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Mysteries of the Lake,
Mysteries of the Heart
Who doesn’t love a mystery? For that matter, who doesn’t love a good ghost story?
It’s been my good fortune to end up in a publishing house with a
mission that has included books exploring the mysterious and strange.
(I joke that we have become Ghost Central with our Haunted books - now
up to a spooky half dozen.)
 But
even our shipwreck books (there’s five of those, in case you’re
wondering) often involve the mysteries of why and where - why did the
ship go down and where did it end up? I’m told that there are about 50
vessels believed still to lie undiscovered in the depths of this Great
Lake. It’s no wonder that there are those who make an avocation of
searching for ghosts or lost ships. Some lucky few, like the crew at
the Great Lakes Shipwreck
Historical Society in Whitefish Point, get to make hunting
for shipwrecks part of their day job. You can read about both the
passionate amateurs and professionals in this issue’s “Chasing
Underwater Shadows.”
It’s followed with a story about hunters of another kind …
those who seek ghosts (or sometimes seek to disprove them). Fred
Stonehouse, author of numerous Haunted volumes, spends a night with some Upper Peninsula ghost hunters to find out “Do Ghosts Walk at Whitefish Point?”
Part of me envies Fred his evening in the dark searching for
lighthouse spirits. Part of me remembers long nights of not sleeping,
stiff and straight, arms locked to my sides, in the exact center of my
bed (if you don’t go by the edge, whatever is under there can’t reach
you because it has short arms). Yup, one too many “Twilight Zones.”
As we put together this issue, yet another of my childhood
mysteries popped to the surface with “Turn Winter Blues into Winter ‘Go
Do.’” That story leading our Recreation Guide is a sampler of silent
sports, encouraging you and me to try one or all of them. As I read the
section on ice skating, it reminded me that about half of my maternal
aunts say they met their future husbands at an ice skating rink. The
question “How did you and uncle meet?” got the response “Ice skating”
so often that I began to suspect that “ice skating” might be 1940s code
for something else, kind of like “watching the submarine races” used to
be in the 1950s.
Odder still was that most of them identified the same rink …
the one at the Duluth Heights Community Recreation Center, not far from
my home (now and growing up). Mom and Dad met there, too.
I remember going to that rink as a child. I started with
those awkward double-bladed things and graduated to single blades when
we found a nice pair of skates, mostly in my size, at a rummage sale. I
fell an equal amount on double or single, but felt I looked much better
doing the swoosh-crash with only one blade per skate. I don’t recall
being “date” interested in anyone on ice, but then I stopped going when
my teen years told me swoosh-crash wasn’t cool no matter how many
blades.
Most evenings now, I pass the recreation center on the way home. In
winter, I see two rinks there, but they have the wooden barriers for
hockey and, it seems, no outside benches for little kids to lace up
skates. Somehow hockey - which is not a silent sport - probably doesn’t generate as many marriages as the old, family-friendly rink did.
Still, when my nieces and nephews, who are coming of age, ask
me about how to meet their mate, I’ll tell them to consider ice
skating. Anyone who is attracted to you even after a few humiliating
tumbles and jerky missteps probably could accept the rest of what life
might slide in your direction … not to mention that a little
unsteadiness on ice is not a bad excuse to hold hands.
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