In my March 2023 post about the Great Lakes as the characters of the movie The Breakfast Club, I referred to Lake Huron as the dark horse of the lakes. Despite being the second largest Great Lake, its identity feels less specific, somewhat unknown, perhaps a bit mysterious. I gotta be honest – it took me a while to even find a decent map of the lake to post (feel free to check my googling!). 

Some of this is likely due to the fact that despite having the longest shoreline of all the Great Lakes – almost 3,800 miles – there are only three million people living on or proximate to the lake. There are no large cities on its shores. The west side of the lake is the thumb side of Michigan’s “mitten” with lake waters flowing down towards Detroit where they will pass into the St. Clair river and then on into Lake Erie. Most of the shoreline is in Ontario.

At one point in history, the lake was called La Mer Douce, or “the freshwater sea” by French Explorers. It was later named for the indigenous Huron people who have lived around the lake for centuries. Much of the lake and land surrounding it has remained in a fairly wild state. Like all the Great Lakes, Lake Huron was carved from glaciers. Over time sedimentary and volcanic rocks carved away and what were likely smoother expanses of rock along the shore. Hills and small mountains of jagged rock form what is called the Canadian Shield around the northern side.

Lake Huron has over 30,000 individual islands including the largest freshwater island in the world – Manitoulin (1,068 square miles) – which has over 100 freshwater lakes of its own. The shipping economy on the lake has historically been focused on the lumber industry present in the deep, dense forests north of Lake Huron in Ontario.

The eastern side of the lake is the Georgian Bay, a popular destination for Toronto area residents in the summer months. The bay is created in part by the Bruce Peninsula, home to a popular Canadian national park.

The waters of Lake Huron off the shore of Alpena, Michigan are home to the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which was formally designated and opened in 2000 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Most people are not familiar with our 15 national marine sanctuaries – essentially national parks in bodies of water. Most are dedicated to protection and advocacy of aquatic life, others like Thunder Bay also pay honor to maritime economies. Thunder Bay protects an area home to over 100 historical shipwrecks that can be visited in glass-bottomed boat, kayak, or with scuba gear. It is also home to the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Museum.  

For more things to do along Michigan’s “sunrise coast”, see this article from Midwest Living magazine. As I shared in my post two weeks ago, my daughter and I were lucky to witness daybreak over Lake Huron. It remains a favorite memory of 2023. 

Note: Other than above, credit goes to others for pictures in today’s post.

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Our tour of the Great Lakes continues today. We’re going to move eastward, from the deep, cold, expansive waters of Lake Superior, dropping down into Lake Huron.  

The first weekend of November, my older daughter and I went away for quiet time together. I wanted one more Great Lakes adventure before the winter settled in, and I really hadn’t seen Lake Huron other than acknowledging it as we passed over the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula in July 2022. Many people don’t realize that Lake Huron and Lake Michigan are essentially one body of water, joined at the Straits of Mackinac which you cross on the bridge. Lake Huron is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by surface area but has the longest shoreline, creating an incredibly diverse geography to be explored in a future post.

I wanted to see the sunrise over Lake Huron. With off-season pricing, we rented a small house right on the waters of Saginaw Bay, a little over a four hour drive from Cleveland. 

Saturday morning, we didn’t get much sun. It was cloudy and overcast at dawn. A weather pattern had churned up the water; the visible and audible effect was every bit inland sea with waves rolling onto the small strip of sand in front of the house patio. My daughter was undeterred by the lack of a picturesque sunrise. Sometimes we don’t get sun. Sometimes we get clouds. We can still find joy from huddling together under a blanket, or romping around on the sand, looking at driftwood. We can still look out, beyond, and know that above the clouds, the sun has brought light and another day.

As I look to 2024, I sit with gratitude for some personal and family milestones that will be reached over the year. But I also sit with a heavy heart and an undercurrent of unease while thinking about our global and national realities. 

As former President Barack Obama once said though, “No matter what happens, the sun will rise in the morning”. And some days it will look like it did the next day, on Sunday morning, November 5, 2023. Simply nothing short of a magical gift.

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While I have shared pictures mostly of calm Great Lakes waters, the late fall and early winter each year brings a reminder: The inland seas are dangerous. Since 1979 there are records of over 8,000 boats and thousands of lives lost on the lakes. One of the most recent, famous, and mysterious wrecks was that of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in the waters of Lake Superior. 

The “Fitz” was, when it launched in 1958, the largest ship on the Great Lakes at 729 feet long. It mostly carried iron ore from mines near Duluth, Minnesota to iron factories in Detroit and Toledo.

The ship left Superior, Wisconsin at 4:30 PM on November 9, 1975 bound eventually for Toledo, Ohio. By late that night, conditions had changed from what had been predicted. A storm turned into a November gale with waves greater than 35 feet high reported and near hurricane force winds. A November gale, also sometimes called the November witch, is caused by low atmospheric pressure over the Great Lakes pulling cold arctic air from Canada and warm air from the south. When these two collide they can create substantial, dangerous wind conditions. 

The Fitzgerald remained  in contact with another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, once the storm started. The Fitzgerald came in and out on the radar. The afternoon of November 10th, it reported that two vents were damaged and the boat was taking on water, but said both pumps were working. At 7:10 PM Captain Ernest M. McSorley communicated “we are holding our own”. But by 7:15, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar and never reappeared. All 29 people on board were lost including 15 from Ohio. The wreckage was eventually found about 17 miles from Whitefish Bay and the Sault Ste. Marie area. 

The cause of the wreck remains unknown. The boat lies 530 feet below the surface making exploration and investigation hard. The most common theories from government agencies and industry organizations: (1) The boat “shoaled” on an underwater mountain range, essentially scraping itself and potentially incurring more damage than the crew was aware of; (2) The boat experienced leaking hatches (doors) from faulty or improperly closed clamps; (3) The boat experienced hatch damage caused by unknown debris. 

The event was memorialized and inscribed into cultural knowledge by Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot, who was inspired to write his hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” after reading a Newsweek magazine article about the shipwreck. After the wreck, new regulations and policies were put in place for Great Lakes ships including mandatory survival suits, increased freeboard (height between water level and deck), depth finders and more frequent inspections.

May we keep the memory of the ship and those lost.

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In September 2020, after those months of lockdown, I spent a glorious day visiting my best friend from college. It was one of those visits of the time; we visited almost exclusively outdoors. We were sitting on a bench having a late summer ice cream cone and she said, “You guys might really like this show I’ve been watching. It’s a total delight. It’s called Joe Pera Talks With You and it’s on Adult Swim”. I remember asking her to repeat that last part…  I’d never heard of the streaming service before. But my husband and I hunted it down, and what a gift it was.  

Joe Pera is a comedian with a slow, earnest, mumbly delivery and persona that he seems to retain in all public interactions and presentations; any separate persona seems unknown. Joe Pera Talks With You evolved out of his stand-up comedy, debuting in late 2018. Critics and general watchers praised the show.

In it he plays a gentle middle school choir teacher (named Joe Pera) in Marquette on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (the UP). Each short episode tends to revolve around a topic that Joe is talking with you about. He speaks directly to you, the audience, about things ranging from rocks and minerals to cold weather sports to how to write an obituary. Between monologues on these topics, there are storylines of Joe’s quiet, content life on the UP. We’re with him as a friendship grows into a romantic relationship with a fellow teacher who is also an apocalypse-prepper. Joe’s beloved Nana passes away. Joe navigates a friendship with his neighbors, the Melskys, who are kind and also a little rough around the edges. 

The show is slow, meditative, absurd, funny, off-beat. Frankly, the show is a lot like the UP as I experienced it in our summer 2022 visit. Our visit was inspired in great part by watching the show which was filmed on location in Marquette. One of the best episodes (S3:E1) revolves around Joe helping his friend Gene pick out a new “retirement chair”. When we were in Marquette we were so excited to drive by the furniture store where the episode was filmed. I hope you might have the chance to watch the episode and appreciate its simple joys.

Almost exactly a year ago, the show’s cancellation was announced after the third season. Although we’ve all built a thick skin for the fleeting world of television shows, my friend and I exchanged texts lamenting our collective loss. A New York Times writer in an article on the slate of TV cancellations late in 2022 wrote that the cancellation of Joe Pera Talks With You “stings the most” and concluded with a turn of opinion that remains so memorable to me: “We live in a time of relatively abundant television, and plenty of it is good, but very little of it is special. ‘Joe Pera Talks With You’ was though, a free verse Midwestern ode to tenderness and wonder”.

You can find Joe Pera Talks With You on Max, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

In the first episode of the show Joe stands in front of the Lower Harbor Ore Dock in downtown Marquette explaining the history of iron ore. We felt the same awe and reverence in summer 2022.

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Today I’m starting a series of posts that will take us on a tour of the Great Lakes. We’ll take our time; I will have an introductory post to each lake and then subsequent related posts before moving to the next one. 

We’re going to move west to east, as the waters flow, starting with Lake Superior.

As I wrote in my post “The Great Lakes as The Breakfast Club”, Lake Superior is the largest Great Lake in surface area, the deepest and the coldest. 

In fact, Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake by surface area in the world, and it could hold the water from all four of the other Great Lakes plus three more Lake Eries. It is thus not surprising to learn that the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior is Gitchi-Gami, which translates to “great sea”.

Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan surround Lake Superior. The largest city on the lake is Thunder Bay, Ontario, home of many minor and major league ice hockey players and apparently the birthplace of the 60s rock band Buffalo Springfield “Think it’s time we stop children – what’s that sound… everybody look what’s goin’ down…”. The largest island in Lake Superior is Isle Royale, a national park and the site of one of the most famous ecological experiments in the world – that of the wolves and moose which I wrote about back in June. Lake Superior is large enough that it is rare for it to completely freeze over. 2014 was the last time it came close, with 91% ice coverage. 

I saw Lake Superior for the first time in July 2022 when we visited Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (the UP). We were there during a heat wave and we swam in the lake off Presque Isle Park near Marquette. The water was, even at the height of summer, well, I would use the word invigorating. On the downside, I would describe skin stinging. Positively, I would describe feeling the incredible physical impact and full-body sensation of cold. It absolutely made you feel utterly alive.   

If you are inspired by the idea of this incredible northern inland sea, let yourself indulge in the idea and poke around the Lake Superior Circle Tour Adventure Guide website. The tour is a 1,300 mile self guided tour all the way around the lake. RV trip anyone? Would be amazing.

My greatest Lake Superior fantasy? A future trip I’ve penciled in for Summer 2027 to Duluth, Minnesota (America’s Best Town in America per Outside Magazine in 2021 and home of the Great Lakes Aquarium) and then several days spent kayaking around the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Wisconsin. Can’t wait to see Superior again. 

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Something happened last week that has not happened since 1968. A strike shut down 13 locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway between Lake Erie and Montreal trapping boats in the shipping artery and preventing others from entering on either end. 

brown and white cargo ship

Workers with Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, walked out on October 22nd. They were in a dispute over wages with the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp. A deal was reached one week later on October 29th, but reflecting on the impact of the strike makes clear the under-discussed prowess of the Great Lakes economy.

The Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway carried over $12 billion of cargo in 2022; estimates were that the strike last week caused a loss of $100-110 million per day. On Wednesday, October 25th, Seaway management reported around 115 vessels that were stuck in the St. Lawrence river or Lake Ontario. Other vessels stalled included a U.S. Naval Warship, the littoral combat ship the USS Marinette, that sat in Cleveland’s port waiting to head into international waters.

This is a particularly busy time of year on the Lakes and Seaway given the fall harvest season. Of great concern was the hold-up of grain shipments that were headed to destinations around the globe. Grain shipments from the Great Lakes regions have been growing in recent years. In November 2022, the Great Lakes Seaway Partnership announced that grain shipments were up almost 25% from 2021. This increase is due in part to the war in Ukraine and changing climate patterns in other grain producing areas. 

agriculture arable barley blur

An article in the Detroit Free Press last week during the strike reflected the wide economic impact: “We have grain that feeds the world that’s not moving. We have salt that goes on winter roads for safety that’s not moving. We have iron ore for steelmaking that’s not moving,” said Jason Card, spokesman for the binational Chamber of Marine Commerce in Ottawa.

While an article from Great Lakes Now reflected a very human position: “We want a fair and decent wage that shows the value our members bring. There’s a lot of labor unrest in North America right now and people are sick and tired of the ivory tower people getting everything while the rest of us get peanuts,” said Unifor spokesman John Hockey.

Economic interconnectedness reflects human interconnectedness. Human interconnectedness reflects the ways individual people understand how they, and their talents and labor, matter. May we always remain mindful of this as we navigate our daily lives and communities and ponder wider global dynamics.

abstract close up cobweb connection

Credit for all pictures today: pexels.com

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Earlier this month the Alliance for the Great Lakes Ambassador program (of which I am a part), held a monthly “deep dive” session on environmental justice.

judgement scale and gavel in judge office

According to the US Commission on Civil Rights, environmental justice is: 

… the fair treatment of people of all races, income, and cultures with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their meaningful involvement in the decision-making processes of the government.

The truth is that many people are not afforded access to safe and clean water from the Great Lakes and are not protected from the pollution that is a byproduct of the lake economies, or the adverse dynamics of the lakes and their waterways. Disproportionately affected are low-income communities and communities of color.  

Two storylines from Chicago starkly illustrate this reality.

buildings near body of water

The first is an opinion article on the Alliance’s website from 2019, “Flooding Hits Hardest in Chicago’s Communities of Color”. For a variety of reasons, many Great Lakes cities struggle with stormwater management. Flooding can bring any number of health or economic challenges to individuals already facing many. The article details flooding that occurs in the city’s Southeast neighborhoods during and after severe storms. Some of these neighborhoods are highly industrial and so floodwaters may bring toxic hazards as they run over Superfund and brownfields sites. 

For me, the statistics below speak for themselves: 

{In Chicago} Just thirteen zip codes represent nearly three-fourths of all flood insurance claims. Over three-quarters of a million residents live here – including 200,000 children and 100,000 elderly. Over a quarter of households are below the poverty line. And 93% are households headed by a person of color.

By contrast, seventeen Chicago zip codes had the fewest flood claim payments between 2007 and 2016 (less than one percent combined). Only 30 percent of residents in these areas are people of color.

The second storyline is one I heard though an interview on the Alliance’s podcast, Lakes Chat, in 2022. Oscar Sanchez is the Community Planning Manager with the Southeast Environmental Task Force.

In his role, Mr. Sanchez was part of a group of activists who fought the relocation of General Iron, a metal sheeting company in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago (General Iron has now rebranded as Southside Recycling). General Iron had a large number of violations including for air pollution and questionable operations. The local community (mostly white, more affluent) no longer wanted General Iron as a neighbor. Initially General Iron received support, including incentive funding, from the City of Chicago to relocate to the southeast part of the city (mostly Latino with surrounding Black neighborhoods, not affluent).

But the identified site for relocation was across from a park and a high school and down the street from an elementary school. The local community was a working one where it was hard for people to get involved as they managed day to day struggles. It was, as Mr. Sanchez said, hard for them to fight back, but people were scared. So a coalition of activists from across the community took on the cause. 

After the organized resistance, the city denied the original permit request from General Iron in 2021. This decision was a win for Mr. Sanchez and his local communities in their fight for environmental justice. The win remains a tenuous one; final decisions remain in limbo as General Iron moves their case through the courts (as of September 2023 news articles).

The heart of the matter sits with a question Mr. Sanchez poses in the interview regarding stark differences in city and regional planning and policy between the north side and south side of the city: 

Just because we are poor doesn’t mean we should be treated poorly…  If it’s not good for one community, why is it OK for a different community?    

It’s a worthy question that should be asked again… and again… and again.  

brown leaf
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My mom and I have a 1:1 book club where we read a book at the same time and get together for a couple of videcalls to discuss. We recently read Ann Patchett’s newest novel, Tom Lake, which is set in Northern Michigan. 

opened book

I found one question in a Q & A exchange with Ann Patchett on the blog of the British bookstore Waterstones to be a bit amusing. She was asked “Tom Lake is such a beautiful setting for the novel – is it inspired by anywhere that you have visited?”

She responds: “Yes! The beautiful setting in Traverse City was inspired by beautiful Traverse City, Michigan. I started going there more than twenty years ago when I was sent to the neighboring town of Petoskey, Michigan, on book tour for Bel Canto. Over the years I’ve made close friends in the area. It’s one of my favorite places. When I started writing the book, my friend Erin took me to see a family fruit farm. I wanted to live there.”

Maybe I’ll give the Waterstones writer a little slack since I assume they are British, but it should come as no surprise that beautiful Traverse City (which is named in the novel) was inspired by beautiful Traverse City!

The novel takes place at a summer stock theater on the fictional Tom Lake and on a family cherry farm presumably in the Leelanau County area. As the novel unfolds, the reader becomes familiar with some of the workings of cherry farms, but to learn more, I read a June 2023 article with content developed by Traverse City area Local 9/10 News station about what it takes to grow Michigan’s cherries. 

cherries on a tree
  • 70% of cherries grown in the United States are grown in Michigan totaling over 100M pounds a year. This volume of cherries is valued at about $280M. 
  • There are a number of conditions that make Michigan ideal for growing cherries – notably a soil that drains well. 
  • Maintaining cherry trees is a year-round effort – keeping them protected from mice through the winter, pruning them by hand and fertilizing in the spring, and harvesting in the summer. This can be done by hand or with mechanical shakers.

In the novel, there are a number of characters who are deeply moved by the farm and the land and are eventually shaped by it. This is Ann Patchett’s sweet spot as a writer from my perspective – digging into both the expansiveness and limitations of human emotions and connections. 

Her writing brings the reader there too – laying in the grass, gazing at delicate tree branches and sky with water somewhere not too far away.

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It might seem inconceivable, but I am going to write a post that brings together the topic of the Great Lakes waterway system and Geraldo Rivera.

On August 31, 2023, The New York Times published an article After Fox News, Geraldo Rivera Boats into the Sunset (via Cleveland). The article details Geraldo’s recent journey on his 36-foot luxury motorboat “Belle” from East Hampton, NY, around Manhattan, and into the Hudson River to a route that eventually brought his boat to a marina in Cleveland on Lake Erie. Many of you may not know that Geraldo is one of the more prominent celebrities currently living in Cleveland.

The 8-day journey took Geraldo, his brother, and Belle, through the Erie Canal and 36 locks that would help climb the boat over 600 feet from the waters of the Hudson to Lake Erie. Apparently Geraldo, according to the article, “loves canals”. Who would have guessed?

The article proceeds to intertwine the boat journey with a retrospective of his career (giving credit where due – it’s really an impressive career). But the article reminded me of a question that, not being from a maritime background, I’ve had for a while: How do locks exactly work?

Locks were a very early invention to solve a challenging issue: How do you move boats through a waterway that has elevation change? The earliest basic lock technology dates to China, approximately 900 AD, with the first canal pound lock technology dating to 1373 in the Netherlands. Most locks are built around a watertight container called a lock chamber. There are gates at both ends. Both gates close and a filling valve opens to allow the lock chambers to fill and an emptying valve allows the chamber to empty. Boats can be raised or lowered by the chamber either filling or emptying. 

Geraldo traveled through the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, and connected the Great Lakes region to the Hudson River. Two years later in 1827 the Ohio & Erie Canal opened to connect Lake Erie to the Mississippi River and in 1829 the Welland Canal opened to solve the challenge of moving boats around Niagara Falls. 

river between brown leafed trees during daytime

The canals were incredible engineering feats of their time. Pause to consider the human labor involved in that era. While they all have had modifications made in the past 200 years, their width and depth still limit the size of ship that can pass through. This led to the Great Lakes vocabulary of “salties” and “lakers”. Salties are ocean-going ships that in the earliest era were able to pass through the Welland Canal, now part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Lakers are too large, and stay in the lakes, running cargo between Great Lakes ports where it often travels by train thereafter.

While I don’t boat, I could understand Geraldo’s decision at a life turning point to seek a physical passage that would perhaps facilitate an emotional one. I wish him “plain sailing” in the years to come (derived from nautical term meaning: smooth and easy, as in a course of action or future path).

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My family ushered in the summer Memorial Day weekend with a day trip to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. We closed it out Labor Day weekend with a day trip to Toledo and the National Museum of the Great Lakes. My takeaway from the visit: Immense respect for the role the Great Lakes region played in economy and nation building during the industrial era of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. The work that happened here was dirty, dangerous, and with hindsight there are plenty of criticisms to lay at the feet of industrialization. But it was an era of ambition and sacrifice and this region, with a variety of rich resources, drove much of the growth and evolution. It was iron ore, coal and limestone that shifted the arc of the industrial age and the Lakes provided the means to move raw material as well as the steel that would build vehicles, railways, infrastructure and eventually skyscrapers across the United States. 

The museum has exhibits on exploration and settlement of the region, expansion and industry, safeguard and support, shipwrecks and safety, and maritime technology. Topics that particularly caught my interest and are worthy of their own posts: the history and role of the U.S. Coast Guard in the region; icebreaking in the Lakes to preserve shipping channels; and the Great Lakes most famous shipwreck – the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior in November of 1975. Stay tuned!

By coming in the summer months, we could also tour two boats docked in the Maumee River next to the museum – the Col. James M. Schoonmaker and the Ohio. The Schoonmaker particularly makes an impression. It’s enormous, austere, and stalwart. At 619 feet long and with a carrying capacity of 12,200 gross tons, it’s not hard to imagine the cavernous cargo hold filled with coal, grains and minerals as the boat plows through Great Lakes waters on routes from Duluth to Detroit to Toledo and back.

Before heading home we had a late lunch at the nationally famous Tony Packo’s Cafe. The restaurant is known for its Hungarian food and over 1,000 hot dog buns signed by celebrities and politicians over the past 50 years that adorn the walls (spoiler: the signed buns look real, but are fake). The restaurant was originally made famous by the character Corporal Maxwell Klinger in M*A*S*H, who referenced Tony Packo’s six times in the series (the actor Jamie Farr was from Toledo). 

The Midwest is often the brunt of jokes, overlooked, or underappreciated. It’s a region with numerous challenges of a wide variety. But it is a place – one with character, heart, and a rich history that I want my girls to know, analyze, and respect. 

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