Superior Blues

It was not actually night but mid afternoon in October, after a long lunch at the Anchor Tap, which, if you have been lucky enough to eat there, you know serves cheeseburgers of every type, hand cut fries, and beer, and not only beer but my favorite American beer:  South Shore Nut Brown Ale.  We were certainly in "the misty mid region of Weir," because if there is such a place it is in the fogged-in city of Superior on the lake that takes its name from the town.  (Surely, the reverse is not true.)

I had talked Jim Easton into spending a few days in a cabin on Lake Nebagamon, not far from where my family had a little cabin--without electricity or running water--in the early 1950s.   I had thought about going fishing in the lake some local wits refer to as the "Dead Sea"--though my son Garret and daughter Molly caught huge smallmouths last Summer--but we had too many things to do.

Usually, I go to the mouth of the Brule, where the wild river slows down its pace to a gentle crawl and slowly fades into "the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee."  Someone once asked me what "Gitchee Gumee" meant.  Big Lake, of course.  A year ago, Jim Easton, feeling sorry for my decrepitude, attempted to do a deed of mercy by overturning the canoe, which trapped my good leg and started to drag me over the rapids.  Repenting, he turned the canoe upright.  The temperature of the water was perhaps 40 degrees, and the air felt only a little warmer as soaked to the skin we paddled an hour to the place where we had to haul out the canoe.  A hot shower and four fingers of whiskey restored me to my normal state of infirmity.

On the way up North, we stopped in a tavern on Rice Lake.  We had visited the joint last Winter and had a quiet drink staring at the frozen lake.  This time it is full of rowdy drunks watching football and slamming the dice cup every few minutes.  Rice Lake is just short of the line that divides central from northern Wisconsin, and there is something brassy and pushy about the drunks that is different from Douglas County.  Last Winter at the Side Lines Bar, everyone was  "stiff," as my parents would have said.  The snowmobilers should have been on a suicide watch, but everyone wanted to talk.  A woman of 45 or so came over and said, "You guys professors?"

"Not exactly."

"I bet you're from the newspaper or a radio station, right?"

"Close but not cigar."

She lurched a little and smiled.  My friends told me I was too drunk to come over and bother, but I'm celebrating."

"What's the occasion?"

"I just got out of jail."

I am getting old enough to bite my tongue and not ask, "What was the charge?  Drunk and disorderly?"  Everyone in the joint, despite being completely plastered, was polite and friendly, with a hint of malice, resentment, or anger.   I've been in some rough joints up North, but it's a bit like Butte, Montana, where everyone is tough but friendly.  At the age of 19, hitching my way West, I spent a night in Butte, and when I told the bartender how friendly everyone was.

Yeah, he shot back, "Friendly till the grave."

In the Village of Nebagamon, population 1000, there are two old taverns that were well-established before 1900.  De rigueur is the broasted chicken, washed down with South Shore Nut Brown, at Patti's Dockside, which had been Finnell's when I was a boy.

 

We meet Anthony Bukoski for lunch the next day, and Tony and I must have bored the pants off poor Easton, trying to trace the occasions when we might have run into each other in the 1950s.  He thinks we met in B&B, where I bought records from Leo Barcovich, husband of my mother's friend "Crazy Edith, and together we figured out that my mother, driving me home from school on occasion, might have picked up Tony hitchhiking from the Cathedral school.

Next was the obligatory drive to Bayfield to eat Lake Superior Whitefish at Gruenke's, which I first was taken to about 1950.  The fish was perfect, especially with more Nut Brown and a glass of brandy and soda.  On the way to Bayfield we stopped to see the biggest train locomotive in America, now located in Ashland and at the excellent bookstore in Washburn.  The proprietors used to own Avol's Books in Madison, but high rent and high taxes seem to have driven them into a much better place.  Madison is not Wisconsin, any more than New York and Los Angeles are America.

America used to be a country with a bland national uniformity of culture and attitude that was belied whenever you entered the  bizarre world of isolated small towns.  In its own way, Superior is as strange a place as Charleston or New Orleans (the way it used to be) or the celebrated villages in the valley of the Miskatonic River.  You can get a smell of this in Hawthorne, and it comes out more pungently in some of the regional and frontier writers, and becomes overwhelming in a few pieces of Ray Bradbury and the crime novels of Fredric Brown, who remind us the Illinois was once a place not of violent ghettos and malled in suburbs, but of Booth Tarkington's and H.P. Lovecraft's America.

Superior,  I learned as a child, was home to the world's largest grain elevator and charcoal briquet plant.  It had the cleanest water, and the highest per capita number of saloons and bordellos.  It was the birthplace of Morrie Arnovich, second greatest Jewish baseball player and contained the world's second largest trainyard, second only to Chicago.

Now in its desolation it still has America's finest shortstory writer, Anthony Bukoski, who once wanted to play professional baseball.  I am sure Tony can tell you all the most famous Polak players.  (I can only recall Ted Kluszewski, who as I recall ended up with the White Sox, which once had a farm team in Duluth-Superior, when the Duluth Dukes were merged temporarily with the Superior Blues by my father, part-owner and manager.  Tony was eager to show me the ancient Blues poster in the Douglas County Historical SocietyMuseum, where the director, John Winter,  is kind enough to show us around.

Visiting the museum is a bit like going into the attic of some ancient ancestor, who, unfortunately, turns out to be yourself.  In the basement, there is a collection of old clothes with which you could trace the history of the Middle West from WW I.

Every American duckburg of over ten thousand has had a baseball team, but how many can boast a genius inventor on par with Gyro Gearloose?   Superior's genius was Henry Lavery, inventor of the Psychograph.   I had read up on Lavery and his invention a few years ago.  He was one of the last great exponents of phrenology, the science of reading character through from the shape, the knots and bumps, of the skull.    His invention--a big hit at the St Louis World's Fair,  John Winter informs me--took the necessary measurements and would provide--if the required coin were inserted-- an interpretation of the subject's character.  It was the psychological equivalent of the weight scales that used to be in train stations and drug stores.

Go ahead and laugh and then go visit your $200 an hour shrink whose success rate is unlikely to beat any control and is based on even a shallower reading of human personality than Lavery's invention.   While Tony is bending the ears of John Winter and Jin Easton, I wonder off in search of genius.  I study the machine and its explanatory placard and return to the endless conversation about who was who sometime ages ago in Douglas County.  Tony then guides us all to the eight wonder of Superior--remember the trainyards, grain elevator, briquet plant, and the other glories--and when I take my seat, he shouts out, "Take a reading and find out what makes him tick!"

By sunset we are in the Choo Choo Tavern on the way out of town.  Jim and Tony order food, but after the Anchor's cheeseburger, I only have room for brandy and soda.  Thank Heaven for omeprazole, or my esophageal ulcers would be dancing on my grave.

Roger McGrath's parents came from Superior, and he told me his father used to sing a song he had written about "The Town that time forgot."  My mother's brother Dan , a former Coast Guard officer and harbor engineer,  visited us a few times, and I remember him asking my mother, "My God, Mary, how can you stand it here?"  Dan was a man of many talents--he was a star football player and excellent pianist--had seen much of the world, and one can hardly blame him for being appalled by a city friend Tony has described , in one of his early stories, as dying of rust.  Still, it is a remarkable place.  Chain restaurants, apart from Dairy Queen and A&W Root Beer, simply don't exist, and visiting here is a bit like the experience Bradbury describes in the Martian Chronicles, when astronauts land on Mars, and each finds  himself in the world of his childhood.  But Douglas County--and much of Michigan's UP and the Dakotas--is genuinely and without pretension in a time warp.

I have no regrets about moving to South Carolina.  On the contrary, I am grateful.  It ws the first step in a pilgrimage.  Nonetheless, we are what we have been and what we will be.  Bergson and Proust were right about human time, something Einstein simply could not grasp.  I got it even in 1968, when I returned to camp out on Whiskey Lake, which we still owned, and fish the Brule.

Return of the Native

           The hottest day of 1968,

           wading sunstruck, half-frozen in the Brule,

           chest deep, skating my dun across a pool--

           rain-guttered drop-off from a pebbled spate.

           Who would dryfly this drain?  Only a fool

           who had learned nothing from ten years of school

           exile except how to uncomplicate

           by scraping all the best parts off the plate.

           Going back to town on four-laned 53,

           a coupl' of beers, top down, the Mojo Men

           warbling their weird joy, and I am home free,

           leapfrogging the unspent years that might have been,

           the backseat dates and deer camp chivalry,

           the fleeting trout I'll never catch again.