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Cents & Sensibility
“By 2006, Lake Superior will be gone, and its islands will be wooded buttes rising above the fertile coulees of the basin.…”
Yes, indeed, back in 1995 Garrison Keillor, that intrepid reporter from
Lake Wobegon, uncovered a master plan among Minnesota water resource
experts to sell off Lake Superior, and, as a side benefit, create the
great tourist attraction described above: the Superior Canyon.
Mr. Keillor revealed in his essay in Time magazine that Minnesota
could be floating in money and the Southwest could have a much easier
time of it, waterwise, if we sold our Great Lake and drained it through
a pipeline into the Grand Canyon.
 When the financial benefit was calculated, according to the
essayist, each Minnesotan would pull in about $120,000 every year from
the sale and the state’s coffers would be filled with money rising at
least as high as the former lake waters. It would be more than enough
money to buy lawyers good enough to withstand any sour-grape suits from
Wisconsin, Michigan (and Ontario, one would think) over spilled water.
Mr. Keillor explained the plan:
“Its code name is Excelsior, the preliminary plan alone fills a
portfolio the size of a breadbox, and if all goes according to plan, on
November 4, 1999, the governor of Minnesota will stand on a platform in
Duluth and pull a golden lanyard, opening the gates of the Superior
Diversion Canal, a concrete waterway the size of the Suez. Water from
Lake Superior will flood into the canal at a rate of three-hundred
billion gallons an hour and go south.…
“In
the past, Lake Superior, which represents one-tenth of the world’s
supply of fresh water, was considered ‘inviolable,’ but with
environmental groups in retreat and a Republican Congress favoring
‘wise use’ of natural resources, the Excelsior project is moving
full-tilt toward O-Day.”
I’m pretty sure that Mr. Keillor was joking; he’s known for doing that.
Yet thank goodness that here it is 2006, and instead of the
waterless, tourist-drawing Superior Canyon described in his
“Minnesota’s Sensible Plan,” I still see a blessedly well-filled lake
as big as the horizon.
Instead of the resource-management planners with dollar signs
dancing in their heads, we are hearing from the governors of the Great
Lakes states who have a master plan to keep the water here, far from a
pipe headed in any direction other than back into the lakes. (See this
issue’s State of the Lake report.)
That we can enjoy a good chuckle about draining away our water, tells me how spoiled we are.
Many others wouldn’t get the joke. There are millions of people
around the world who must think daily about where to get water. We turn
on a faucet and, for far less than a penny a glass, savor some of the
best-tasting water the earth offers.
You see, thanks to a childhood on Lake Superior, I’m as snooty
about water as a France-born woman can be about wine. What can I say,
I’ve had the good stuff.
Mr. Keillor, though he wasn’t raised on Lake Superior, knows a
thing or two about great waters. It came through in the conclusion of
his “Minnesota’s Sensible Plan,” even as he was praising the good that
would come to the world from tons of lake-bought money in the hands of
the sensible folks who live in Minnesota:
“The Superior Canyon project can help bring the country to its
senses, putting a big chunk of the economy into the hands of modest and
sensible people, people who have been through some hard winters and are
the better for it. But winter isn’t the only reason Minnesotans are as
good as they are, it’s also due to something in the drinking water.
That’s why the lake was named Superior.”
Superior, eh. Perhaps those French explorers who named our water knew about more than just great wine when they tasted it.
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