After finishing last week’s update, I poked around northern Minnesota for a bit longer. With high temperatures hovering around 80 degrees F., it was uncharacteristically balmy in that part of the world, so I took full advantage of those two golden autumn days.

The state offers superb hiking and biking trails—which are perfect for winter sports, too, of course—and it was pure pleasure to walk among the birches and pines. I found another heavenly campsite at Fall Lake in the Superior National Forest, on an elevated promontory overlooking the lake. Surrounded by birch and anchored on one side by a huge rock, the space felt like a cozy hideaway; I built a fire and enjoyed the stars and the calls of the loons.

But, inevitably, the weather changed and clouds moved in. I didn’t linger in Wisconsin, either, because it rained most of the time I was there. I did stop for gas, though, in Bloomer, a town so tiny that before I could get out of the car to start pumping, a man came out of the station and did it for me. (How long has it been since an attendant fueled your car?! Do you even remember the days when that was the rule rather than the exception? Many readers don’t.)

The town looked a little down on its luck, so while he manned the pump, I asked him about the local economy. He said that a lot of dairy farmers had sold off their herds and taken day jobs, because they weren’t making enough money to stay in business—they were being undersold by Mexico and California. Mexico didn’t really shock me, but I expressed surprise that that state famed for its dairies could be undersold by California; he explained that dairy farmers in that state received larger subsidies than Wisconsin farmers. Now, he said, only 3,000- to 4,000-head herds were viable. Sure enough, as I crossed the state I saw far fewer working farms than I remembered. The relentless tide of large-scale efficiencies rolled on in America. view photo

 :: Heavy Weather, High Seas ::

As my map recommended, I made a reservation for the ferry across Lake Michigan; it was a good thing I did, because when I called on Thursday the woman said that Friday’s crossing was almost full. But almost was good enough for me, and I reserved a spot despite suffering a little sticker shock: It cost me and Uli $91 to cross (there were per-vehicle and per-person fees). In a driving rain, we arrived at the Manitowoc dock at 1:30 PM as instructed, and I surrendered Uli to professional ferry parkers. While he got tucked away in the huge hold, I stood in line to pay. A man behind me was taking Dramamine to prevent motion sickness, and he offered me the chance to pop two out of the packaging for myself. In view of the heavy weather and the white-capped waves coming over the breakwaters, I gratefully accepted.

The sun broke through as we put out to sea (the Great Lakes are called great for a reason—it feels like you’re crossing an ocean), and I thought all might be well. But in short order the 410-foot S.S. Badger was pitching and rolling, and I wasn’t feeling very good. I sat down and closed my eyes and drifted in and out for a couple of hours, but the Dramamine saved me, and I was very, very grateful to that generous stranger. A soft pretzel helped, too.

About halfway through the four-hour voyage, I moved to a section of the ship where airline seats were lined up in front of a mounted TV. In the middle of Lake Michigan, I watched a satellite feed of Israeli forces assaulting Yasir Arafat’s compound. U.S. isolationists take note: Your days are numbered. Oceans are clearly irrelevant. view photo

 :: Ghosts On the Lake ::

The man on my right was looking out the windows to my left as much as he was watching the TV, and he pointed out a huge, thousand-foot ore carrier on the horizon. I said that it seemed impossible for one of those monsters to go down, but it had happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald. The woman on my left laughed and said she’d been thinking about that ill-fated ship, too.

At 729 feet and 13,632 gross tons, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes from her 1958 launching until 1971. On November 9, 1975, she put out from Superior, Wisconsin headed for Detroit. Heavily loaded with over 26,000 long tons of iron ore, she got caught in one of Lake Superior’s deadly storms and went down with all 29 hands on November 10th, just 17 miles short of the safety of Michigan’s Whitefish Bay. Like the Titanic, she had been considered practically unsinkable; but the 27- to 30-foot waves and following sea proved that humankind hadn’t yet achieved invincibility. Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot immortalized the loss in his 1976 recording, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which says: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead, When the skies of November turn gloomy.” view photo

 :: It’s Only Business ::

My neighbors had excellent senses of humor, and we soon fell into an easy camaraderie. Diane Holmes was a real-estate agent on her way to a weekend conference; Phil Endries was a businessman between businesses. He and his wife were on their way to visit old friends. (She sat on his right and looked like a nice lady, but she hadn’t had the benefit of Dramamine and was suffering, mightily, in silence, so I didn’t have the pleasure of making her acquaintance.)

Diane told me I had to write about Packer football; she said that she didn’t hold Sunday open houses because she wasn’t willing to miss any games and knew nobody would come, anyway. I told her that I knew little and cared even less about football, but promised to do a bit of research and work it in, since it was such a defining feature of Wisconsin.

Phil had run the dog-food company that his dad started in 1947, but he had just shut it down and was converting the shop to a game-processing plant. Diane immediately said, “Oh! You were one of the guys who goes around picking up dead cows,” so she clearly knew how it all worked; but I didn’t, so I asked. It turned out it was that simple: When a farmer lost a cow, he’d call Phil, who would come and haul it away and process it. It was a reasonable exchange: The farmer didn’t have to bother with the carcass, and Phil made a good living by butchering and sorting the parts, then selling them to large, nationally known dog-food companies for final processing and packing. I asked him if whatever killed the cow didn’t taint its carcass, but he said that that was rarely a problem and you quickly learned what was bad and what wasn’t. It was Capitalism 101: If he had sold his buyers a bad product that would harm its consumers, he would have been out of business in short order. view photo

 :: Oh Deer ::

He seemed fairly young to retire; it turned out that he had needed to upgrade equipment and such if he wanted to keep going, but it didn’t seem reasonable to make substantial investments in the business with full retirement a relatively few years away. (His two sons weren’t remotely interested in carrying on.) Plus, Phil was fed up with the 24/7 nature of the business and wanted to ease into retirement—thus, the decision to process wild game. They had thoroughly cleaned the building and would soon paint, then open in time for deer season.

Diane teased him about his lousy timing: It was all over the local news that Wisconsin’s deer were falling victim to chronic-wasting disease, and everybody was wondering how hunters would react. Phil acknowledged that he might not have any business, but he optimistically considered it more likely that this would push already reluctant butchers and meat markets out of the game-processing business altogether and that there would still be enough hunters to keep him busy. He figured that they could get by on a couple of months of that and really start enjoying life in the off months.

Our conversation was cut short by Mrs. Endries’ urgent tug on Phil’s sleeve, and he gently hustled her away. When he returned to collect their belongings, he said that she had gotten the last room available—the crew said it was rare to fill up the rooms with sick passengers. Considering how many people were lurching around (it was usually impossible to walk properly) with waxed-cardboard barf buckets, the only thing that surprised me was that a room was still available so late in the crossing. view photo

 ::The Bonus Round ::

As the throng exited the ship, a crew member told us that we got a bonus: We only paid for a horizontal trip, but they threw in a little vertical for good measure. I may love 3-D driving, but I definitely prefer to limit my water crossings to flat, boring surfaces.

Once off the ship, we all lined up as the parking attendants hustled to empty the hold of vehicles. (It was just like waiting at the airline carousels for your luggage; dockside, the baggage was just considerably bigger and more valuable.) I laughingly apologized to the big guy who carefully extricated himself from my cockpit, and told him I had warned them when making a reservation that, due to my short legs and Uli’s full load, the driver’s seat was submarine-tight. He grinned as he sprinted back to the Badger, so he didn’t seem to have suffered any permanent damage.

I had picked up Heat Moon’s trail again in Michigan, expecting to follow his lead in taking a shortcut through Canada; but the retired preacher I met in Midland unknowingly changed my intended route. On the western edge of the town, I pulled into a Little League ballpark to coil my hair up under my ballcap so I could throw open the windows and sunroof; while stopped, I took the opportunity to stretch my legs. I hadn’t been there 10 minutes when an older man walked by; it was clear from the way things unfolded that he had been checking me out, probably suspicious of a car at the deserted park and wondering if someone was up to no good. We ended up having a nice conversation, but I’d been dealing with such heightened scrutiny all around the country and was sick and tired of it. With a full load that I had no desire to unpack for any over-zealous inspector, I had no stomach for two border crossings.

So I headed south instead, passing embarrassingly close to two cousins’ homes. But it was late on a Saturday evening and they weren’t expecting me and I needed to find a place to hole up and write, so I cruised by without saying hello. I would have liked to see them and presumably they would have liked to see me, but there were, as usual, a whole host of factors in play, so I made another tough executive decision. Apologies to the three cousins in Michigan and the two in Ohio that I passed by: One of these days we will actually see each other again.

We’ll pick up the tale again in New York when I finally run out of Great Lakes.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . . .

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