Off Kilter
An ode to the odd, strange, and just plain weird happenings in these Apostle Islands.
The size and power of Lake Superior is nearly unfathomable — 360 miles long, containing 2,900 cubic miles (3 quadrillion gallons) of water, fully 10% of the world’s liquid freshwater supply and half of all the water contained in the Great Lakes. If you gathered enough scoundrels, trouble-makers, and ne’er-do-wells to tip its edge like a dinner plate, the lake would spill out sufficient water to cover the entire land area of North and South America up to the tops of your mud boots. If you untangled its shoreline like a twisted fishing line, you could tie one end to Duluth and the other to the Bahamas. It’s blue eye outline is so large it is visible from space. It takes the sunrise a full half hour to cross it end-for-end.
And on and on (one enterprising statistician even figure out that if you were to drink a half a gallon of Lake Superior water every day, it would still take you 16 trillion years to empty it , and another that it would take a Zamboni 693 years of constant running to resurface the lake’s ice like a hockey rink). There is no shortage of weird statistics attesting to the size and power of the greatest of the great, Great Lakes.
There is a power, almost planetary in its scope, that beats in the heart of Lake Superior. So, it is not at all surprising that there have been, and continue to be, strange, unexplainable events on the big lake.
So in this edition of the Little Dipper I will begin an on-going and occasional series of reports about strange doings and weird happenings on the lake and in the islands. Some may be amusing. Some, frankly, a little disturbing, but all of them touch on how we as humans struggle to wrap our minds around a geographical feature like Lake Superior leaving us standing on the shore with our mouth open, scratching our heads, and saying “hmmm.”
One such event occurred on a calm August morning in 1925. The waters of Lake Superior were as quiet as a church mouse – still, blue, as calm as something sleeping. The freighter the John Dunne, Jr. carrying 9,000 tons of ore was gliding seamlessly, or so it seemed, in the lullaby waters of the Apostle Islands between Devils Island and Outer Island, downbound from Duluth making just under 10 knots.
What happened next has never been explained. Here’s the way it was told by Detroit News reporter Stella M. Champney years after the event:
“… an upheaval from below tossed the 400-foot freighter and the 9,000 tons of ore she was carrying four inches out of the water and left the crew shaken and bewildered. The story was verified for me by H. Otis Smith, chief engineer on the ship that was lifted like a chip by that mysterious subterranean explosion. ‘There was a roar like a clap of THUNDER,’ Smith said, ‘and the ship rose upwards as if the back of some huge monster and then settled down again. The water boiled around the ship in a great white churning billows, then spread out in an ever-widening circle as waves will when a stone is thrown in calm water.
I ran down to the engine room, thinking something had let go. Everything was in order. An oiler came up from below, his face like chalk, ‘What blew up?’ he asked. ‘Did we hit something?’
Men swarmed about. Some of them had been thrown out of their beds by the shock. They ran here and there, trying to discover the cause.’
There was no answer. The sea was like glass a moment before, not a breath of air stirring. It was like a bolt from a clear sky.”
Captain N.B. Roach gathered his crew and warned, “We’ll just be laughed at if we report an earthquake out in Lake Superior.” He urged them to “say nothing about this.”
It was years before anyone on the crew leaked the story to the press. Even then, no reasonable explanation for what happened was ever confirmed.
The final tale in today’s offering is one of those “so-hard-to-believe-it-has-to-be-true” kinds of stories that proves the luck of fishermen, so incredible, I offer it without commentary quoted verbatim from a National Park Service document entitled “Hokenson Fishing Dock: Historic Resource Study, February, 1984” and I quote:
“In 1923 two Apostle Island fishermen had a very narrow escape. T. S. Coville of Ashland and Alec Riken of Bayfield were fishing out on the ice near Madeline Island in late April of that year. Suddenly they became aware that the spring thaw was causing their ice floe to drift off toward the middle of Lake Superior. Even though they had to abandon their automobile, fortune was on their side as the ice floe drifted past Outer Island and they were able to get ashore. They took shelter in the Outer Island Lighthouse and waited for rescue. But after two days the wind direction changed and they saw the ice floe returning with their automobile still standing on the surface. As the prevailing wind was stiff and steady toward the mainland, they climbed back onto the ice and were able to drive their vehicle home to Ashland.”
As long as there are humans living, working, and recreating on a lake so large it nearly defies our ability to grasp its power, there will be no shortage of strange tales to tell.
So, stay tuned for more in future installments of “Off Kilter” and use the comment section to tell me your strange tales of the big lake.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photos by the author unless otherwise noted)
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