What washes up

I fear Lake Superior. More so, I fear what it might bring me. We live right at the end of 350 miles of open Lake Superior water and anything could wash up here.

This morning, in one of Lake Superior's lighthearted moments, it was a beer can. From Istanbul. Efes Pilsener. Imagine the Turkish sailor out at anchor tossing his empty over the rails.



After a big blow in October, some local artist had a good time with the debris that washed up on the shore here, taking some fisherman's gloves and a smelter's boot and making installation art on the dune of old driftwood.



But the lake brings real gruesome things, not just foreign beer and art material.

Nine years ago this fall, Tomasz Wlodarcyk, a 34-year-old Polish sailor, disappeared from his ship in the Duluth harbor. The following April, the body washed up on this beach.

Back in July 1885, the body of Louis Foucalt, a French-Canadian who'd written his name on his arm, was found on this beach by a little girl playing in the sand.

Darn that historical research. I know too much.

When Douglas Winter disappeared from the North Shore in October and his sea kayak washed up at Twin Points, I feared that he, or actually his body, would wash up here on Park Point. After his lifejacket came to shore a few days after he disappeared, I was even more afraid.

For the last month, when I'd take the dog for a walk on the beach, I'd hesitantly look up the shoreline, half-sure I would see Winter's limp corpse. Fortunately for me, the gales of November never really hit this year. Big Lake Superior storms, with their raging east winds, bring all sorts of things to our beach.

Winter's body surfaced and came to shore maybe ten miles away from where he died. The body had headed this way, but only made it to Two Harbors. Winter, it turns out, had shot himself out on the lake, shortly after calling his girlfriend on his cellphone to report increasing waves.

He wanted to disappear. I feared he would un-disappear, right onto my beach.

I know too much. It's a big, beautiful lake. With just the occasional unpleasant surprise.

Temptation and tragedy at Temperance

There is no place finer on the North Shore than the mouth of the Temperance River, where you'll find a gravel beach and some very scenic campsites. The river has run through the deep gorge and rounded kettles and completes its path to Lake Superior in a last push of current. When the river was first named, there was no "bar" at its mouth (hence the no-drinking name), but now it does. It was right here on Saturday the Fourth of July that divers searched for the body of Ari Sommerfeld.

You'd think with a name like Temperance, a famous North Shore river would be a place of modesty and caution. But the Temperance River took another life this weekend. Overly brave men take risks there all the time, and in a few cases, the odds turn against them and the power of the river wins. The temptations at Temperance are too strong.

At least eight other people who have died in the Temperance River over the last 25 years. Four of them were men in the dangerous age range of 14 to 31. Statistics show that young men are by far the mostly likely to be drowning victims, probably because they overestimate their abilities and feel immortal.

But tragedy has struck older men and also women at the Temperance. Two young women drowned last year when they were carried into the current above the gorge.

Ari Sommerfeld, the victim this weekend, was exactly my age, 45. He was not saving a child's life; he was jumping into a whirlpool he'd jumped into numerous times before just for fun. His widow urges that no one go there again. But they will.

When I was young and immortal, my cousins and I used to jump off the cliffs just upstream from the highway, at the mouth of the main gorge. It was a thrill. We all survived. Once as an adult I met up with a group of teenagers from Duluth for an educational program on Lake Superior. They were polite but restless, asking their leader during most of my program "Can we go jumping now?" As a liability-conscious grown-up, my only response to that was, "After my program."

For me, the saddest tragedies at Temperance came in 1999 and 2000. Twice, fathers age 48 and 50 found their child in trouble, went in and saved the child, but then drowned themselves. Not even swimming themselves, taking no risks for themselves, they were drawn into danger by the tragedy of their child. As a now-cautious dad, I totally understand that.

You can't ban swimming at Temperance, any more than you can ban hiking on steep trails or crossing wide highways. With the temptations, there will always be tragedy.

The fatal draw of waterfalls

Gooseberry Falls State Park was crawling with people today. For a Monday in May that was not Memorial Day, that's unusual. The weather was fine: sunny and warm, with a persistent strong wind.

After hiking the park's Hiking Club Trail, I wanted to check out the Middle Falls and a memorial I'd read about.

Richard Paul Luetmers had died here over 30 years ago. He would have been 46 today, just about my age. Here's the memorial:



This plaque is about ten yards away from the upper edge of Middle Falls. Park staff hoped this somber message would discourage others from jumping or swimming here. It didn't work. Five years later, almost to the day, Robert Maxwell of Illinois jumped off the falls, hit a rock ledge in shallow water, and died. The day after that, park staff kicked 20 more swimmers out of the falls. In July 1999, Allan Johnson, a 20-year-old from Baxter, MN, joined the fatality list in this same place.

I continued past the memorial to the falls, sat on the exposed bedrock, and took another picture:



Beautiful day.

And then more people came to the falls. From my left, a teenage boy in bare feet, his pants rolled up, was walking tenderly down the rocky stream above the falls, toward the crest. A father came in with his two young children. Both the teenager and the dad had friends across the gorge, with cameras. For a brief moment, both teenager and toddlers were posing on the lip of the falls.



Father, son and daughter got out fine. The kids did not somersault over the edge to their doom. The teenager tenderfooted back up the rapids to dry land, his whole escapade videotaped (of course) by a friend.

Not everyone dies when they do this. 99.99% of them survive. But why do people risk it? Teenage boys I understand, but the kids were just being camera fodder, like having honey smeared on their cheeks for a bear to lick off.

Get out there, experience the wild. There are better, safer ways to feel that risk of death without actually risking your death.

Smelt!

Come on now, does anything really say "North Shore" more than smelting?

Thanks to Happy Hooker Charters for these great photos of smelters ceremoniously biting off the heads of their first smelt.

Ecologically speaking, the smelt run is a fascinating story. Whoever dumped some smelt into the Great Lakes back in the 1910s didn't know they'd create a whole culture, or fill such a hole in the ecosystem. As the lamprey and commercial fishermen killed off the lake trout, smelt had few predators and their population soared. Lake Superior is a huge, cold, sterile place, and even at the peak of the smelt population, the little buggers spent most of their year scattered all across the lake straining the water for zooplankton like little humpback whales.

Dip a net in a North Shore stream in July and you'll get nothing. For a few evenings in spring, though, the lake seems ripe and abundant and teeming with life.

As the smelt jammed the rivers and beaches, so did the people. The mouth of the Lester River was a crazy party scene. At least five men died there smelting in the 1960s-1970s, carried out by raging frigid water into even more frigid water in the dark.

I'm old enough to remember the good old days of smelting, though as a 12 year old on the Cross River or Caribou River, I did not partake to the level of serious adults. Like our Governor Ventura, who remembers coming to Duluth to smelt at the Lester River, but not much after that. A sure sign of spring was when the Holiday stores would put those smelting nets out in front for sale, the round nets on the 8-foot poles.

Smelting was the most sensory experience I had on the North Shore as a child. It was dark, I could smell the cold water rushing by and smell the fish as they piled up in the bucket. I could feel the cold from the water and the warmth of spring air. And the excitement was palpable. It was amazing to dip a net into these rivers and pull up, in one swipe, dozens of squirmy fish.

Now I live right at another smelting hotbed, Park Point. The Sivertsons have had their smelt net out in the bay for a week or so now, just two blocks from our house:



According to the Minnesota DNR, they are catching almost a ton of smelt each day.

Last night, the real action moved to the beach, in our backyard. The seiners are out. Yesterday evening, as dusk set in, they arrived on our street and came through to the beach. They light a driftwood fire, pull on their waders, and working in pairs drag a large net through the water. There are so many fewer smelt nowadays that this is the only way to get decent numbers.

They are still a little slobby. Someone left a shoe and a fire that was still smoldering this morning:



It used to be a lot worse. Guys would bring worn-out car tires to the beach and set those on fire. Aachk!

For a few days in spring, the waters of the North Shore come alive.

A deadly North Shore blow

74 years ago today, on April 14, 1935, three fishermen headed out onto Lake Superior from their North Shore settlements, in small boats, to check their herring nets. Only one made it back home, though he took the long way home. Two of the fishermen were never seen again.

John Hansen left Little Marais. Carl Huby and Christ Tuinglem headed out from Thomasville, a little settlement near the present day Satellite's Cafe in Schroeder. This was before weather radio or blogs. They didn't know that a northwest wind would kick in, clear and cold and hard.

Here the newspapers pick up the account:

"Two Thomasville, MN fishermen today were believed to have drowned in frosty and windswept Lake Superior after a coastguard cutter last night halted a fruitless search along the south shore for the men cast adrift in their small boat two days ago.

"Carl Huby and Christ Tuinglem were the two who were carried out into the open water in their small craft as a swift northwest gale blew up while they were tending their nets.

"The cutter Crawford (similar boat pictured below) anchored off Rocky Island after picking up John Hansen of Little Marais, who was swept out into the lake while fishing.



"Coastguardsmen of the Crawford who were hampered in their search by the cold temperatures that coated the cutter with ice said they believed it impossible for the boat carrying Huby and Tuinglem to endure the pounding of the raging waters."

Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, April 16, 1935

Sad story! Imagine blowing out to sea, the horizon of the North Shore getting slimmer and slimmer, the waves getting larger and larger, and your boat getting heavier and heavier with ice. The math just doesn't work. Hansen got lucky: he made it across to the South Shore, where men in a way bigger boat were looking for him. The newspaper doesn't say so, but he probably got a ride back to Little Marais on the highway. The final fate of Huby and Tuinglem can't be known for sure, but neither hypothermia in a raging sea or drowning sounds to me like a pleasant way to go.

In my spare time...

... I am researching the unpleasant topic of death on Lake Superior. I came across this mighty fine image today, and I'm sorry to say I was excited to see it.

I feel a bit like Lemony Snicket, like I should warn you to turn off your browser right now, or switch to the Disney Channel.

But should you insist on looking at this picture more, you may find that it shows the Ojibwa of Madeline Island slaughtering a group of invading Fox Indians, somewhere off the Montreal River. Apparently, the Fox had come down the Ontonagon River and snuck onto Madeline Island a few days before. They had, well, dishonored a few of the Ojibwa women. Although the call for vengeance was hot, cooler heads prevailed, and the Ojibwa waited until a fog had descended. Then they followed the Fox upshore until the lakeshore banks were steep and unclimbable. Then they pressed the advantage of their larger lake canoes against the small and tippy river canoes of the Fox. The party of 400 Fox was lost, apparently, "to a man."

Pleasant, huh?

Just ask me about some Lake Superior lighthouse keepers! Now there are some great stories of dead people. And heroic rescues, too. Something about 400 people dying in one attack on Lake Superior is extra creepy and extra sad.