Sometimes I feel like the Big Lake’s Vanna White or like a sort of sidekick to a super hero. Don’t get me wrong, our readers and supporters are great about giving our staff kudos (as you can see in the Letters to the Editor), but deep down, we know the true star of the show holds 3 quadrillion gallons of water and spans about 1,300 miles around its midriff (or its Midcontinent Rift? More later).
My favorite example of how secondary my secondary role is on the magazine came after I’d been on the job for a couple of years. I received an urgent email from an elementary school student with a straightforward request: “Tell me everything you know about Lake Superior. My paper is due tomorrow.”
The note elicited both a chuckle and a sad shake of the head from me. (I’d been that late writing a school report.) Back then, Lake Superior Magazine was already more than 20 years old. Since then, we’ve put out another 20 years’ worth of magazines about Lake Superior, its communities and its people.
And we are in no way done turning over the cards and revealing new things or revisiting historic things that need to be celebrated and remembered.
What that means, essentially, is that if I’d started to email my answer to that hapless young student 20 odd years ago (and in my life, odd is the key word), I’d still be composing it because I’ve yet to learn “everything” about Lake Superior.
Lest you think I have no heart, I did send off some great websites, including our own, where an industrious, albeit desperate, elementary-school scholar could look up a few basics about the Big Lake.
Once again, though, this issue brings home to me how much there is yet to know.
In “Cityscapes & Shorelines,” Jan Swart, born in Two Harbors, Minnesota, but who spent much of her work career in the Twin Cities, retired to the shore and brought with her a fresh photographic eye for what’s beautiful and majestic. She’s given even locals like me a new sense of Duluth’s cityscapes, along with stunning views of our coast.
In his first story for our magazine, Brent Frazee introduces us to a family of “happy hookers” willing to take you to some of their favorite fishing holes on a chartered ride.
Regular Recipe Box contributor Beth Dooley gives tips on how to shop and get the most enjoyment at our local farmers markets. One tip: Make time to chat. Plus she throws in recipes geared toward local produce.
Two of our stories go way back and teach us about our history.
Lesley DuTemple catches up with residents dedicated to keeping the memory of Bishop Frederic Baraga alive … and to shepherding him through Vatican protocol to make him the first official saint connected to Lake Superior. Her story “Snowshoe Saint?” traces a bit of Baraga’s missionary history and zeal more than 150 years ago while updating us on the decades’ long process – under way since 1929 – toward sainthood.
For our story on the Midcontinent Rift, I got a chance to dig even deeper into the Lake region’s past … so far back that Lake Superior was only a twinkle in the universe’s eye. It’s a 1.1 billion-year-old mystery about a rift that started to make an ocean, but ultimately left us with a volcanic base for Lake Superior unique to the Great Lakes.
One more geological card flipped over … and “everything I know about Lake Superior” just got a whole lot larger.