The November 1910 issue of Power Boating magazine included a photo from Duluth’s ship canal.
The caption reads:
Elvina, a 53-foot gasoline freighter, “beating it” out of Duluth harbor on her way to Cornucopia, 40 miles across Lake Superior, which she makes back and forth every day in the season. With 40 tons of freight and passengers, as shown in the photo, she makes ten miles an hour. Her power plant equipment is a four-cylinder, Campbell, 40-horsepower machine.
Not long after I disembarked from the research vessel Blue Heron in June, it was announced that a new form of life had been discovered inside the propeller shaft. A life form, hidden inside the extreme environment of the engine, cold and dark — it feels like how the Venom movies started. It feels maybe a little Lovecraftian, maybe, this shapeless life form, in the black goo.
My colleagues laugh at me for thinking in such melodramatic terms. But really, ever since that ride, I just keep learning how cripplingly limited my understanding of Lake Superior, and of our relationship to it, really was. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.
Finding the Blue Heron
The Blue Heron is docked in Superior on Montreal Pier, a research facility maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Superior. The site itself is a weird mishmash of history. The Montreal Pier, Quebec Pier and Allouez Bay are all a reminder of the deep affect French Jesuits and fur traders had on the Superior region.
By the early twentieth century, these piers were incredible sites of commerce. Superior was in competition with the Minneapolis area as the center of wheat and grain production, and several major companies built grain elevators and mills on the piers — Lake Superior Mills, Anchor, Listman, Cargill, and Belt Line. Most of these structures were destroyed in fires. …
Images taken over the span of a few minutes as dark rollers split off the main cloud bank like sideways funnel clouds, conflicting air masses in turbulence. (This kind of thing scared the heck out of me when I first moved here.) …
Local YouTuber Vibe with Mike took a ride on the Duluth Fire Department’s fireboat.
