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Sault Ste. Marie
By Peter Nichols — Spring 2005
I’ve paddled by kayak from the north bank to the
south in five minutes. Faster than it takes by car to cross the international
bridge between the twin cities of the same name, one in Canada, one in
the U.S. If I were to write a James Michener novel of the Great Lakes—a
fat, multigenerational epic that begins at some moment of unrecorded time
with, say, a fish leaping upward through tumbling cataracts of icy water
in a place that will become the geographic nexus of all the history that
will follow—it would have to begin here.
In my novel, that fish would be speared by an Ojibwa
native, who would be met on his way home to supper by the apparition of
two pale-faced men in black robes: the French Jesuits who heralded the
beginning of the recorded history of the Great Lakes. They would form
an uneasy, entirely political—not religious—alliance with my
fisherman and his tribe, and found a mission they named “Ste Marie
du Sault”—approximately “St. Mary of the Falls”—in
his village below the rapids. I’d set my book here because half of
all that would subsequently happen in the Great Lakes would depend on
this narrow waist of the great inland seas.
My high-minded French priests would ultimately be unable
to resist the commercial reality of the furs sold by the natives. A peculiar
breed of fur transporter would soon appear, portaging the 30-foot-long
fur company canoes over the rapids of Sainte Marie twice a year on the
way from Montreal to the Grand Portage, at the far end of the uppermost
lake (le lac superieur) and back. All rippling arms and torsos on stunted,
spindly legs, these red-hatted voyageurs would sing all day as they paddle
and are consumed not by dreams of wealth but by their efforts to out-paddle,
out-carry, and in every way best their fellows. How I would have loathed
to have traveled with the voyageurs. But in my vast tome, one of these
stalwarts—I’ll call him Jacques—would roam the upper lakes
in the service of Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, the explorer-merchant adventurer
from Lyons. What adventures they would have!
Jacques would eventually settle with his Indian wife
and uncountable kids at font du lac, or Duluth as we now call it. One
of Jacques’ offspring, on a trading expedition, would become curious
about the strange color and quality of the red-brown mountain ranges to
the west.
From there, it’s a few quick narrative hops to
the iron ore being shipped downlake, first by barge and later the doomed
Edmund Fitzgerald, always by way—there
being no other route—of the locks built over St. Mary’s falls,
so fueling the explosion of industry that erupted in molten steel on the
shores of the lower lakes, made possible by this seaway to the mineral-rich
northwest and the infinite power of the waters that sluiced always downlake
to the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic.
Recently I took a large power vessel across Lake Superior
from Duluth, Minnesota, downlake to St. Clair, Michigan, squeezing through
Soo Locks. A few days later I paddled my Klepper folding kayak around
the low, marshy islands below the locks where the St. Mary’s River
hurries down to Lake Huron. In the same place where one day I saw a thousand-foot-long
ore carrier, on another all I could see was a lone Great Blue heron and
the weeds through the cold fresh water beneath my paddle blades.
On both the large- and small-scale cruises I saw the
whole history of the lakes written in the water and the land around Sault
Ste Marie. Both times, I ate the same Lake Whitefish, Coregonus clupeaformis,
that brought the first Indians to this place.
And it was good.
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