Sault St. Marie

                                   

The legend lives on

From the Chippewa on down

To the Great Lake they call

Gitche Gumee…

If I were to select one theme that is pervasive here on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it would be that of the maritime thread that sews this region together and binds everyone to the history and drama of the ships and sailors that ply these waters.

                                    There are many others, but I’ll start here.

                        We are up here in Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan which as you can surmise by the spelling of the name, was founded by the French in the early 1600’s making it one of the oldest permanent settlements in the country. But, for us folks who took Spanish, etc. in High School, it’s pronounced Soo St. Marie and that’s evidenced by another accepted way of spelling it because when the Brits took over, they morphed it phonetically.

                        The Great Lakes do provide the bulk of the traditions of this area, and no one minds at all. This tiny area of the Soo is the home to the Soo Locks, a project started way back in the 1800’s and carried on by the indomitable force of the Army Corps of Engineers to this day. All of the ships that transport the commodities of this region have to transit through these locks in order to get around the elevation difference between Lake Superior and Lake Huron and the rest of the world. Lake Superior lies about six-hundred feet above sea level and unless you want to watch a giant ore freighter try and navigate some Class V rapids or go over Niagara Falls, then a system of canals and locks is quite necessary!

                                    We started our day with Darla and Sandra, our friends and tour guides, with a stop at a Native American cemetery. This particular one belongs to the Bay Mills Tribe, one of five recognized Tribes on the UP. These tribes have their histories intertwined with the Chippewa, Menominee, and Dakota.

                                    Our next stop was out on a point jutting into Lake Superior that had one of Michigan’s 129 lighthouses on it. Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state, coming in second is Maine with almost one hundred less!

Our primary objective of the day was a visit to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum way out on Whitefish Point, near what is aptly monikered as the Graveyard of the Great Lakes. This area, just off of this point is, in fact, the site of the foundering of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which for better or worse brought the ever-present possibility of catastrophe on these waters to the forefront.

I am one-hundred percent sure that my opening lines of this Post were familiar to you. Gordon Lightfoot considered The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald to be his finest work. He wrote and recorded it just weeks after the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in November of 1975. This song is obviously used at the Museum as this is the organization that spearheaded a dive to the site (over 500 feet down) to bring the bell of the ship up to the surface to be used as a memorial. The families of the crew were all involved in this endeavor, and they replaced it with an identical bell inscribed with all of the names of the twenty-nine men that perished that day.

                                    We watched a film documenting this entire (very dangerous) process which ended with a ceremony where family members came up one by one and rang the actual bell in remembrance of their lost loved one. It was an ending that most families don’t get to have when there is a tragedy at sea. Mr. Lightfoot’s lyrics rang particularly true at this point…

                                    The church bell chimed ‘til it rang twenty-nine times

                                    For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald

We could have spent a lot more time here as the Museum had an exhibit on most of the ships that have gone down over the past hundred or so years. I would not hesitate to return to this area!

                        The Upper Peninsula is mainly composed of large swaths of forests and waterways. Bogs filled with blueberries and cranberries work their way in from the shoreline where the beaches are as sandy as the Jersey Shore, and the water looks like it could be in the Caribbean!

We drove long stretches of roads that had absolutely nothing on them until a small settlement would appear and then just as quickly disappear behind us. At the end of one of these roads was our next destination and lunch! We were headed to Tahquamenon (which rhymes with phenomenon) Falls State Park, the home of the falls and a local brewing company of the same name, and their accompanying restaurant.

                        Lunch over, we walked down to the Falls, which are quite impressive as these falls are second only to Niagara Falls in volume. In the Spring over 50,000 gallons per second drops over the edge of the falls on the river of the same name. I think they just like to say “Tahquamenon” 😊

                        We arrived “back in the Soo” just in time for ice cream and a walk across the street to visit the Soo Locks Visitors Center run by the Army Corps of Engineers. This viewpoint was multi-level, had loudspeakers which explained what ship was coming through, and was situated just a few feet from the edge of the Locks. The inside of the Center provided an incredible amount of information about shipping, lock technology, history, and the current ships and marine traffic at any given time. It was very well done!

                        One of the best parts of traveling around our country is discovering things that we never knew existed but are in fact very important and interesting. We are only one day in on our visit to the UP and this has already been exemplified well beyond our expectations.

                                                And there’s still more to come!