Thinking Continental by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT011000 Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection
ISBN: 9781496202819
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

The French wanted pelts, castor gras, the “greasy beaver.”17 Rain repelling, beaver fur made great hats, and for fashion these mammals were trapped close to extinction. Spring was a busy season for fur traders such as Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Luth, the namesake of my city. Once ice-out happened, the river highways opened. Greysolon and other fur traders could move expeditiously from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Lithe, swift birch bark canoes allowed them to penetrate thousands of miles into the North American interior. As Skinner puts it, “[It] was a corrupt, chaotic time of fast money and few rules and in it the coureurs de bois attracted more than their share of rogues and scoundrels.”18 Eventually this industry collapsed, presaging the boom and bust of future extractive enterprises. Lake Superior, at the cusp of three important watersheds, provoked a collision of cultures.

All of this is ghost past now, a faded tracing beneath the current passing show. The violence of the fur trade era has receded, and the legends have been domesticated. Greysolon is a ballroom for rent and a city street; Radisson is a hotel chain and Cadillac a car. The spring melts that once led coureurs de bois downriver and up-country now provoke the invasion of the tourists on the North Shore hankering to witness crashing waters. The old warehouse, brothel, and saloon district, Canal Park, boasts hotels, art galleries, restaurants, and the durable goods of Duluth Pack. Once a depressed burial ground of lost industry, the tourist district now houses all forms of kitschy Gitche Gumee shops selling mementos of the place, T-shirts, mugs, whiskey shot glasses, lighthouse magnets, and the like. The shipping season itself has become a major draw. The fanatics call Boatwatcher Hotline: 218-722-6489. Not far from Canal Park, archaeological palimpsests of fur trade activity, barely known to the locals, faintly mark this history. The juxtaposition of fur trade and tourist trade, however, is at once jarring and true.

The return of ships is among northern Minnesota’s delights each spring. Global trade in the twenty-first century repeats the ice-out cycle of the fur trade, with ships that winter over leaving first. The opening of the shipping season varies considerably. The snow load into the spring of 2014 was among the deepest: 130.2 inches of snow stopped just short of the record. When winter holds on tenaciously, cold, foggy days add up well into May. Delayed ice-outs are dramatic and swift when winter shifts to summer. Winters that freeze up the Great Lakes are less and less common as the Anthropocene era warms the planet, but 2014 was anomalous. Throughout May ice still packed into the southwestern corner of Lake Superior, and icebreakers plowed out of Duluth harbor. On thick foggy mornings the city disappeared, and the sun struggled to burn off the ground cloud. By afternoons glinting parts of the aerial lift bridge appeared briefly, but the ice floes on the lake kept generating fog. The world for days remained in silvery opaqueness. Wind-sculpted ice walls slowly retreated from the beaches, allowing the detritus of winter storms to emerge.

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