Lake Superior Profiles: People on the Big Lake

Preface

Preface Igrew up on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Keweenaw pokes a gnarled finger northeast into Lake Superior, which locals call “the big lake.” We kids visited a camp at Little Traverse Bay, on the south shore of the Keweenaw, where we smoked driftwood—the size of crayons , with dry, punky hearts that burned like tobacco—and thought we were big shots. We scurried across the dry beach sand (hot enough to cook a hot dog) to the hard and cool wet sand (where the waves erased our footprints in an instant). We took saunas and ran naked through the trees and down to the beach and into the cold water that took our breath away. We rowed around the bay in a three-person skiff just to see how far out we could see bottom on a calm, clear day. It is hard to judge the depth of water. Twenty feet? Forty feet? It was deep. We’d peer over the side, shielding our eyes from the glare of the sun. In all that water, on all those days, we never saw a fish. In the dark of night we made dancing bonfires. At night we slept like babies. We took the lake’s measure by throwing or skipping rocks. We knew from school that we lived on the largest freshwater lake in the world, but that meant nothing. We were just kids with no sense of perspective. We thought it was a big deal to do belly floppers in the city pool in Milwaukee. It took living in Detroit to make me appreciate a slow pace, a quiet winter forest, and a vast lake. In the city, I learned to tune out the noise. Back in Upper Michigan, I had to listen hard to tune back in to the birdsong and breezes—and the people with a link to the water. I knew a man who lay on the shore ice with a soup ladle taped to a broomstick, digging for agates; an ice fisherman who sounded the depths with a piece of sucker and a hook and said, “Everybody’s different but basically they’re all the same”; and a crusty old mariner who told me, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.” This book recounts the stories of some of these folks. “They’re ordinary people,” I told a recreational sailor from Thunder Bay. xii % preface “I don’t know any ordinary people,” he said. Waino Asunmaa is eighty-four and lives in Calumet, Michigan. He quit school after the eighth grade to go to work with his father, Ansel Asunmaa. Ansel, a big strapping fisherman, drowned off Betsy Location, on the south side of the Keweenaw, near the town of Gay, when Waino was fourteen. Ordinarily, Waino would have been out on the lake with his dad, but he had stayed behind that day preparing to boil and clean the nets when his father had lifted them and brought them in. “He wasn’t showing up,” Waino recalls, “so I went to the neighbor’s. I told ’im, ‘Geez, my dad’s been out there a long time. There’s gotta be something wrong.’ So we went out there, and the boat was there, but my dad wasn’t in it.” He and his father lived in a shack at Betsy, on property owned by somebody else. When Waino’s father disappeared, the owner kicked Waino out. “Get out of Betsy!” So Waino dismantled his dad’s shack, hauled the lumber to Pumphouse Location a few miles southwest, built a net house, slept in his boat, and continued fishing. A family took him in. “They didn’t want me living inside the boat, under that teepee for keeping the rain away.” He fished for three years. Then he lied about his age and went into the service in World War II. When he returned, he worked as a miner and fished part-time, then ten years later got back into fishing “in a bigger way,” going after herring, which brought a penny a pound, and chubs, which brought 2 cents a pound. One time Waino was fishing near Stannard Rock, south of Keweenaw Point, where there was a lighthouse, and his helper remarked that there weren’t any life preservers. “Sure there’s life jackets,” Waino told him. “Go up in the bow there. Bring one of them chains.” Waino meant lengths of...