Brian Barber
The Old Man and the Inland Sea
In his fishing skiff, he had no protection. The blasts of offshore wind hit him hard as he left the rocky shore behind and entered the open waters of Lake Superior.
In the open 17-foot boat, the Old Man shivered, even dressed in his heavy oilskins and his multiple layers of wool clothing. He knew that the storm that was coming on could be one of the worst for Minnesota North Shore fishermen – an offshore wind from the north-northwest.
The temperature was 6 degrees and dropping fast this bitter November 26, 1958 – the day before Thanksgiving. The 62-year-old Helmer Aakvik could make out ahead of him a line of fishing buoys, bending in the strong winds. Aakvik cupped his hands to his eyes to give him better vision, but he saw no sign of his fishing partner, 26-year-old Carl Hammer. Nor had “The Kid” tied his boat to one of the sturdy buoys – a standard practice in case of engine troubles.
Not good. The Old Man grabbed a buoy and waited a minute. He made his decision: He turned off his own engine and he let go the buoy.
By drifting his own skiff without power, he could figure out which way and how fast Carl was moving in the storm’s waves and wind. Obviously, The Kid had engine troubles and was now being carried farther out into the middle of Lake Superior.
Minutes passed and the Old Man restarted his outboard and roared ahead. When he was 8 miles out, he let his boat idle atop a tall wave crest. He could see for miles, but there still was no sign of Hammer.
With his engine idling, he heard an odd sound. The waves whistled – he’d never heard that sound before. This was bad.
Suddenly, his outboard started to splutter, and then die, and he saw his engine was white with ice. He had been using his elderly Lockport outboard without its cover and the entire engine had been splashed with spray, which had frozen.
He wound up the starting cord, gave it a hard pull, and the old engine wheezed several times. Again and again, he ran through the starting drill. But the ice-encrusted engine would not start.
He sat back for a moment, weary. His newer 14-horsepower, two-cylinder Johnson two-cycle lay in the skiff’s floorboards, now partly awash with icy water. Carefully, he lifted the old engine from the stern and then slid the Johnson prop-first in its place. He wiped his face and discovered that perspiration had turned to ice. His hat had a rime of white around it.
He yanked hard on the starter cord, but there was not even an encouraging whuff or slight backfire. Despite his efforts, his second engine wouldn’t start.
A rogue wave reared over the boat, swamping it. Desperately, he bailed, but his boat was riding too low in the water. He felt a twinge of regret. The elderly Lockport had been his faithful fishing companion for years. With reluctance, he threw it overboard.
Immediately, his boat lifted an inch or two.
He had to fix his remaining engine, but he did not have any tools with him – just an ax. He took off his gloves, baring his skin to the frozen metal, and twisted the gas line off by hand. No gas was coming out; his line had frozen. There had been water in the gas.
The Old Man stuck the gas line in his mouth to melt the ice. The raw rubber, soaked in gasoline, made him gag, but after a half hour, he blew hard on one end.
The ice block popped out. The line was free.
It was growing dark as he reattached the gas line. With a roar, the two-cylinder Johnson came to life, and the Old Man headed for a shore he could not see. Pounding into the wave trains, the old skiff took a terrible beating, with its planks flexing and beginning to separate. The screws holding them to the frames were pulling out.
The Old Man had built this boat himself with wood he had cut in his own small northwoods sawmill. He had faith in the boat, but it was old and punky and now there was nothing left to do but turn off the engine. Without power, his boat was no longer being pounded to pieces, but it was cocking sideways to the waves; breakers were splashing over the side. Reaching down in the skiff’s bilge, he picked some rope out of the half-frozen slurry and tied it to a wooden fishing crate. With a splash, the 50-pound crate sank part way into the waves, receding from his drifting boat.
He felt a tug on the rope and watched as the bow swung around.
His improvised sea anchor was working. His boat was riding to the waves with its bow cocked at a slight angle to them – its best sea-keeping position.
Now, alone and unprotected, he could only bow his head to the growing fury of the storm. He could do no more.
Brian Barber
The Old Man and the Inland Sea
In the small fishing community of Hovland, Minnesota, about 17 miles south of the U.S.-Canadian border, the families grew desperate. Anguished and feeling helpless, they only could look out over Lake Superior’s broken seas and imagine the terrible ordeal of the men in the open boats.
The storm was getting worse. Answering the call for help, the U.S. Coast Guard’s 36-foot lifeboat plowed northward from Grand Marais. When it arrived at Hovland, it rode eight inches lower in the water because of ice covering the boat. They had been fighting waves that averaged 15 feet in height. By evening the wind howled at nearly 50 miles per hour.
From near Isle Royale, steaming hard into the teeth of the storm, the steel U.S. Coast Guard cutter Woodrush arrived to begin the search for the lost men, but as temperatures neared the zero mark, ice built on its topsides, making the vessel dangerously heavy. Several times the crew had to return to harbor to chop off ice.
Darkness fell early. Along the shore, the little Norwegian fishing community prayed that the Old Man and The Kid, each huddled alone in their small boats, would survive the night. Earlier, local fishermen had been out searching.
Waves came like dark walls out of the night. They rose high and crashed into the old boat and the Old Man could feel its agony. Somehow, it survived the onslaughts, although it seemed that only the growing coat of ice held it together.
He had been out in his open boat more than 16 hours, and he had nothing to eat or drink. His face was painfully cold, as were his hands. His foot, where the boot had cracked and water had come in, was numb. He felt his toes freezing.
Spray continuously washed over the skiff’s bow, crusting it with more ice. If ice built up too much, he knew, his small boat would get top heavy and roll over in the waves. Thankful he had taken his hatchet along, the Old Man reached forward as far as he could from his seat and began chopping ice off his boat.
His mind drifted during the long night, and he repeatedly thought about what had happened. In a rush to check the nets that morning before the holiday, The Kid probably wore his light work clothes, the way he usually did. He was probably just going out for a quick dash to the nets and then back again. Carl had not filtered his gasoline for water, which froze in the fuel line. He didn’t carry a hatchet.
The Old Man thought of Carl in his light clothing, caught out in this offshore storm, with no power, nothing to chop away the ice, and with his boat getting lower in the water as all that spray came aboard and froze.
The Old Man bent his head into the wind. Carl probably just slumped down with the cold and the fatigue and went to sleep. In these seas, the boat probably turned sideways and, top heavy with ice, rolled over. He hoped the end came gently.
The Old Man dared not sleep. It would be easy to slump, to bend his head down to his chest, as if in prayer, and let the motion of the skiff rock him into slumber.
To sleep was to die. The Old Man caught himself. Once again he sat bolt upright.
Off in the distance, flashes of light bounced off the headlands of Hovland. Those were his rescuers, he thought, but there was no way to tell them that he was farther out from shore. A lot farther.
He wondered if they’d even see him if they got close. His skiff was covered with ice, and his oilskins were coated in ice. His feet were encased in ice, also; even his fingertips had icicles hanging from their tips. But the Old Man had a little secret: the ice encapsulation kept him warm. It sealed up his oilskins with an extra layer of protection and kept out the surf spray and the wind.
Brian Barber
The Old Man and the Inland Sea
The moon came out. The Old Man looked up to admire the beauty of the spray by moonlight. It glistened white, surreal and ethereal around him.
He saw something else gleaming white in the water.
Ice chunks had begun to surround his boat.
At dawn, Lake Superior was covered with heavy steam and the Old Man waited patiently. When the weak sun rose out in the east, he’d get a bearing to head home to the hills of Hovland. But he couldn’t move: his oilskins had frozen to the wooden seat and his boots had frozen in the bottom of the boat. The bow glittered white with ice a foot thick.
Cracking ice chunks off his oilskins, he twisted to see that ice coated the outboard’s flywheel. The rope wouldn’t fit in the starting pulley. The starter rope was frozen hard.
Cautiously, he hammered ice off the outboard, and, with his uncovered hands, he worked a starter rope strand into flexibility. Carefully, he wound two strands around the starting pulley. He kept his fingers moving so they would not freeze to the metal. The strands just fit, and he put his mitts back on his numb hands. He said a silent prayer and yanked. With a puff of blue smoke, the old engine chuffed into life.
Slowly, the skiff plowed homeward. The bow was so heavy with ice that it barely kept buoyant. He managed to keep the engine running for about six hours. When he was within sight of land, but 6 or 7 miles from shore, the engine finally stalled and quit.
He checked his fuel supply. Out of gas.
The Old Man swallowed his pride and loosened the setscrews that held the outboard to the transom and watched sadly as the Johnson slipped overboard. It was lost forever, but the boat was lighter.
The shoreline was tantalizingly close. He thought about rowing.
As the Coast Guard lifeboat plowed through the fog banks, its crew grew increasingly worried. The bow crunched through ice and the temperature hovered around zero degrees. Even if the lost men had survived the storm, the cold and heavy ice could have taken down their small boats.
“There!” a crewmember yelled.
Above the layer of lake steam, something bobbed up.
His face and beard were glistening with frost, his hat was coated with white, and his oilskin suit was encased in ice. It was the Old Man.
He was stiff with cold, covered with ice from head to toe and frozen to his wooden seat. Even his feet had frozen to the floorboards – but he had survived.
With care, they chopped him free and lifted him out of his skiff. When he was aboard, they fed him hot coffee – his first drink in 29 hours.
As they came into harbor, cheering rolled across the waves.
Brian Barber
The Old Man and the Inland Sea
The Old Man looked around, amazed.
“There must have been a hundred people there,” he recalled. Though he was having trouble moving, he still shrugged off offers of help.
“I can still walk,” he said. “I’m no cripple.”
He managed to gulp down an egg sandwich and drink a pint of hot coffee, but declined any special help.
“As if I needed a hospital,” the Old Man snorted. “I only froze two toes.”
The Old Man turned down a helicopter ride and insisted on sitting up in the ambulance. He was treated for frozen toes and frostbite. His hands were swollen from being exposed. A doctor pronounced him as being in excellent shape, with normal blood pressure.
There was no word of Carl Hammer, and there never would be. He disappeared into the Inland Sea.
Many news people interviewed the Old Man and, one asked if he prayed to his God for help during the long night.
“No,” he said, “there’s some things a man has to do for himself.”
Few words were as sweet to the Old Man as those of his neighbor, Elmer Jackson. Before Aakvik had gone out on his search, he had promised Jackson: “Don’t you worry, the Old Man will be back.”
In the hospital, Elmer Jackson came to the Old Man’s bedside and said, respectfully: “You are a man of your word.”
A few years ago, I headed off Highway 61 going north and climbed in third gear into the hills overlooking Lake Superior. There it was, a practically unmarked cemetery in the midst of a grassy meadow, surrounded by tall pine trees. The sun was down at a slant in the late afternoon, casting long shadows into the grass – and onto the small granite tombstones.
It was not hard to find the final resting place of the Old Man near the pine trees, at the northern edge. Today, a light wind swept through the foliage, gently rustling the pine bows and sweeping onto the clearing with a northwoods scent.
His headstone was simple carved granite, recording that he had been born 18 August 1896 and had died 11 January 1987. In the upper left was a ship’s steering wheel, and a small saying had been carved at the bottom of the stone:
Home from the cruel sea
and in a peaceful harbor.
I looked at the earth below my feet, and I knew what was down there: Helmer was resting at last in a plain wooden coffin, nothing fancy. It was fitted with rope handles and his name had been carved on the coffin. But the Old Man’s coffin had a keel and a compass rose on the lid, like a proper boat.
That was so he could, as he put it, “steer a straight course to the stars.”
Heroism & Tragedy
The heroism of Helmer Aakvik and the tragic loss of Carl Hammer are not rare among commercial fishermen along the shores of Lake Superior, says Carrie McHugh, director of the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum in Tofte, Minnesota. She researched such stories and found that getting caught alone in a storm on the Lake happened more often than one might hope.
“It was a dangerous job,” she says. “The best time to go fishing was the worst time to be out on the Lake.”
Carrie used her interviews with fishermen and families of fishermen for her master’s thesis and now the work is available to see at the museum in Tofte. The museum also has an exhibit that includes Helmer Aakvik telling the story of that night in his own words.
These museums focus on commercial fishing:
North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum, 7136 Highway 61, Tofte, Minnesota, 218-663-7804, www.commercialfishingmuseum.org. Open year-round.
Bayfield Maritime Museum in Bayfield, Wisconsin, on First Street between the Coast Guard Station and City Hall, 715- 779-3925, www.facebook.com/BayfieldMaritimeMuseum. Open June through mid-September.
Marlin Bree is the award-winning writer of books and articles, often based around Lake Superior. A longer version of this story can be found in Marlin’s book Broken Seas: True Tales of Extraordinary Seafaring Adventures. The tale of Marlin’s own encounter with Lake Superior’s wrath is told in his book Wake of the Green Storm: A Survivor’s Tale.