Paul L. Hayden / Lake Superior Magazine
Journal: The First Stirrings
Since the author first visited in 1952, Duluth has added a few buildings and the Lakewalk. The 1,013-foot Paul R. Tregurtha, launched in 1981, was just a twinkle in a boatbuilder’s eye at the time, but it’s easy to see how a freighter could make a boy fall in love.
Sometimes one remembers everything about the first stirrings of a romance. Sometimes not so much.
I certainly recall that when I first met the woman who is now my wife, she was flirty, funny and gorgeous. I don’t remember anything we said, and I’d be guessing the year (we’ve been married for some decades).
Yet I can still bring to mind details of the weekend that triggered my ongoing romance with Lake Superior, Minnesota’s North Shore and Duluth.
It was June of 1952, a few weeks after I’d turned 16.
Four high school pals and I drove north from our suburban Minneapolis homes in a two-tone green Hudson Hornet. It was my friend’s first car and our first away-from-home adventure.
I drove much of the way. The car’s owner was a lousy driver, and I made good money – around $1.50 an hour – driving a delivery truck after school.
There was no Interstate 35 back then, but there was a fine overlook at the top of the hill before the drop to Duluth and the shore. We stopped and gawked, unashamedly awed by a scene more magical than real. An odd feeling stirred in my innards.
The Big Lake stretched to the horizon, punctuated by a fairy-tale lift bridge, enormous freighters, sailboats almost motionless on distant water and craft darting this way and that. The city itself, running up a very steep slope from the Lake, might have been an Impressionist’s creation.
The five of us stood strangely quiet for wildly energetic mid-teen boys before returning to the car in uncharacteristically orderly fashion.
Journal: The First Stirrings
Our mood changed by the time we parked to look for a substantial (cheap) lunch. We were back to silly and boisterous. We earned suspicious looks from some passers-by, others moved away from us.
We decided our brown denim jackets, first names embroidered on the chest and “Travelers. Hopkins, Minn.” on the back, must be the cause. People must think we’re a gang.
I was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed less than 130 pounds, and my companions were not more physically impressive. As we strolled confidently, we erupted into guffaws at the thought of being mistaken for a “gang.”
The jackets, embroidered at a little shop in Minneapolis, were our declaration of independence and a symbol of our desire for more travel, though I don’t recall any trip but this.
We ate at the counter of a diner near the bus depot, then headed to the shipping canal. A huge ore boat awed us again into brief silence. Sliding between the piers, the boat was so big and the men aboard so small, but they were seafaring men, undoubtedly tough and had seen places we never would. Some waved to people on the piers; we, like children, waved back.
We headed up the shore, anxious to see more of the Lake, to see the north woods … and to see if any girls were interested in hanging out.
Hey, we were 16 and had 3.2 beer smuggled from a grocery store where one guy worked. We were optimistic, past experiences to the contrary.
But we met no girls. We drank the beer moderately over three days, and I found an unanticipated romance.
We stayed at a cabin court a few miles out of town. It took awhile to persuade the owner that we were not troublesome – we still wore those jackets. The cabin court was bulldozed some 15 years later, but one cabin remained into the 1980s, reminding me of this trip each time I passed it.
We scrambled down the bank to walk on the shore. Another freighter passed by at regal pace, and we speculated on where it came from and what it carried. I suddenly had a great yearning to see more of the world, a yearning that grows stronger with the years and the list of countries I visit.
After a dinner of wieners and baked beans, we sat out, talking quietly and listening to the breeze in the trees.
Next day, we discovered a gen-u-wine big-water lighthouse in Two Harbors; we boys from the prairies were deeply impressed.
Our timing was good: A lake freighter maneuvered into position at the ore docks with the help of a tug, perhaps the Edna G. It gave me an odd feeling, the sort a young fellow gets on a painfully sweet spring day. An ache for unrevealed mysteries.
I got that same feeling a day later when we stumbled onto another lighthouse – Split Rock.
We’d seen it on a map, but it wasn’t easy to find. We took a gravel road in from Highway 61. The station was still active (retired in 1969), yet no one was there. But for trimmed weeds and well-trodden paths, we would have thought it abandoned. No keepers, no guides, no visitor center – nobody but us and the old buildings, all locked tight. It was beautiful.
We roamed the grounds, spying an upturned lifeboat in one building and old furniture in the keeper’s house. We speculated about life here 50 years earlier, how people dealt with great isolation. Uncharacteristically careful, we did not want to leave traces of our visit. An homage to history, I suppose.
We explored farther. All along the shore in 1952, spits of land supported rows of small boathouses with a type of fully enclosed commercial fishing boat that I’ve never seen elsewhere. Some boats were derelict, others ready to head out. I could picture them on the Lake, hauling nets, dashing for shore when a storm approached.
Those boats held possibilities. We talked all weekend about how one could be converted into a comfortable space for wandering the Great Lakes – provided you had money for the conversion and for the wandering. I checked boat ads in local newspapers.
Years later I saw such a converted fishing boat at Two Harbors. I longed to go aboard, but the owners weren’t there and I’d lost my boyish brashness.
Our gang’s big adventure ended quietly. We cruised home, the guys in the back seat asleep most of the way. We did no damage and picked up some new dreams, but no girls.
Of all of us, I remained the most enchanted by the Lake. In later years, I conned my bosses at a Minneapolis newspaper into letting me cover business in the north. For 20 years, I made runs to write about the iron mining and maritime industries. Sometimes I lived my dreams: greeting the magnificent tall-masted Norwegian Christian Radich on a pilot boat; joining a pilot as he brought a Greek freighter into port through thickening ice; sitting on pilings as I pulled tales from Captain Tony Rico, head of the Upper Great Lakes Pilots Association.
I’m retired now, but I love the Lake and its shore and people more now than I did as a teen. Contrary to the beliefs of the young, romance does not disappear with age … even if a few memories may.
Jim Fuller worked 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune (later the Star Tribune). He has reported for the Wall Street Journal, Time and other publications. You’ll see him in Duluth at the Gales of November program each fall or may bump into him any day dining in town with friends or standing on the piers, marveling at the incoming vessels.