My husband and I moved to Cleveland in 2014. That fall we had a BBQ with some new Cleveland friends, one of whom was stationed here with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Partway through the evening, someone posed a question: What if the Great Lakes were the characters of the classic 1986 John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club about five teenagers serving detention one Saturday?  Which lake would be which character?

Without any hesitation, the group dove into serious analysis. Here is where we landed, with some context on the five characters given the movie is almost 38 years old.

Lake Michigan: Claire Standish as played by Molly Ringwald

The rich, popular lake. Molly Ringwald’s character was perceptibly “the princess”, but one who struggled with peer pressure to be perfect. It seems possible to say that Lake Michigan might feel that same way. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources in 2017, the most visited parks in the Great Lakes region are on Lake Michigan. Chicago, sitting on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan, is arguably the most well-known, and is the most densely populated Great Lakes city. And while the state of Michigan’s slick, well-known tourism marketing campaign “Pure Michigan” aims to promote the entire state, people invariably associate it with Lake Michigan and some of its shinier resort towns on its eastern coastline (think South Haven, Charlevoix).

Lake Superior: Andrew Clark as played by Emilio Estevez 

The jock of the lakes – the coldest, deepest and largest. The most populous city on Lake Superior is Thunder Bay, Ontario, a place known for producing college and professional hockey players. Lake Superior is a solid lake – but it’s also volatile, like Emilio Estevez’s character. Late fall is storm season and the lake can become rough, turbulent and angry. The largest waves ever recorded on the lake were 28.8 feet (8.8. meters) high (recorded October of 2017) and one of the most famous shipwrecks in Great Lakes history happened when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior in 1975.

Lake Ontario: Brian Johnson as played by Michael Anthony Hall

The smallest and most cerebral of the lakes. Ontario has a neat, tight shoreline and is not known for beautiful beaches like some of the other lakes. But it has a hip side with the gem city of Toronto on its northern shores. Like Michael Anthony Hall’s character in the movies, it’s small, but has ambitions for something larger: the waters of Lake Ontario flow into the St. Lawrence River, pass by Montreal and Quebec City and out into the Atlantic Ocean. 

Lake Huron: John Bender as played by Judd Nelson

The dark horse of the lakes. Potentially the least discussed, it is the second largest of the Great Lakes with tremendous variety in terrain including over 30,000 islands, many of them in the Georgian Bay. There are over 1,000 shipwrecks sitting on the bottom of Lake Huron due to the varied geography and potential for storms. There is also a petrified forest of trees over 7,000 years old in the vicinity of Lexington, Michigan. In sum: A lake of great variety and unknown inner depths just like the rough, but somewhat misunderstood, character of the movie.      

Lake Erie: Allison Reynolds as played by Ally Sheedy

The basket case of the lakes. The black sheep. The shallowest of the Great Lakes by far, Lake Erie has been prone to challenges, most notoriously ones created by pollutants of different kinds (algal blooms, fires near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland due to industrial pollutants). But, like Ally Sheedy’s character in the movie, cut back those bangs and wash out that dandruff and she can clean up well. Lake Erie’s health absolutely remains threatened, but there are also remarkable stories of renewal and it is currently the strongest fishing arena in the Great Lakes – something many people don’t realize.

The Breakfast Club closes with a voiceover reading of a letter the group wrote while in detention. In the letter they ask the school principal to see more expansively their traits and talents both individually and as a group. I like to think the five Great Lakes would make the same ask of all of us.