Chicago by Brian Doyle

Author:Brian Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466868076
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

16.

LATE THAT MAY I WENT OUT on the lake for the first time, and it happened like this. It turned out that Mr Pawlowsky and the former sailor in the basement had long talked about going into business together as a salvage concern, to locate and reclaim various treasures at the bottom of the lake; what with Mr Pawlowsky’s naval experience and connections, and the sailor’s knowledge of the lake’s weathers and currents, they were convinced they could choose a few wrecks, locate and raise them without fanfare, and sell what was recoverable to collectors and museums and historical societies. The law allowed any licensed concern to salvage and sell what it could of long-lost shipping, and while the sailor, a student of lost Lake Michigan ferryboats and steamers, had a couple of legendary vessels in mind, Mr Pawlowsky was set on recovering an airplane that the Navy had lost in the lake in 1943—a Wildcat, a fighter jet that had crashed on a training flight and sunk without a trace. The pilot had escaped, but the location of the plane had never been recorded, and the Navy, desperately trying to win two wars abroad, had never taken the time to find or recover the craft. Mr Pawlowsky, however, had known both the pilot and the men who fished him out of the lake, and he had never forgotten their estimates of where the plane went down, and where it might yet be found.

He explained all this to me one glorious sunny morning as we walked down to Belmont Harbor, a little south along the lakefront, where the sailor was waiting in what looked exactly like a whaleboat, “because it is a whaleboat,” explained the sailor, who had borrowed it from a friend who ran a school for building wooden boats. I had never been farther into the lake than my knees before, and as we slid out of the little hooked harbor and into the lake proper I saw that Miss Elminides was right to be reminded of the sea; the lake stretched away endlessly in every direction, and the city shrank so quickly behind us that in minutes it looked like a tiny tourist’s postcard, and then it vanished altogether, and we were alone on an immensity of deep blue-gray water.

All that morning, as the sailor fished for whitefish, which he called humpbacks and which he said were absolutely the best eating especially if you caught a big one of five pounds or so, Mr Pawlowsky explained about ships and shipwrecks in the lake, craft of every kind from huge freighters to tiny sloops, and those were just the ships that were known to be at the bottom of the lake, which was almost three hundred feet deep on average and almost a thousand feet down at its deepest point, at the northern end of the lake; up there was where he thought the truly huge lake sturgeon lived, beyond the reach of any fishery, and as no

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