Blue Highways: Somewhere on Lake Michigan

Unfolding the Map

On the high seas...or at least the high lakes!  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) takes the ferry from Kewaunee to Elberta, and we're on deck with him, watching Wisconsin grow more distant in the early afternoon.  I'm putting us right square equidistant between Michigan and Wisconsin, so get your soundings at the map.

Book Quote

"On the aft deck I took a seat and watched Wisconsin get smaller.  I had long wondered whether all shorelines disappear on a clear day in the middle of Lake Michigan (the name means 'big water').  I would soon find out."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 13

The Ann Arbor No. 7, later renamed Viking, transported William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) across Lake Michigan from Kewaunee, Wisconsin to Elberta, Michigan shortly before it stopped running for good. Photo at the the Gallery at Pasty.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Somewhere on Lake Michigan

In the short list of things that terrify and fascinate me (spiders, certain types of heights), I'm going to add a couple more.  I know why I have one of these small phobias, but not the other.

Deep water terrifies and fascinates me, but only in a certain sense.  Have you ever been out on a lake or in an ocean, and you jump overboard for a swim, and you realize that your feet are simply dangling and you have no way of knowing where the bottom is?  It isn't the water that terrifies me, but the sudden realization that there's an unknown depth below and anything could be in that unknown depth.  For some reason, that just sends a chill up my spine.  I don't think that's a fear that is unexplainable.  Water is really not a human element, though our makeup is over three-quarters of the stuff.  To me, swimming in an unknown depth is like free-falling in slow motion, or being suspended over clouds off an unknown height where you cannot gauge how high you are.

The other thing that terrifies me, for reasons I cannot fathom (oh, that pun was so intended!), is the sides of ships.  But it's not just the side - if I look at a ship straight on or from a distance, I am fine.  No, the part that terrifies me is imagining that I might be in the water next to the side of a ship.  I think about being in the shadow of that huge thing, with my legs suspended and dangling over an unknown depth, before I'm sucked under the ship and into the propellors.

Mind you, I don't think about these things often.  They are not an obsessive phobia.  And they are not debilitating.  I will still jump off a boat in the middle of a lake to swim despite my uneasiness.  But when I do think about them, I get a shiver and that hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I bring this up because Lake Michigan is a huge, deep lake.  LHM wonders just how big it is and before he gets sidetracked by a story told by a fellow passenger on the ferry intends to put it to a test and see if the land disappears completely, leaving him surrounded by water.  There is something magical and forlorn in watching land disappear from the deck of a ship.  The only time I've experienced it is on the ferry from Le Havre, France to Rosslare, Ireland.  I was so excited and fearful of getting seasick (another slight phobia) that the uniqueness of my situation was lost on me at the time.  My imagination has filled in the gaps, though.  The land, the anchor to the world, dissolves into the horizon or perhaps mist off the water.  At that point, which I have experienced, the movement of the ship is betrayed only by the sound of the engines, the movement of air over the ship and the ship's wake.  Otherwise, like a lonely swimmer, you seem suspended between water and sky and often at the mercy of the water, until the farther shore materializes in front of you.

I believe I wrote this story before, about not realizing the size of Lake Michigan from a map.  On my first trip to the Midwest I had to take a puddle jumper from Chicago to Benton Harbor, Michigan.  I expected a short flight.  After all, it was only over a lake.  We took off from O'Hare Airport, flew out over downtown Chicago, and then out over the lake.  30 minutes later, we were still over the lake.  It was only my second flight and I began to wonder if we were lost when the land appeared below us and we touched down.  Later, when I lived in Milwaukee, I loved heading to the lakefront, because the vastness of the water reminded me of being on the ocean where I grew up.

The other theme in this passage is the ferry.  LHM might have been one of the last few people to take this ferry because it ceased running in 1982 after 90 years of service.  The ship, the Viking, was known originally as the Ann Arbor No. 7 and was renamed after it was rebuilt.  The Ann Arbor Railroad train ferries originally ran between Kewaunee, Wisconsin and Elberta, Michigan and expanded to other cities on upper Lake Michigan.

In the chapter, LHM remarks how small Ghost Dancing looks next to the boxcars on board, and when he hears some clanking down below hopes that the boxcar hasn't shifted in some way and crushed his van.  The boxcars were actually loaded onto the ferries, taken across the lake, and then disembarked onto tracks there to continue their railway journeys.  Without the ferries, the route would take much longer and therefore be much more expensive.  I did a quick Google Maps route and found that by car, getting from Kewaunee to Elberta would take about eight and a half hours.  By boat, that would be at least cut in half, and by the time LHM took the ferry, it might have been only 3 hours.

Though the Kewaunee ferry has ended, I am happy to say that there is still ferry service on Lake Michigan from Wisconsin.  The Lake Express has been billed as American's first high speed ferry line, and it runs from Milwaukee to Muskegon, Michigan.  It appears to be one of those sleek, double hulled catamarans and the website says it does about 40 miles per hour (34 knots) during the 2 and one-half hour trip.  The ship has been sailing since 2004.  The Lake Michigan Carferry runs between Manitowoc, Wisconsin to Ludington, Michigan.  The ship, the S.S. Badger, appears to be more of a conventional style ferry that plied the Great Lakes.  The website touts her as the biggest ferry to ever sail the Great Lakes and did so from 1953 until 1990, when she was tied up in Michigan.  An entrepreneur bought her in 1991 and had her refurbished, and began running her again shortly afterward.  The cruise takes four hours.

A Great Lakes or ocean ferry is a great way to get a nautical experience without having to endure days at sea, and if you pick the route right, you can get a little of everything.  Sometimes there are big waves and big excitement, sometimes calm seas and relaxation.  Perhaps, if you're lucky, you'll catch that magical point just as the land disappears from view and you too are suspended between water and sky on your personal chariot between space and time.

Musical Interlude

You won't believe that there aren't many songs about ferries.  You would think that given their importance to our nation's history and growth, there'd be more written about these forms of transportation.  However, I was only able to find one fun song by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters celebrating the the Black Ball Ferries. If you have any other suggestions, Littourati, let me know.

Black Ball Ferry Line

If you want to know more about Lake Michigan and the history of the railroad ferries

Carferry.com
Classic Trains Magazine: Lake Michigan Carferries
Great Lakes Information Network: Lake Michigan
Lake Michigan Circle Tour
Railroad History of Central Wisconsin: A Lifelong Love of Lake Michigan Railroad Car Ferries
RRHX: Railroad Car Ferries
Wikipedia: Ann Arbor Railroad
Wikipedia: Lake Michigan
Wikipedia: Train Ferry
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources: Lake Michigan

Next up: Elberta, Michigan

Blue Highways: New Bern, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe ride a ferry with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) to New Bern, a place where an invention by a pharmacist has repercussions for all of our health, dental hygiene, and Super Bowl entertainment during time-outs.  Click on the map to orient yourselves, and leave a comment if you'd like - you're always welcome to do so.

Book Quote

"I didn't want to drive the route I'd come the day before, so I headed toward the free ferry across the Pamlico River above where it enters the sound. Two hours later, the ferry, with a loud reversing of props, banged into the slip; three of us drove aboard, and we left in an uproar of engines, water, diesel exhaust, and birds. Laughing gulls materialized from the air to hang above the prop wash and shriek their maniacal laugh (Whitman thought it nearly human) as they dropped like stones from twenty feet into the cold salt scuds; some entered beak first, some with wings akilter, but all followed the first to see an edible morsel, real or imagined.

"New Bern, on the Neuse River, was well-preserved antebellum Georgian houses....as railroads deveoped in North Carolina, New Bern lost its importance as a port city, and "progress"came slower, the old ways remained longer....As a result, New Bern is an architecturally interesting city where the Old South still shows on the streets rather than in a museum."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 13

Postcard of New Bern, North Carolina

New Bern, North Carolina

Your fun fact about New Bern for today.  New Bern is the place where Pepsi Cola was created.  Why is this important to me?  First of all, I work on the campus of the University of New Mexico, which evidently has granted some kind of franchise rights to Pepsi.  If you go to a place on campus that sells food, or if you go to any of the campus stores, all you can get is Pepsi.

Second, because of this, I probably drink a Pepsi a day.  Besides black tea sodas are the only way I get any caffeine.  My wife thinks I am a communist or at least un-American because I never developed a taste for coffee.  However, sodas are bad enough.  The last time I had blood work done, my blood sugar was a little high.  I need to cut down on the sugar, but having that can of Pepsi seems to keep me going in the afternoon.

Third, I don't even really like Pepsi all that much.  If I drink a soda, I prefer a regular Coke.  But when Pepsi is all you can get, you take Pepsi.  So I drink Pepsi, and my blood sugar rises.  Thanks, Caleb Bradham.  Pepsi was created by Mr. Bradham in New Bern at his pharmacy and fountain in 1898.  Originally known simply as "Brad's Drink," it was renamed Pepsi Cola possibly because of the pepsin and kola nut in the original recipe.  Either that or it was supposed to give one pep, as Bradham sought to create an invigorating drink that would aid in digestion.  You have to love the first celebrity endorsement by race car pioneer Barney Oldfield, who enthusiastically pitched Pepsi as "a bully drink...refreshing, invigorating, a fine bracer before a race."  Can't you just see someone saying that?  It's a long way from where we've come in advertising, where a "bully drink" ad evolves over time into a 1980s commercial Michael Jackson meeting a pint-sized imitator on an inner-city street (he also filmed another Pepsi commercial in 1984 where his hair caught on fire which injured him badly) and the more current commercial where Coke and Pepsi deliverymen fight in a diner.

Just writing this makes me think that I'm going to quit soda altogether for awhile.

As for LHM's quote above, I really like his description of the ferry ride across the Pamlico River.  I absolutely love river ferries.  I hadn't really thought about them before I lived in New Orleans.  My wife and I would occasionally have the opportunity to ride the ferry across from downtown New Orleans to the Algiers neighborhood across the Mississippi.  On the ferry, one gets a new perspective of the city.  On the ferry, I felt the power of the river as the ferry strained against the current.  The air was always cooler down on the river, and the buildings of downtown took on a new significance as the ferry pulled away from the dock.  Occasionally, a ship or barge passed by - the oceangoing ships rising stories above us as their powerful engines propelled them upstream or gliding silently as they rode the current downstream, or barges low on the water but taking forever to pass by, their pilot boats emitting a steady engine noise as they passed by.  We'd pass by debris floating on the water, brought from who knows where and going to places unknown.  And of course, there were the gulls, their cries still audible above the engine's low rumble. 

Ferry rides always brought me into reflective moments, broken only as the engines revved the ferry into place at the dock, and we walked to our car to wait for the signal to debark.  On misty nights, when the ferry would cross the river to where we waited, you could see nothing except faint lights growing brighter and brighter until, almost like a ghost, the ferry would, almost quietly and daintily, slip into place and lower its gate.  The boathand opening the barrier, his hoodie pulled up over his head, seemed otherworldly, like Charon himself beckoning with a sweep of his hand our souls' passage into another world.

If you want to know more about New Bern

Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on New Bern
City of New Bern
IndieRegister.com (alternative newspaper)
NewBern.com
New Bern Convention and Visitors Bureau
New Bern Sun Journal (newspaper)
Our New Bern (blog)
Tryon Palace Historic Sites and Gardens
Wikipedia: New Bern

Next up: Wallace, North Carolina