared the “horseshoe” of the lakes—the route around Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, from the bottom of Lake Michigan to the bottom of Lake Huron. It is considered bad luck because the horseshoe shape is inverted, allowing the luck to pour out. Nobody has compiled a complete list of all the shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, but hundreds, certainly, and probably thousands have gone down along that upside-down horseshoe.
Ahead of us waited one of the most treacherous places in the lakes: Gray’s Reef, a channel through a complex of submerged shallow reefs composed of the mineral dolomite, which was formed from precipitates of marine animals that lived in the ancient seas. The reef is an extension of the Niagara Escarpment, a geological anomaly extending from Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, around the top of Michigan, across to Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron. From Lake Huron, it cuts east across the arrowhead of Ontario to the land bridge that separates Lake Erie from Lake Ontario, where the Niagara River falls off its edge.
Hajo had mentioned several times already that he was worried about Gray’s Reef. On the charts it’s a cluster of buoys and lighthouses, with safe passage only through a narrow channel. Hajo knew we would be passing through at night and that we might confront a bottleneck of lake traffic there.
We noticed lights blinking on the water to the north.
“Is that Gray’s Reef?” Hajo asked.
“I think so.”
“Have you ever been through here?” he asked.
I admitted that I had passed through one night the previous summer during a sailboat race. I tried to add a caveat: “But it was a dark night and I’d hardly slept for three days and I’m not sure I remember…”
“But you were here.”
“Yes.”
“Good. You navigate.”
I knew nothing about nautical navigation, but Hajo was so in need of assistance that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him. I went below to the main cabin and with a flashlight examined the charts spread on the table. This end of the lake is spotted with islands and reefs and the long arm of Waugoshance Point. I’ve walked on the Point; it’s a low, rocky nesting ground for gulls, lined with reeds that sway with the waves, and is uninhabited by humans. Gray’s Reef is an extension of the Point—a string of small, rocky islands with shallows between. The channel is twenty-five feet deep at low-water datum, and marked at its south and north ends by automated lighthouses perched on carapaces of rock. Between them are double strings of buoys and bell buoys leading the way through the safe water.
Much of that I remembered from last summer’s Chicago-to-Mackinac Race, when the sailboat I was on entered the channel with a pack of others. I remembered also that as we approached the reef from the south, we were confronted with a confusion of flashing red, green, and white lights, and no obvious way through them. There was not much else to see. The reef was submerged; the little islands and Waugoshance Point were out of sight in the darkness.
I studied the chart until I could decipher the abbreviations beside each buoy and lighthouse. The first to watch for was the white beacon on the lighthouse at Ile Aux Galets, better known as “Skillagalee,” which flashes every six seconds. We had to keep it on the starboard side, maintain a northeast heading, and aim for the first pair of buoys in the series, a red one on the port side, flashing at ten-second intervals, and a green one on the starboard, flashing every four seconds. Once we identified those lights, we could continue our northeast course until we lined up with the second set of red and green buoys. At that point, we would adjust our course to due north. Then the channel should open before us, lined with reds on the left and greens on the right.
Hajo called down for me. “I need to know what to do,” he said.
I returned to the deck. With the moon so bright, the entire lake seemed visible—immensities of silver water in every direction—with nothing else to see but blinking clusters of navigation lights ahead. I told Hajo what to look for. We passed the first lighthouse and identified the buoys ahead. Hajo’s eyes jumped from the buoys to the compass to the buoys. The compass was housed in a domed binnacle mounted on the top of the cabin forward of the helm. Its internal light was broken, so Matt had earlier clipped a penlight to the brass housing. It gave off a red light bright enough to illuminate the marks on the compass but did not affect our night vision.
We approached the first buoy and Hajo steered the boat north. To my relief, the channel opened before us. On the chart the passage is marked as three thousand feet wide, a little over a half mile, but in the darkness it seemed narrower. If we had been sharing it with a barge or freighter, it would have seemed much narrower yet.
We passed through, counting buoys as we went, a foghorn bleating somewhere ahead, though there was no fog that night. The beacon of White Shoal Lighthouse flashed high on our port side, and we knew we were finally at the top of Lake Michigan. We steered hard to starboard until our bowsprit swung straight east, toward the Mackinac Bridge. The bridge sat low and bright in the distance, a graceful spray of lights across the Straits of Mackinac.
It was exhilarating. I felt like a useful member of the crew.
A year earlier, during the race from Chicago, I came around this same corner on a sailboat and saw the bridge for the first time and felt similar exhilaration. That night had been very dark, no moon or stars, and the wind was strong—much different from tonight. The two boats differed also. The Malabar was a large, heavy schooner that plowed through the lake, its diesel engine chugging resolutely. Gauntlet was a sleek 44-foot racing yacht, efficient and fast. In the strong wind she had hurtled across the tops of waves, almost silent beneath her load of sails.
Hajo wanted to talk about how the Malabar was performing so far. He liked the way she responded to his wishes. He thought she seemed dependable and strong and equal to the challenge of the trip. Again he wondered why the previous owners had sold her. But he was being a romantic, not a businessman. “This boat has a beautiful soul,” he said emphatically, daring me to contradict him. When I said nothing, he said, “I think she’s grateful to be alive.”
Chapter 4LAKE MICHIGAN
The Chicago Lakefront ♦ Racing to Mackinac ♦ Dunes and Sand Mining ♦ Across the Finish Line
One Friday in July, the summer before I joined the crew of the Malabar, I drove to Chicago to meet a guy named Bob on his sailboat. I’d never met Bob, but he had invited me through a mutual acquaintance to ride along with him in the Chicago-to-Mackinac Sailboat Race, which at 333 miles, the full length of Lake Michigan, is the longest (and longest held) freshwater regatta in the world. Bob promised that if I showed up in Chicago the evening before the race, he’d buy dinner and book an extra hotel room for me, and in the morning we’d go out on the lake and crush the competition. It was a good plan, I thought. But it didn’t work out the way I expected.
From where I live, Chicago is a six-hour drive down the Michigan coast of Lake Michigan. Most of the way the road is two lanes, through woodlands and orchards, past lakeside towns that started as lumber camps and fishing villages and evolved into weekend getaways with time-share condominiums on the beach and motels named “Beachcombers” and “The Breakers” and restaurants designed around maritime themes. As the road approaches Chicago it becomes a highway, of course, and then a superhighway. It’s six or eight lanes wide by the time it passes through the city’s borderland of suburbs, malls, and franchise businesses; through the warehouse districts and train yards and smoking industrial complexes; past the housing projects, gated communities, and brownstone town houses. At the core of the city rise the skyscrapers of the Loop. But Chicago’s heart is in its waterfront.
The Windy City’s love for Lake Michigan is nearly as old as the city itself. What began before 1700 as a fur-trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River was by 1830 platted as a townsite of forty-eight blocks. Soon settlers began pouring into the Great Lakes and to the plains beyond, making Chicago a hub of transportation, radiating waterways, roads, and railroads. As the town grew into a city, demand for its water frontage increased.
By then, the shore at virtually every Great Lakes city was cluttered with factories, mills, refineries, warehouses, railroads, and docks—the water’s edge fouled with ash, slag, garbage, and human waste. Most cities would rise facing inland, their backs huddled against the lakes. But Chicago was different. It would face the lake proudly and maintain a long crescent of beach at its center free of the usual industrial scourges. The credit for that must go to three farsighted men, William Thornton, William Archer, and Gordon Hubbard, who in 1836 had been authorized by the state of Illinois to supervise the sale of canal lands in Chicago. This was an important job and a powerful one, with enormous opportunities for personal profit. But these men were apparently not profiteers. They recognized the economic importance of linking Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River through the Illinois and Michigan Canal (which would be completed in 1848, and replaced half a century later by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal), but they foresaw also the necessity of managing the city’s land for the future. They decided among themselves that the Chicago lakefront should be preserved for public use, not parceled off and sold, as speculators were demanding. In case anyone doubted their intentions, they oversaw the printing of a real estate map of the city upon which the lakefront was labeled: “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear, and Free of Any Buildings, or Other Obstructions Whatever.” A good deal of the shore has remained open and clear to this day.
After Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871, city planners began rebuilding with stone and steel instead of lumber, and though they honored the charter to keep the lakefront open, they weren’t quite sure what to do with it. It was left, two decades later, for the architect and builder Daniel H. Burnham to make the waterfront the focus of a revolutionary city plan. Burnham soon gained national prominence as the builder of the magnificent “White City”—an idealized, neoclassical model of urban design constructed in Jackson Park for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. He went on to put many of his ideals to practice as one of the lead architects in Chicago’s civic renewal. At the time of the city’s most rapid growth in the early 1890s, Burnham led the effort “to bring order out of the chaos incident to rapid growth,” as he explained it. In the process Chicago’s waterfront was transformed into one of the finest in any city in the world.
Today along Lake Shore Drive, from Jackson Park north to Lincoln Park, are fifteen miles of nearly continuous parks and public beaches, ball fields, tennis courts, golf courses, and marinas, all linked by jogging and biking trails. Some of Chicago’s finest attractions—Adler Planetarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium, Navy Pier—are more interesting for being at the edge of the lake.
* * *
That Friday I walked the shore of Grant Park, watching the waves break against docks and jetties. The wind off Lake Michigan smelled fresh and complex, like springtime. Around Chicago the water is more turbid than up north, and you’ll often see beards of bright green algae clinging to stones along the shore—evidence of excessive nutrients—but as city water goes, it’s quite clean. It wasn’t always that way. Until 1900, when the flow of the Chicago River was reversed, raw sewage and industrial contaminants were dumped into the lake not far from the intake pipes through which drinking water was drawn. The river was the city’s sewer, and when it contaminated the drinking water, it spread disease. One nineteenth-century cholera epidemic reportedly killed one in every twenty Chicagoans. Reversing the flow solved that problem, but of course created others. The Chicago River and its sewage now flowed south to the Illinois River and on to the Mississippi. It would be decades before sewage treatment would clean the river, though today’s downstream residents are justified in arguing that it is not yet clean enough.
The Monroe Street headquarters of the Chicago Yacht Club sits at the approximate center of the Chicago waterfront. Some people claim it’s at the center of the freshwater sailing universe as well. The clubhouse is a low, unassuming building, practically in the shadow of downtown skyscrapers, bounded by Grant Park on one side and Monroe Harbor on the other. The day I visited, it was a busy place. White-coated restaurant staff whisked past in golf carts, delivery trucks backed up beeping to the service entrance, luxury cars and limousines pulled to the curb at the main entrance and dropped off casually dressed frolickers. Around the front of the building, docks branched away into the harbor, each crowded with sailboats of every size and style, many of them rafted three and four deep. Their masts formed an aluminum forest covering many acres.
I searched the docks until I found Bob’s boat, a fine-looking 33-foot sloop tucked between larger boats. A few men in their thirties and forties sat on deck drinking cocktails and laughing. I introduced myself and asked for Bob. One of the men said, “That’s me.” He was fit, tanned, about my age. I started to ask permission to come aboard and stow my bag, but he held his hand up to stop me.
“There’s been a change of plans,” he said. “An old buddy of mine showed up this morning. I gave him your spot.”
I reminded him that I’d driven to Chicago at his invitation.
He shrugged. “Ain’t that a bitch,” he said.
Bob was that kind of guy.
But hell, I thought, so what? This was his world, not mine. He owned the boat, he could decide who sailed with him. I’d be just as happy to spend a couple days in Chicago, then head home and go fishing.
But our mutual acquaintance, Dave Gerber, felt responsible for what happened and made it his mission to get me on another boat. Dave is a thirty-year-old sailor and professional sailmaker who lives not far from my home in northern Michigan and has sailed many times in the Chicago race and others around the world. He spent all Friday evening looking up people he knew at the docks and asking them if they had room for one more on board. Nobody did.
He continued the search Saturday morning, but by then I had little hope he would be successful. Friday night I’d noticed a fit-looking young man in cargo shorts, T-shirt, Teva sandals, and Oakley wrap-around sunglasses—the virtual uniform of sailors young and old—walking from boat to boat and inquiring in a low chant, “Need crew? Need crew?” This morning I watched the same ritual performed by a woman perhaps twenty years old. She was bouncy, blond, athletic, bursting with assurance, and flat-out beautiful. At every boat she received a long head-to-toe appraisal followed by a firm “Sorry.” I knew I didn’t stand a chance.
So I walked the docks, admiring the boats. They were splendid. Some were wooden, but most were combinations of wood, steel, fiberglass, aluminum, and carbon fiber. There were racing boats and cruisers; sloops, cutters, yawls, and ketches; monohulls, catamarans, and trimarans. The larger vessels, sixty- and seventy-footers, were impressive and sometimes breathtaking, but often in a store-bought way. I was more taken by the smaller boats, the thirty- and forty-footers. To my eye they possessed more individuality than the large boats and had been cared for more lovingly. Many had acquired a well-buffed ambience of the sort you sometimes see in classic cars and motorcycles. On their sterns were painted their names and calling ports. They were from Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto—and from Annapolis, Montauk, Norfolk, Pensacola.
Docked front and center before the clubhouse was Steve Fossett’s sixty-foot America’s Cup contender, Stars & Stripes, a high-tech, cutting-edge catamaran that might have been designed by NASA for skimming across the nitrogen seas of Ganymede. Fossett, who lives in Chicago, was fresh off his most recent attempt to circle the earth in a balloon, and was the heavy favorite to reach Mackinac first. In 1998 he set the Open Division overall record with an elapsed time of just under nineteen hours, which was seven hours quicker than the previous record and twice as fast as most of the better finishes in years when the wind is good. Poor wind can result in excruciatingly slow times. The fastest boat in 1905, for example, took ninety-four hours to reach the finish line.
I stepped onto the clubhouse porch. People sat around tables there, wearing jackets against the cold, drinking coffee and talking about the wind. It was blowing at twenty to twenty-five knots. I looked beyond the harbor and saw waves detonating against the breakwall. “Bumpy out there,” someone said.
Now I couldn’t remember my seasickness lore. Was it better to have a full stomach or an empty one? But I was hungry, and a sign on the door of the clubhouse dining room offered a buffet breakfast for a good price. I walked in, collected a plate, and went at it. Scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes, fruit, coffee. A second helping of eggs and some hash browns couldn’t hurt. I needed more coffee because I had hardly slept the night before. The caffeine made me jumpy, so I ate a few muffins to settle my nerves.
Dave poked his head in the door.
“No luck yet,” he said. “But don’t give up.”
“You’ve been searching all this time?”
“Yes.”
“Have you had breakfast?”
“No. It’s better to have an empty stomach.”
* * *
The Chicago Yacht Club’s first race to Mackinac Island was held in 1898, and, with the exception of a few years during the two world wars, it has been repeated every summer since. It remains the premier race in the Great Lakes, although many sailors will remind you that there are two “Macs.” The other is the Port Huron-to-Mackinac, which runs the length of Lake Huron, about 250 miles, and is nearly as venerable as its sister regatta on Lake Michigan. Each event draws 250 to 300 boats and about 3,000 sailors, and usually requires two or three days to complete. They’re staged on consecutive weekends in July, Chicago taking precedence one year, Port Huron the next.
I entered the bar, looking for Dave. Though it was not yet noon, the place was packed, with men mostly, though a few stunningly dressed women seemed to be trolling. People of color were conspicuously absent. Deeply tanned men stood six deep at the bar and gathered in clots of bonhomie around the room. Most wore khakis or the standard shorts, tees, and Tevas, and spoke in bold variants of Urban Midwestern, though a few wore blue blazers and talked like Thurston Howell the Third. One guy trumpeting his business triumphs wore a T-shirt that read: OUR DRINKING TEAM HAS A SAILING PROBLEM. Everyone spoke at once and loudly, as if they owned the place. Rarely have I seen so many alpha males under one roof.
Yacht racing is an expensive sport—perhaps the most expensive. It requires big money to purchase the boats, and almost as much to outfit and maintain them. Owners can spend tens of thousands of dollars in preparation for the Mackinac races. The entry fee is insignificant—up to a few hundred dollars, depending on length of boat. A great deal more is spent on each of the twelve or fifteen new sails needed for the race, a different one for every wind condition, plus spares. Lines are replaced, winches overhauled, electronic navigation systems checked by technicians. The morning of the race, divers are hired at the dock to inspect hulls and rudders for damage (or sabotage: pranksters have sometimes cemented toilet plungers to rivals’ hulls, causing drag that slows them a knot or two). Crews must be transported to the race and fed and housed, galleys must be stocked, safety equipment must be inspected and upgraded. It’s no wonder the sport attracts aggressive, financially successful people.
The clock was against us now. Dave was bowman on one of the elite contenders, Flash Gordon IV, a Farr 40 owned by the Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, and needed to be on board by twelve-thirty sharp. Jahn is very serious about racing and does not tolerate tardiness. I began thinking about going home.
Then Dave was running toward me down the dock. It was twelve-twenty-five. “Let’s go, let’s go. I found one.”
I grabbed my bag and ran after him. “One of their guys just canceled,” he said over his shoulder. “His wife broke her leg or something. The boat’s a beauty, you’ll love it. But hurry, hurry.”
He stopped behind a sleek racing sloop with several people on deck. Inscribed on the transom was the name Gauntlet.
“One thing,” Dave said. “I sort of told them you were experienced. I mean, I embellished a little. You can tell them the truth if you want to. But you don’t have to tell them all the truth. And you don’t have to tell them until you’re on the water.”
Three or four times in my life I had set foot in sailboats. As a child, growing up on an inland lake, I spent my days canoeing, fishing, waterskiing. Sailing was boring, I thought. It was a diversion for the bored rich kids at the other end of the lake.
We went aboard. “This is the writer I told you about,” Dave said, to no one in particular. He turned to me and said, “The owner’s name is Guy. Introduce yourself when he shows up.”
And he was gone. The people turned away and went back to handing bags of gear below deck. A middle-aged man I would later learn was nicknamed “B.B.” stepped up to me, got in my face, and said, “Are you good? We don’t need any deadweight on this boat.”
“I need to find Guy,” I said.
“He took the truck to get gasoline.”
“Where can I wait for him?”
“Parking lot. Look for a white van.”
I sat at a picnic table. A van pulled in and the driver got out, walked to the back, and lifted out a five-gallon fuel can. Guy Hiestand was about fifty years old, sun-browned, dressed in shorts and a sloppy T-shirt. I introduced myself.
“Yeah, Dave told me about you.”
“What’d he tell you?”
“Said you were a writer looking for a boat. Experienced sailor. Capable guy.”
“Some of that’s true.”
“Which parts?”
“Writer, fairly capable.”
“But you’re a sailor, right?”
“No.”
“You’re not a sailor.”
“No.”
Silence.
I gave him my best pitch. Been around water all my life. Hard worker. Fast learner. Tell me something once and I won’t forget it. If I screw up, yell at me, I don’t care, I want to learn.
“Okay, okay, you’re in. Stow your bag below and give B.B. a hand hauling groceries.”
Ten minutes later we threw off the dock lines and motored slowly out of the marina. Even inside the breakwall the water was choppy. Outside its protection the waves came steep and quick, four- to six-footers topped with whitecaps. And building. Within a few hours they would be sixes to eights.
Guy ordered the mainsail and jib raised. Our crew was nine experienced sailors—and me. Most of the others had sailed together many times and all of them knew what they were doing. I knew just enough to stay out of the way.
We began circling near the big Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw, which was anchored to serve as an orientation point. Around us were hundreds of boats—273 of them registered for the race, plus many powerboats and motor yachts filled with spectators. The city rose in tiers to the sky, skewing perspective. Was it a mile away or ten?
We were in open water now, exposed to the biggest waves. They were typical of the Great Lakes—not rollers, but steep, short-period wind waves. Freshwater is less dense than salt water, so lake waves rise quicker and run faster and can be harder for a boat to negotiate than the long rollers of saltwater seas. Now they rushed headlong down the length of Lake Michigan and slammed into the wakes of the powerboats around us, making a confused chop. At forty-four feet long, Gauntlet handled the turbulence better than the smaller boats could, but we were thrown around enough to be uncomfortable.
Everywhere we looked, sailboats heeled in the wind or veered suddenly away from one another. “Starboard! Starboard!” crewmen yelled if they had the right of way and others were slow to yield. According to the Rules of the Road, a boat that is tacking or jibbing must give way to one that is not, and a boat on a port tack must give way to one on a starboard tack. If they’re on the same tack, the boat to windward must give way to the one at leeward. But not everyone seemed familiar with the Rules of the Road.
Sailboat races are organized within two broad categories. One-design races are for boats of the same size and type and thus with the same potential speed. Handicap races—the Macs fit this category—allow boats of many kinds to compete equally, using formulas that factor length, weight, hull style, and sail dimensions. Entries are grouped within several divisions and sections. We were in Section 2 of the Performance Handicap Racing Federation Division, placing us in a category perhaps best described as “Serious Amateurs,” although by definition everyone in the race was an amateur. As in most sailboat regattas, we competed not for cash but bragging rights. Each divisional winner gets his name engraved on a trophy displayed in the clubhouse, and winners can fly a champion’s pennant for a year. If a boat is extraordinarily successful—if it sets a course record or wins repeatedly—its photo is hung in the clubhouse.
The slowest boats began the race at noon. Other sections were staggered at fifteen-minute intervals. Ours, with twenty-three boats measuring from thirty-five to sixty-four feet in length, would leave at two-fifteen. Last to start, at three o’clock, were a baker’s dozen of “big 70s,” the largest and fastest in the fleet.
Guy asked me to sit near him by the helm and take charge of trimming the mainsail. It was a matter of cranking a winch to sheet in the main sheet or release it to ease the sheet out. After a few tries, I felt I had it mastered.
At our appointed time all the boats in our division got a running start and sprinted together across the starting line at the committee boat. With her sails close-hauled into the wind, Gauntlet climbed each wave and crashed into each trough. Right out of the gate we were passing other boats. I trimmed the mainsail at Guy’s command. Sheet in, ease out. Piece of cake.
Or maybe not. Even in the harbor, the pitching of the boat and the smell of diesel exhaust wafting over the water had bothered me. Lack of sleep didn’t help. Neither did my performance anxiety. Nor the lumberjack breakfast I’d packed in. I had been seasick a few times in my life, and was determined not to let it happen now. Willpower would carry me through. Besides, I had taken the recommended dosage of Dramamine. And I was wearing wristbands—those pressure-point elastics that seem more cabala than science, except that thousands of people swear they’re effective. I would not get sick. I refused to get sick. It was important that I—who had bragged about being around water all his life, about not being deadweight, about being a fast learner and a hard worker and an all-around great guy—not get sick.
I got sick.
Bill Craig and Scott Jacobson timed me. They were busy, but not too busy to make a note for reference: One hour and three minutes from the start of the race. I think a betting pool was involved.
The boat rose on every wave and crashed into every trough, and I vomited every thirty minutes for the rest of the day. In some of the intervals I felt better, even well enough at times to return to my post at the mainsail winch, though it was obvious that I wasn’t needed. Guy said I should keep my eyes on the horizon, so I stared astern and watched Chicago, a cluster of hazy skyscrapers rising beside the lake like the Emerald City of Oz. Each time I looked, the skyscrapers were a bit lower in the water. Then I would lie on the deck and die a little. The pattern kept repeating: cold sweats, roiling stomach, a flood of saliva—then retching, expulsion, humiliation.
The waves topped out at sixes and eights, so big that Guy had to steer at an angle down the larger crests because if he took them straight on, the boat slammed into the troughs with such force that the aluminum deck flexed a few inches. I knew the others were concerned about this, but it was of no importance to me.
Somebody asked if I felt like I was going to die.
I managed to raise my head. “Yes,” I said.
“Good. That’s the next-to-last stage.”
“What’s the last stage?”
“You wish you would die.”
An old joke. Perhaps it was funny once.
Hanging with my face inches from the hissing lake, having just expelled a meal I remembered eating in my brother’s apartment in New York in 1985, I looked up to see one of the big 70s passing close on our starboard, bound for glory. A dozen guys in red foul-weather gear sat along the rail watching me. Most of them were grinning.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James classified mal de mer as a mild state of depression he called “anhedonia,” the symptoms of which are “passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring.”
The esteemed professor was never seasick. He couldn’t have been. The condition he describes would be remedied by a hot bath and a nap. Nothing about my joylessness was passive. My joylessness was extremely active.
Late in the day, as the sun went low, the waves diminished to fours and sixes. Slowly, incrementally, I began feeling better. I tried a sip of water. Then I tried half a stick of ginger-flavored chewing gum. Then more water and a single saltine cracker.
I noticed the lake again, blue and oceanlike. The Michigan shore showed low at the limits of sight, with a line of cumulus clouds bunched above it. Around us whitecaps rode the waves—whiter whitecaps than I had ever seen—and on every side and at every distance were sails, colored mostly white but also pink, orange, yellow, and red. Everywhere was a great deal of blue water, topped with a half-dozen shades of sky fading to the horizon. It was glorious. Who had time to be sick?
I climbed to my feet.
“Okay. Put me to work. I want to learn the ropes.”
“Look who’s back from the dead.”
* * *
Guy sat relaxed at the helm. This was his twentieth Mac. He’s a CPA by profession, owner of a firm in Grand Rapids employing a dozen accountants and with a client list that includes a number of NFL players.
I apologized for getting sick.
“Hey, don’t feel bad,” he said. “I’ve seen three-hundred-pound line-backers turn to jelly as soon as they hit rough water. There’s no shame in being a pussy.”
For the first time I participated as we tacked. With the mainsail and jib close-hauled, Guy called: “Ready about!” and everyone cleared the sheets and got ready to move. “Hard alee!” Guy said, steering the boat straight into the wind, and we slid inboard and let the jib and main sheets fly. The mainsail went slack in great billowing luffs, and we ducked beneath the boom as the bow of the boat passed through the wind. We jumped to the winches and began grinding as rapidly as possible to sheet in the main and jib sheets. The boom swung and the mainsail filled with a snap so powerful I could feel it from my feet to my scalp. The boat surged into the wind.
I asked Guy about Gauntlet. She was a Kaufman 44-footer, built in Italy in 1975, aluminum hull and deck, Marconi rig. In 1979, manned by an Italian team, she survived an infamous Force 10 gale that struck the Fastnet Race in the Irish Sea, capsizing seventy-seven boats, knocking down a hundred others, and drowning fifteen sailors. She was a barebones racer. No frills, no extra weight. Below deck was naked superstructure, with a few plywood berths barely big enough to lie on. No cabins, no galley, no privacy. Her chemical toilet sat isolated in the open below deck, a humble throne surrounded by stacks of sails.
Bill Craig joined us in the stern. Like most of the others, he was from the Grand Rapids area. He was a forty-seven-year-old banker who had sailed in a dozen Port Huron-to-Mackinac races but only a few Chi-Macs. He preferred the Port Huron Race, he said, because he had grown up sailing it with his late father, Rocky.
Now, for my benefit, Bill discussed general principles. “Sailing sucks,” he said. “The same aerodynamic law that causes lift beneath an airplane’s wing creates pull on a sail. The wind doesn’t push, it sucks the boat forward.”
“What amazes me,” Guy added, “is that a sailboat uses one fluid substance—wind—to overcome the resistance of another fluid substance—water. To me, it seems miraculous. Water clings. It’s displaced for a few moments as the boat cuts through, but then returns to its former place. It’s a wonder we can move at all.”
Water swept past the hull. It gave the illusion of speed, though I knew we were making less than ten miles an hour. Still, the boat rose eagerly on every wave and seemed to leap from its crest.
“She’s a dog with a bone in her teeth now,” Jeff Burt said. Jeff was thirty-six, a mortgage loan officer, and had sailed since he was six years old. He had been in two previous Macs, but this was his first aboard Gauntlet. As a boat owner himself, he was accustomed to running things and would distinguish himself as an excellent sailor and probably the most reckless member of the crew. He said his nickname as a kid should have been “Runs with Scissors.”
Chuck Kmiec came up from below and sat in the cockpit. He was navigator, cook, and resident Mensa genius, fifty years old, an old friend of Guy’s, and the big man on board—not three hundred pounds, maybe, but crowding it. Though he’d been racing for two dozen years and in seventeen Macs, he grew up a troubled kid in inner-city Chicago, far from the sailing world. When he was twelve, his mother dragged him to a Boy Scouts meeting. He liked it. He excelled at scouting and liked the feeling so much that he went on to excel in academics as well. Now he had a string of university degrees and worked as a computer consultant and ran a scout troop of his own near his old neighborhood. “Sailing is the only sport that uses all my scout skills,” Chuck said. “I like the resourcefulness it demands, and how tough it can be. All other sports are wimpy.”
The rest of the crew sat at the rails looking over the water. They ranged in age from sixteen-year-old Zach Schramm, a scouting protégé of Chuck’s, to fifty-eight-year-old John “B.B.” Whitton, a veteran of dozens of races who though bitter to discover that I was deadweight after all was getting over it. Occupations varied widely. Doug Van Der Aa was a lawyer and CPA. Todd Suess worked as a boiler operator at a factory in Grand Rapids. The single constant the crew had in common was a passion for sailing. Together, they had tallied more than a hundred Mac races.
Gradually the wind swung from north to west and finally to southwest. By nightfall we had made two headsail changes and tried three or four spinnakers, none of which was quite ideal. The crew tinkered constantly with the sails, trying to milk any advantage from the wind. A slight correction will sometimes mean an extra knot or two. At an average speed of seven knots (about eight miles per hour) a boat can complete the race to Mackinac in forty-two hours. Add a knot and you finish in thirty-seven hours. It can be the difference between first and last in your division.
With night approaching, the wind fell and our progress slowed. Stars showed first in the eastern sky, then in the west. Mastlights twinkled in every direction around us—but more of them astern than ahead.
By then we were in the middle of the lake, no land visible in any direction. Chicago lay far behind, but the sky over it glowed as if a fire burned beyond the horizon. To the west the sky was lit in a dome above Milwaukee; to the east it glowed above Grand Haven and Muskegon. Most of the way up the lake we would see the residual lights of cities, each a radiant stain on the horizon, growing smaller as the cities grew smaller to the north.
Bill and I sat at the rail with our legs swinging free over the water. He told me that after his father’s death in 1997, he wrapped his ashes in small bundles of paper towel and took them along on the Port Huron Race, which his father had enjoyed more than anything else he did, and dropped them overboard at key places along the route. The last bundle he saved for the drive home and threw over the side of the Mackinac Bridge.
Now he pointed out constellations. He knew them well, from lessons learned long ago from Rocky, who loved the night sky almost as much as he loved sailing. We looked up in silence at the stars—and at that moment a meteor flared across half the sky and left a fading trail.
Late in the night I went below and slept for a few hours.
* * *
Morning dawned bright and cool, with a fresh wind from the west and waves three to five feet. Sails dotted every horizon.
Guy gave me new assignments. He showed me how to tighten the boom vang to keep the boom horizontal. He instructed me to watch the luff of the mainsail, easing or trimming as required to keep it taut. Ease too much and the sail “bubbled” with slack. Trim too much and the boat heeled over.
I was starting to learn how much there was to learn. Sailing requires technical mastery of rigging and navigation, knowledge of water and weather, a feel for the boat. A team mentality is at work—as much, or more, as on any sports team—which explains why it is so difficult for a novice to enter a race. Nobody wants to introduce an unknown to the mix, let alone one without experience. A crew must blend together well and efficiently. The more quickly every sail is changed, the more smoothly every tack and jibe is performed, the faster the vessel goes. If one member screws up, the system collapses. When everyone does his job right, a change of sail or tack works with precision, like a well-executed football play.
I discovered the pleasure of “rolling” the competition. We would close on a boat and pass on the windward side, stealing the air, forcing the other crew to tack across our stern, where they rolled in our wake. If we were feeling cocky we crossed their bow, an act of high disdain certain to piss them off.
It was fun to pass boats larger than ours or those in faster divisions—smaller boats were “ratboats” unworthy of our attention—but we reserved our greatest zeal for the others in our division. We sparred frequently with Blind Hog, C. C. Rider, Dr. Detroit. Feelings ran strong against Vagary, which once set a divisional record but was disqualified for not having a spare tiller on board. One of our crew, twenty-six-year-old Scott Jacobson, had sailed for several years on Vagary, but only recreationally. “I wasn’t a rock star yet,” he said, “so they wouldn’t let me race.”
“What’s that ratboat?” Scott asked, glassing a boat ahead of us. It was Bob’s, the one I was originally supposed to be on. I had already told the story, and everyone was indignant on my behalf. Guy cut upwind and very close and we drew abreast of the other boat, robbing her air and making her sails go slack and her rigging clank against the mast. Bob and his crew looked none too frisky. Their boat was eleven feet smaller than ours, and the waves had been tough on them. We cut across their bow, a flagrant diss. I stood in the stern and waved, pretty sure that Bob recognized me. He raised his middle finger halfheartedly, but his eyes went down in submission.
* * *
Early the third morning I climbed to the deck and discovered a world obscured by whiteness. Jeff and Scott were on duty alone. They’d been up all night and were nearly comatose. The sails hung limp, and the boat sat motionless at the center of a thirty-foot circle of flat gray water. Lake Michigan was out there, but invisible. We could see nothing around us but fog.
“A CSS day,” Jeff said.
“What’s that?”
“Can’t see shit.”
On the navigation chart I saw that we were a few miles off Frankfort, approaching Point Betsie, with Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Manitou Passage ahead—my stomping grounds, and the most picturesque leg of the race. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft paddled along this shore in September 1820 during a five-month canoe expedition around the Great Lakes led by Michigan’s first governor, Lewis Cass. Schoolcraft was a geologist, an ethnologist, and an Indian agent who is best remembered for discovering the source of the Mississippi in 1832 and for his report on the legends of the native tribes of Superior, Algic Researches (1839), which inspired Longfellow’s epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Schoolcraft’s journals offer an interesting perspective on the lakes and the people who lived around them and are a reliable record of many details of physical geography. Observing the Lake Michigan shore from Point Betsie to the Manitou Passage, Schoolcraft wrote: “There is a great uniformity in the appearance of the coast, which is characterized by sand banks, and pines … the beech and maple are occasionally intermixed with the predominating pines of the forest.” He found greater variety at Sleeping Bear Dunes: “The shore of the lake here, consists of a bank of sand, probably two hundred feet high, and extending eight or nine miles, without any vegetation, except a small hillock, about the centre, which is covered with pines and poplars, and has served to give name to the place, from a rude resemblance it has, when viewed at a distance, to a couchant bear.”
A century earlier, in August 1721, the Jesuit missionary Pierre de Charlevoix came this way also, and commented in a similar vein: “I perceived on a sandy eminence a kind of grove or thicket, which when you are abreast of it, has the figure of an animal lying down: the French call this the Sleeping [Bear] and the Indians the Crouching Bear.”
In the Ojibwa legend of Sleeping Bear, the dunes were formed by a sow bear that collapsed exhausted on the beach after swimming across Lake Michigan to escape a Wisconsin forest fire. Behind her, unable to reach shore, her twin cubs faltered and sank beneath the waves, forming South and North Manitou islands.
Sleeping Bear Dunes haven’t changed much since the days of Charlevoix and Schoolcraft, though at 460 feet they’re twice as high as Schoolcraft thought. The “bear” is still visible at the top, but erosion has shrunk the hillock at the center and the grove has been reduced to a few gnarled trees.
Dunes are found in many places around the Great Lakes, but never in concentrations such as those along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Ranging from a dozen feet to several hundred feet high, extending from the edge of the lake to a mile or more inland, they form the most extensive network of freshwater dunes in the world. Carl Sandburg declared (with some exaggeration) that “they are to the Midwest what the Grand Canyon is to Arizona and the Yosemite to California. They constitute a signature of time and eternity.”
That signature has turned out to be indelible in only a few places. One is at Sleeping Bear, where the dunes are contained within a national lakeshore that has protected them from bulldozers and front-end loaders. Other dunes to the south are similiarly protected within Michigan state parks near Manistee, Ludington, Muskegon, Holland, South Haven, Benton Harbor, and elsewhere.
At the extreme southern end of the lake, portions of 14,000-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore were set aside starting in 1927, but not before most of that shoreline had been leveled and built over with houses, factories, and power plants. The remaining dunes are squeezed between the industrial metropolises of Michigan City and Gary, just down the shore from Chicago, and comprise the most fragmented national park in America. From the lake, looking shoreward, the dunes are overwhelmed by steel mills and other structures. But up close, and especially back from the shore, they form an ecosystem remarkable for its stark beauty and the amazing diversity of plants and animals it supports.
In the late nineteenth century, a young professor of biology named Henry Chandler Cowles approached the Indiana Dunes as if it were a living laboratory. While studying the pioneering of the land by plant communities, he observed that dunes evolved from barren sand near the shore to ridges of pioneer grasses to hills of shrubs and trees and finally to climax forests. The plants that lived on the sand, he discovered, grew in predictable patterns, with marram and sand reed grasses first, followed by red osier dogwood and sand cherry and cottonwood, then maple, oak, and pine.
Others before Henry Cowles had recognized that the Indiana Dunes were a dynamic ecosystem, with landforms and microclimates supporting more plant diversity per acre than in any other national park in the United States. But where others had seen only hills of sand and an interesting variety of plants, Cowles saw centuries of ecological progress compressed into distinct zones only a few hundred feet apart. In 1899, when he published his observations in a report, The Ecological Relationships of the Vegetations of the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan, it sent a shock wave through the scientific world. Cowles had demonstrated for the first time that plant communities succeed one another, each serving as the foundation for those to come, while simultaneously creating the conditions for its own collapse. This concept of the interrelationship of organisms was revolutionary, and it changed the way people looked at the natural world. Some historians now mark Cowles’s paper as the beginning of the science of ecology.
Though parks have thrown a protective barrier around many Lake Michigan dunes, hundreds of miles of others are privately owned and have succumbed to commercial and residential development. Homeowners can’t be blamed for wanting to live along the lakeshore, in spite of history’s lesson that it is unwise to build a house on sand. During the 1970s, when water levels were the highest in historical times, hundreds of lakeside houses and cottages washed into the lake. Undeterred, developers continued to bulldoze the tops from dunes to unblock the view of the water and have leveled countless others as building sites for houses, condominiums, and town houses. Even where development is restricted, dunes are easily damaged by the trampling feet of sunbathers and the wheels of all-terrain vehicles.
Dunes can form in many places. All that’s required are sand, wind, a few obstructions, and time. Sand is the product of force applied to rock. Around the Great Lakes, most of the force was originally supplied by millions of years of glaciers grinding over bedrock. The rock was crushed into fragments, which in turn were ground to grains of sand. About ninety percent of the grains were made of quartz, and less than ten percent were feldspar. Some were magnetite, a very fine ironlike mineral that accumulates in thin black layers often mistaken for oil or other contaminants. The rest were a mix of garnet, calcite, ilmenite, hornblende, and epidote.
As the glaciers receded, rivers of meltwater washed through the debris they left behind, carrying sand downstream to the basins that would become the Great Lakes. As the lakes formed, current and waves pushed the sand shoreward, forming beaches. When the sand dried, every grain became subject to wind.
It takes a wind of about eight miles per hour to make fine sand fly, and about twenty-five miles per hour to lift coarse sand. Kneel on a beach on a windy day and you can see a mist of sand blowing a few inches to a few feet above the ground. Look closer and you can watch individual grains jumping and tumbling along. They go airborne, collide with one another, fall suddenly into eddies behind rocks and other obstructions. This bouncing transport is called saltation. During lesser winds, the grains roll along the beach in a process called surface creep. Over time, collisions chip away at the grains, rounding and polishing them. The older the grains, the rounder and smoother and more uniform in size they become.
Sand would migrate forever inland if not for marram grass. Also called American beachgrass, and belonging to a group of about a hundred similar species found along the Great Lakes, Atlantic, and Pacific coasts, marram is among the first plants to grow on a beach and serves an important function as a dune builder. When a clump of the grass takes root, it creates a slight break in the wind, allowing grains of sand to fall behind it. As the sand collects into a pile, more grains fall in its eddy, building a ridge with a long slope on the windward side and a steep slope on the lee side—the classic shape of a dune. The rising sand buries the plant, which sends out underground stems called rhizomes that shoot new sprouts to the surface. The network of rhizomes and roots bind the growing dune in place. As the dune ages, organic material accumulates on its surface and other plants take root and gradually crowd out the marram. In time, a hill of sand covered with a thin layer of loam will become a forest of mature hardwoods and conifers.
A variety of dunes is found around the lakes. Sleeping Bear is a “perched dune”—a crest of sand sitting on a glacial moraine. The winds at Sleeping Bear Point are strong enough to blow sand up the face of the moraine, depositing it at the top. Grand Sable Dunes on Lake Superior were formed in a similar way.
The most common dunes along the lakes are called linear dunes, and form in ridges parallel to the shore. Rarely higher than about fifty feet, they rise row after row away from the water’s edge, becoming wooded ridges as they age. From the air or from a boat far out on the water they look like tightly fitted wrinkles on the land.
Parabolic dunes are U-shaped and occur when plants that stabilize a linear dune are destroyed. Once the plants are gone—killed by natural processes or from human activities—the sand becomes exposed to wind that blows it into a saddle-shaped ridge of bare sand known as a blowout. Sometimes one blowout will stack upon others until they form a giant parabolic dune several hundred feet high. Other blowouts become “walking dunes” that travel inland a few feet a year and bury everything in their way, including houses. On the shore of Lake Michigan in the 1800s, an entire abandoned fishing village was buried this way.
Since about 1920, the sand from Lake Michigan dunes has been strip-mined and sold for industrial use. About ninety-five percent of it goes to foundries that cast engine blocks and other parts for the automobile industry, while smaller amounts are used to make glass, sandpaper, toothpaste, and other products. In a foundry, the sand is combined with a binding material and shaped into molds, into which is poured molten metal. Once the metal cools and hardens, the sand is broken away, leaving the finished product. About four hundred pounds of sand are required to cast an engine block in this way.
Until 1976, sand mining in Michigan was unregulated; mining companies bought shoreline dunes wherever they could and stripped away the sand as fast as they could sell it. One of the largest barrier dunes on the Lake Michigan shore, Pigeon Hill in Muskegon, originally measured about forty acres in area at its base and rose to a height of two to three hundred feet. Sand Products Company began excavating it in 1936. By the mid-1960s, Pigeon Hill was gone, replaced by a hole in the ground.
Aesthetics are not the only reason to protect dunes. Many of the plants and animals that live among the dunes can survive no place else. A number of them are endangered or threatened, including the piping plover, a rare shorebird that nests near the water’s edge in northern Lake Michigan, and Pitcher’s thistle, a flowering plant found in isolated patches among the dunes.
Michigan’s Sand Dunes Protection and Management Act of 1976 saved some of the more critical dune habitats from mining, but environmentalists have recently raised questions about its effectiveness. The general public and environmental groups took for granted that the act protected existing dunes and would result in a gradual phasing out of sand mining. This seemed inevitable after Ford Motor Company adopted a policy of not using sand from barrier dunes in its foundries, relying instead on sand mined from interior lands that were less ecologically sensitive.
In fact, however, sand mining continues at only a slightly slower pace than before regulation. In 1976, fifteen active mining sites were in operation on a total of 3,228 acres of dunes; twenty-five years later, there are twenty active sites, totaling 4,848 acres. The output of sand is slightly lower than it was in 1976, but still averages about 2.5 million tons per year. In all, some 2.3 million dump-truck loads have been hauled away since 1976. And they’ve been sold cheaply: the going rate for dunes is five to ten dollars per ton.
* * *
From the Gauntlet that morning we watched the sun rise slowly, an orange glow in the whiteness, as the fog disintegrated a droplet at a time. In the distance a few gauzelike images of boats appeared. Ghost ships. Then the fog lifted altogether, and ahead of us was open water to the horizon with not a single sail to be seen. We turned to look behind and the lake was filled with them.
Scott leaped to his feet and hooted. “We’re gonna roll in ahead of the seventies!”
Jeff fiddled with the FM radio, lifting it and turning it, trying for a clear station. Then he found a classic rock station playing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” He cranked the volume as high as it would go, and the morning cracked open and electric guitars spilled out. We raised our fists in the air and tipped our heads back and howled. The rest of the crew poured topside, awakened by the tumult. As if by decree, a breeze came up from the southwest, riffles streaked across the water toward us, the sails caught and filled, and the boat jumped to life beneath us. We banged the corner around Point Betsie and headed toward the Manitous. The wind increased.
“We’re getting aggressive now,” Jeff said.
It was perfect, nothing in the world but water and sun and blue sky and a good wind from the southwest at fifteen knots. We entered the Manitou Passage, where dozens of ships have been lost, often in fog, more often in storms. The passage cuts inside the islands, with Sleeping Bear Dunes dominating the mainland—a khaki tsunami of sand—and with South Manitou Island off our port side. A hundred yards or so off the island’s south tip sat the rusting and guano-streaked hull of the Francisco Morazan, a Liberian freighter that grounded there during a storm in November 1960.
The winds and currents in the Manitou Passage are often treacherous. Schoolcraft, in his Narrative Journal of Travels, mentions in a footnote chilling in its offhandedness that fifty Indian canoes were once lost here, somewhere between the Manitou Islands and Sleeping Bear Dunes. The details of what happened have been erased by time. Perhaps a war party of fifty canoes was on its way to ambush an enemy camp in Wisconsin. Or an entire village population of men, women, and children were paddling to the islands to make maple sugar or pick blueberries or rendezvous with friends and relatives. Probably they were caught in a squall. They come up quickly here, and gain force as they funnel between the islands and the mainland. Fifty canoes, each carrying at least two and probably three or more people. Gone without a trace.
In 1838, the French naturalist Francis Comte de Castlenau encountered a storm while sailing through the same passage. He later wrote: “… we were a plaything of the giant waves that pushed us toward the immense bank of sand [Sleeping Bear Dunes] … I have seen the storms of the Channel, those of the Ocean, the squalls off the banks of Newfoundland, those on the coasts of America, and the hurricanes of the Gulf of Mexico. Nowhere have I witnessed the fury of the elements comparable to that found on this fresh water sea.”
We passed the “Crib”—an automated lighthouse at North Manitou Shoal. We passed Pyramid Point, Whaleback Mountain, Sugarloaf—all prominent remnants of glacial plowing on the mainland. We could see the tracks the ice made there, and the level bench twenty feet high where the shore of the lake once stood. Good Harbor Bay was a long, low strip of sand backed by green hills, with houses visible along the backdunes near Leland. It was where I would spend six weeks in February and March, getting acquainted with wind, waves, and sand.
Guy canted the boat to fifteen degrees and we jumped a knot in speed. “Our waterline is starting to pay off,” he said. I looked back and every sail on the horizon was canted at the same angle.
Eight knots now, and it was impossible not to be mesmerized by the sensations of sailing—the wind in our faces, the slapping bow waves and creaking sails, the impish sense that we had reached up and snagged the tailhook of the sky. We had caught a free ride across the planet.
We closed on some 40s and 50s that had been so far ahead in the morning we couldn’t see them. We caught up to Captain Blood and passed her. Beyond North Manitou, we passed Blind Hog and Kokomo and Flying Cloud. It was pure motion. It was perpetual. It was better than rock-’n’-roll.
Then we fell into a wind hole. Two hazards of sailing are too much wind and too little wind. On the Great Lakes, they can sometimes be encountered within moments of each other. For twenty minutes we watched boats we had passed catch up. Some steered close to shore, hoping to find land breezes. Others drifted to a halt a hundred yards from us. The water was glass-calm. Here and there streaks showed on the surface, like the patterns you can make walking across freshly vacuumed carpet. A stirring would crawl northward, a hundred feet wide and a half mile long, crossing the water at the speed of cloud shadow, and if we were lucky it intercepted our path and snapped our sails full and we jumped to four or five knots and passed a few boats before it got away and we settled again on glass. A couple boats farther out seized a wind and rode and rode and rode; we were jealous. Then we seized one ourselves and were off and passing South Fox Island, with the mainland slipping lower on the horizon.
We passed Grand Traverse Bay, which at this distance looked narrow, like the mouth of a bottle, though I knew it was ten miles wide. My home was down there, a few miles past the curve of the earth.
We passed North Fox Island. We passed Little Traverse Bay and Beaver Island, low and green. Now the wind was strong and steady, with no gaps, and the race was heating up.
By sunset, we had abandoned all sense of leisure aboard Gauntlet. Sailing was serious business now. Northern Lake Michigan is colder and wilder and less forgiving than the rest of the lake. The bottom there is studded with dolomite shoals that can gut a boat. Ahead was Gray’s Reef, legendary trouble spot. Beyond it we would bear east into the Straits of Mackinac, enter Lake Huron beneath the Mackinac Bridge, and cross the finish line at Mackinac Island.
We approached Gray’s Reef in darkness, clouds blacking the sky, nothing to see but buoy lights and mastlights. The wind was strong and dead astern, and we ran ahead of it, our big spinnaker up and mainsail out and everyone standing by at stations. We crowded a pod of boats, while others challenged us, staying hard on our beams and stern. But we were passing more often than not.
Coming into the channel at Gray’s Reef, with red and green buoys on either side, we made a move on a boat ahead of us. We cut to the inside and laughed when her crew shouted through the darkness. The boats chasing us fell behind.
It was a sprint to the finish now, everyone throwing everything they had before the wind. With White Shoal Lighthouse off to our port, we spun to starboard on the last green buoy, our rail inches from it. We were working without words, on automatic, ten men operating like a single organism. We raised the jib as we dropped the spinnaker, not losing momentum for even a moment, hauling the house-size tent of nylon into our arms as fast as it fell, never letting it touch water, shouting with the elation of it. The boat caught the beam wind full in the jib and mainsail, and leaped like she was spurred.
Damn. We pounced into that wind. Behind us was gridlock, chaos flapping at the turn. We heard hulls bumping hulls and madmen yelling. We heard “Starboard! Starboard! Starboard!” and the word “fuck” manifested in a dozen ways. Mastlights swayed. Rigging clanked.
Now we were cutting hot. Coming into the Straits with the five-mile-long bridge spanning it in an arc of lights, like rockets sprayed from land to land, we made 8 and then 8.2 knots, but with the wind in our faces it felt like 20. It felt like 60.
We passed beneath the bridge cheering. We figured we were first or second in our division. Just five miles ahead was the island. We could see the long antebellum front porch of the Grand Hotel lit in welcome. Parties were in progress all over the island. All we had to do was pass the buoy boat at the entrance to the harbor and somebody would touch off a cannon, hit our sails with a spotlight to identify us, and enter our time in the books. We were ahead of many of the 50s and some of the 60s. Nothing stood between us and glory.
And the wind died.
It died a sudden death. Went out like a candle.
For an hour and a half, we bobbed. Boats drifted up and bobbed with us. Every ratboat we’d passed in the Manitou Passage, every barge we’d blasted out of the water at Gray’s Reef—caught up to us. We became just another vessel in a drifting armada. Some boats had enough momentum to pass us. A phantom puff would goose them and they would glide a hundred yards and slow and stop and sit there. I wanted to huff and puff and blow our sails full. But all we could do was wait.
Finally, a breeze mussed the water and we edged forward. At 4:25 A.M. we crawled across the finish line, moving too slowly to register on our GPS. A spotlight caught our rigging, our neon numbers glowed, a cannon banged. But it was only a formality. No longer did it matter who finished first. Everyone was a winner. Time to celebrate.
But at that hour most of the edge was lost from the party. In the harbor, we tied up to boats already rafted several deep and popped a bottle of champagne. We passed it around. We gripped each other by the hands and congratulated ourselves. A few revelers nearby gave some hoots and hollers, but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it.
We had set out from Chicago with our destination clear, and some of us stayed on course and some of us got lost, and some performed magnificently and others not well at all. We knew moments of elation, discontent, triumph, and discouragement. We suffered a little. We learned a little. We threw ourselves at the mercy of forces we had no control over while managing, barely, to harness lesser forces. Then the race was over and we had used up all our strength. We had pushed our limits, had tried our best, had seen how we measured up (not as well as we’d hoped), and now we were weary of the whole business.
In the gray dawn I went ashore and walked into town. The ground kept tipping away from me, its fixity an illusion. No motorized vehicles are allowed on Mackinac Island—transportation is by foot, bike, or horse—and the streets gleamed where a guy with a fire hose sprayed away yesterday’s horse droppings. Sailors walked alone or in small groups, their faces stunned with exhaustion.
The Pink Pony is supposed to be where you go after the race to get drunk and hit on each other’s wives and girlfriends. I stuck my head inside. It was a nice place, with lots of oak and brass, and crowded with unshaven, sunburned men standing around with drinks in their hands. One or two were shouting lustily.
I might have fit right in. When we spun Gauntlet around the last buoy at Gray’s Reef and dropped the spinnaker, all of us drunk with speed and conquest, Jeff or Scott or someone had slapped me on the back and shouted that I was a rock star now. I didn’t believe it, but I liked the sound of it. Here I was, filthy, sun-cooked, hardly any sleep for four days, hands raw from rope damage—the Pink Pony was just the place for a rock star like me.
But no. Not this time.
Instead, I called home, caught the ferry to the mainland, and sat on a curb in the parking lot to wait for my wife. An hour and a half later she pulled up in our truck and lowered the window. She gave me a funny grin.
“Hey, sailor,” she said. “Going my way?”
Copyright © 2003 by Jerry Dennis. Copyright © 2024 by Jerry Dennis