Goodbye, California

 

My wife and I are separating after 33 years. Harsh but true. We had a good run. I blame the current political climate, but the official reason is "irreconcilable differences." 

I have decided to "retire" to Wisconsin to write a book about my late father: a deeper dive into my "Revisiting Highway 61" series already blogged here (see the link). My brother and I are the only witnesses left to my father's incredible and early interest in scuba diving and his pioneering underwater photography. I don't expect to make any money off of this -- it's just a strong desire of mine -- it's something I feel I must do and do well. I'm giving myself 6 months. I'm also going to start an online business selling what I make. California is terrible place to start a business in case you haven't heard.

That photo was taken recently aboard a rented sailboat on Lake Pepin which is a natural feature of the Mississippi River. After the outing I saw another boat in the marina:

It was getting dark and the photo is a bit grainy but the other boat's name was πνεύμα. I instantly recognized the word "pneuma," but I guessed wrongly that it meant "wind." It actually means "spirit" which is an inspired name for a sailboat. Inspired in the classical sense. 

Split Rock Lighthouse

photo by Ron Winch

What good is a lighthouse in broad daylight?
Who needs such enlightenment in an age of modern communications?
The lighthouse is just an icon to admire--a quaint beacon of a bygone era.
_________________
I bought that print many years ago on eBay, perhaps from the photographer. I'd like to contact him to get his permission to use here, but I can't seem to find an address on the Web.

The photo reminds me of my father and the times we spent together along the Minnesota North Shore which I blogged about in a series called Revisiting Highway 61.

The photo juxtaposes many opposite compositional elements.  Here are a few that I see:

Black vs. white
Vertical cliff vs. plane of water
Wet vs. dry
Deep unknown vs. known clarity
Living trees vs. inorganic rock
Chaos (rubble) vs. order (monolithic cliff)
Near vs. far.
Darkness vs. lightness
Soft vs. hard
Edge/boundary vs. continuity

[As a comment, MamaM added: Two different cloud types. High cirrus in foreground and low cumulus close to horizon. Changing weather perhaps?

Two opposite diagonals. Tree trunks slanting one direction, cloud lines another.]

Silver Creek Cliff And The Silver Cliff Motel

After camping outdoors and living on the side of Highway 61 for five days it was nice to be able to check into a motel and take a shower and get cleaned up before heading out on the long trip home.  My dad's favorite motel was called the Silver Cliff Motel back near Two Harbors. The motel had been there forever.  Here's a photo from 1958 looking much the same as when my parents first stayed there and how I remember it too:

Up there to the left in the photo behind the motel is Silver Cliff, a rock outcropping of geological interest.  Highway 61 used to wind right around it, hugging the rock face and looking something like this view from an old picture postcard:

Note the skimpy safety "barrier" (I have a Viewmaster reel from the 1950s that shows essentially the same view). That portion of the road is closed now, but my mother still has memories of a white-knuckled moonlight drive with Don Franklin behind the wheel of his large automobile as he drove my parents to and from the lighthouse that I described back here. Don knew those roads like he knew the wrecks and he probably had a little fun scaring the bejeebies out of the younger folks. 

That particular stretch of the road has been replaced by a modern tunnel.  You can see what's left of the old roadway in this photo, along with the northern portal to the new tunnel:

original

Old Highway 61 hugging the cliff off to the left looks like a pathway slowly being reclaimed by nature. Apparently one can park and walk that old stretch of Highway 61 that was first carved out of the Silver Cliff in the 1920s.

The motel was located behind where the "Merit Award" is affixed to the photo in the upper left. The tunnel project actually won some design awards, mainly for incorporating the natural geological strata into the design:

original

Getting back to the motel. The original Silver Cliff Motel probably became like the Bates Motel when the new freeway went through. I'm not sure at all what's there now: it could be a resort complex or more likely, lake shore McMansions. I suspect the latter.  Here's a photo of the old motel site, including the pebble beach, taken from the old Highway 61. Note the gazebo at the extreme far left, looking out over the lake:

Directly under that gazebo, at a depth of less than 15 or 20 feet, is an underwater natural cave passing from the lakeside to the bay side. It's easily reached by a mask, fins, and snorkel. Now I don't have an underwater photo to prove it-there may be one somewhere in my father's photo collection- I'm still looking for it.  And I haven't been able to find any description of it on the Internets either.  But I remember that cave well.  I know it's there because my father, who had his own way of looking beneath the surface of things, showed it to me.

Wrecks of the Amboy and the George Spencer

We didn't stay in the town of Silver Bay but travelled further up Highway 61 to a place near Tofte, MN.  There are two wrecks there, one named the George Spencer and the other called the Amboy.  The two vessels were wrecked together during the Mataafa storm, which sank around 30 vessels the night of November 28, 1905.

The Amboy and the George Spencer were wooden ships and both were driven ashore and beached and then abandoned. They both lie (well what's left of them) offshore of private property and are accessible now only by boat. Years ago my dad had permission to camp on the property nearest to the wrecks. You can get a good overview from the photo labelled Figure 266 at this website (I recently ordered that book). The photo shows the beautiful green lawn between the house and the shore where the owner used to let us drive right down to shore and set up camp.

The site of the George Spencer wreck is indicated in Fig 266 with an arrow. Figure 267 in the link above shows a general map of the wreck in the harbor (including some washed up on shore) and Fig 268 shows a detailed sketch of the remaining underwater portion of the wreck. The wreck is decaying fast. I took this photo of what remains of the Amboy's backbone washed up on the shore:

That photo is from around 1975. The wreckage has decayed further since then. I can see further decomposition in this 1992 photo found online:

The underwater portion of the wreck in Figure 268 above belongs to the George Spencer.  I found a YouTube video of a family canoeing right over the Spencer: the video gives you a sense of how shallow the wreck is and how clear and still the water can be.



The Spencer was quite photogenic and my dad loved that wreck best for that reason. Here's a shot he took of another diver and his photography equipment circa 1977:

Note how clear the water is which is amazing for freshwater.
Here's a B/W shot that my dad took of me on the George Spencer circa 1977.

Here's another shot of me from that day. This photo won him first place in an underwater photography competition sponsored by Sport Diver magazine the following year:

Silver Bay And The Hesper

Our next stop after diving the Madeira was Silver Bay, just up Highway 61 from Beaver Bay.  My dad's friend, Don Franklin, worked for Reserve Mining Company which is pretty much all there is in Silver Bay.  Don refilled our scuba tanks at the local fire station and chatted with us for a bit about exactly where to go, though he declined to go with us. The year before he had taken my father and my brother to Isle Royale and had shown them the wreck of the passenger steamer, the S.S. America.

The harbor at Silver Bay has a wreck named Hesper which went down in 1905, the same year as the Madeira:

 The Hesper lies in three big pieces in about 35 to 40 feet of water.  Part of her is partially buried under the western breakwater wall.  The jetty makes for an easy way to get up close to the wreck site, although you have to pick your way across the rocks [added: the jetty is visible in a photo at the website that I linked to below. The wreck is about 3/4 of the way out on the left (harbor) side]. You can visualize the wreck with the help of this sketch (click to enlarge):

According to my dad, Don and his friends discovered the wreck and were the first to dive on her. Some recovered artifacts can now be seen in a museum in Duluth.  Because the wreck lies inside the breakwater and the harbor is busy, the water is pretty turbid.  Consequently, the underwater visibility is not as good as found at the Madeira.  Nonetheless, the wreck is impressive.

Here is a photo of the wreck my dad took, looking pretty much as I remember it:

The Minnesota State Historical Society maintains a website with additional photographs of the Hesper here.

Meet Mr. Donald Franklin

Michael Haz jogged my memory back here when he mentioned Beaver Bay, Minnesota. The name Beaver Bay (Haz's humorous anecdote aside) dates from the days when that part of Minnesota was the western boundary of the known New World.  The commercial exploitation of beaver preceded the discovery of iron in Minnesota by at least a century and helped establish ports like Beaver Bay (and Duluth) before the days of lumber, grain, and iron ore.

The French were the first Europeans to explore inland (unless of course you believe that there were Vikings in Minnesota). The demand for beaver pelts drew the fur trappers because fierce competition had depleted the beaver populations in the east. The French trappers and traders, known as Voyageurs, expanded their range into the northwest territories of North America. The "Land Of 10,000 Lakes" is hardly an exaggeration and the woods of Minnesota were rich in beaver and other pelts. A canoe/portage  route across the lakes paralleling the modern Minnesota-Ontario border had been known to the Indians for centuries who then showed it to the French. That same route along the chain of lakes is now known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Voyageur National Park.

When I was kid we got National Geographic magazine.  I recall being shown a photo in one issue of a fellow named Don Franklin. Franklin had been part of a historical research team looking for relics and artifacts.  I can't find a link to that National Geographic story but I did find this story written by a historian describing the discovery of some copper pots by a waterfall [it's a pdf file and takes a few seconds to download]. The story corroborates some of what I recall, including a mention of Franklin's role.

According to my dad, Franklin changed his life forever when he saw him swim across the Richland Center community swimming pool using a pair of newly invented rubber swim fins (flippers) sometime back in the 1950's. Franklin was several years older and was a friend of my dad's older brother, J.  I met him around 1975-76 on one of our trips up there.  He worked for Reserve Mining Co. at Silver Bay MN.  He's dead now too as are many of the diving pioneers of the North Shore of Gitche Gumee.

Photo of Don Franklin dated June 1962 taken by my dad. They're probably just a few hundred yards from Highway 61. Note the primitive gear and single tank.

The Blob

During one of their diving trips up North my parents found something that still makes me smile to think about. The Madeira wreck that I wrote about here had been worked for salvage in the late 1950's and early '60s. The salvagers weren't really interested in the hull per se but rather in some of the more valuable deck machinery and winches and what not.  The salvagers used enormous pontoon floats which were buoyed by what were essentially big rubber bags.

My dad found one of those stray floats washed up on shore. It's hard to describe it exactly other than as a big oblate-shaped rubber bag. Now as a five or six year old kid, everything seemed bigger than it actually was but I suppose it must have been about a body length in diameter, maybe four or five feet. But as I said, it wasn't exactly circular; it was longer and wider than it was high. Imagine an enormous jelly donut only black. It had no dangerous buckles or straps. It was shiny black and it smelled like rubber. I can still smell it-like the rubber of a bike inner tube. It could be soft and squishy or hard and bouncy depending on how much air was inside it. We kids named it "The Blob."

The Blob was one of those neighborhood things that made you instantly popular. The fun thing for us kids with the Blob was our discovery that if one of us sat on one end of the thing and another jumped onto or quickly kneeled on the other side, the first kid would get displaced or be given a "lift-off."  We soon discovered that by jumping from various heights, we could actually launch each other.  Endless fun. We must have spent a week just doing variations on the same theme.  Word got around, and "The Blob" gained quite a reputation.   In those days, everybody seemed to have kids or had had kids. Some families had kids way older than me (I turned 50 today). Anyway, it was easy to round up a dozen kids in those days, and that was really just in about a two or three block circle.

The fun escalated that summer without much adult supervision until we discovered that jumping off a garden shed roof would really send a smaller kid flying--I mean several feet in the air!  One poor kid landed wrong and we heard about it after he ran home in tears.

The Blob had a tough thick skin and seemed indestructible. We also played games of running each other over--getting swallowed and eaten by the Blob. We gave it our all for what must have been a good solid month until school started in September. One night, somebody snuck into our backyard and slashed the Blob with what looked like a sharp knife according to my dad.  We never did figure that one out.

Split Rock Lighthouse

Years before my dad took me and my brother diving up North, he took friends and diving students, and once or twice he took my mother.  She was determined not to be a SCUBA widow and she had an "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" attitude about the whole thing.

He took her to the Madeira wreck that I described back here. That is Gold Rock and the rocky beach in the upper right corner of the photo above. The wreck was only accessible then from the roadside shoulder of Highway 61 but access has improved since those days.  Back then there was no proper place to change clothes at the dive site. My uninhibited dad had no problem stripping down nude in semi-public places, but my mother was a different story.
"Nobody will see you" he reassured her after they had carried all their gear down to the beach.
She nervously glanced up at the lighthouse. She saw that the lighthouse had an unobstructed view of her (you can see her point of view here--the lighthouse is in the upper right background).  Throwing caution to the wind, she undressed and changed into her bathing suit and wet suit.
 
Later that evening after the dive, they met some friends for dinner in Two Harbors. After dinner, they drove back up Highway 61 and stopped at the lighthouse, which had only recently opened to the public. To my mother's shock and horror, the lighthouse had one of those telescopic, coin-operated viewfinders, and it clearly looked down on the beach where she had undressed earlier that afternoon.

Added: this photo:

The Wreck Of The Madeira

We arrived at the first wreck site by car on August 4, 1975 and got suited up and in the water by around 10 AM. The air temperature was 78^o, and the water temperature was 42^oF.  No, I don't have that good of a memory -- I'm reading from a logbook that I kept at the time. My actual memories are visual and not at all numerically factual like that. 

Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate the negatives or even prints from a roll of film that I shot on that first trip. I know I didn't throw them out -- I just can't find them right now. I'll have to rely on my memory, the Internet, and some shots my dad took at different times.

Madeira was the name of a vessel that went down in a huge storm of 1905. There's a harrowing story about her last hour that you can read about here. She broke in two against Gold Rock, less than a mile "up-lake" from the present day Split Rock Lighthouse.  Of course the lighthouse wasn't there then--it was built a few years later after the owners of ships that went down that night banded together and persuaded Congress to build one (I have a separate story about the lighthouse that I'm saving, but I should say that the lighthouse is the most iconic image of the North Shore, having been painted and photographed to death).

In those days one had to park alongside Highway 61 and carry the gear through a beautiful birch forest (one of the photos I'm missing) down to a small rocky beach. Here's an aerial view of the lay of the land: Link. 
The rocky beach was as close as one could get to the wreck site on land.  Here's an older photo of my dad (standing) heading out to the Madeira wreck site. The photo was taken sometime in the early 1960's:

photographer unknown circa 1960s

That's Gold Rock in the background, the rock that battered the Madeira to death that November when the skies turned gloomy.  On a clear sunny day when the water is still, it is possible to look down into the water from the edge of that cliff and see a bit of the wreck.

Madeira was my dad's favorite wreck. It wasn't the most photogenic, being too deep for natural light. But it was the most challenging and is still typical when one thinks of a shipwreck. The wreck lies in two big pieces. I'll never forget how her bow points straight up towards the surface and the steel of her hull where she broke looked peeled back like a banana skin. You can more easily imagine what I'm talking about with the help of this sketch:

click to enlarge

The bow section is in the upper left.  [added: here is a photo of her bow taken by my father sometime in the '60's]:

Obviously tremendous forces clashed that night back in 1905. Her stern lies in deeper water and the pilothouse lies even deeper, completely detached from the rest (in the very foreground in the sketch). My dad's friend salvaged the ship's wheel and other artifacts which can now be seen in a museum in Duluth. The other parts of the wreck are unrecognizable as a ship- just twisted bulkheads. The vessel had long since lost its coating of paint, but incredibly, the iron hull is remarkably well preserved--a combination of freshwater, cold, and depth.

The Madeira wreck is cold and deep.  I recall experiencing a little bit of nitrogen narcosis that first time when we plunged to the wheelhouse. I remember signaling my dad that we needed to go up a little. I still remember slowly crawling back up that pile of rocks towards the cliff.  In those days (1975) before the widespread advent of buoyancy compensators (BC's), I had an orange inflatable vest that required me to wrap my lips around the inflation tube and blow (nowadays, those things are hooked-up directly to one's air supply and one can adjust buoyancy with a push button). Although we were covered head-to-toe in 3/8 wet suits, there was this little gap between my face mask and the opening in the hood which exposed my face and lips. Now those body parts are pretty resilient to cold, but after mouthing a regulator for about 45 minutes in 42 degree water, my lips and mouth were frozen and I still recall the difficulty of getting my mouth around that smaller tube in order to re-inflate my vest--the sheer will to live overcame and triumphed.

There is a major treasure trove of Madeira photos here: Link

First Stop,Two Harbors

After breaking camp outside of Duluth, we sometimes stopped on the main drag (Highway 61) through Two Harbors for a breakfast. If you go through there, it's impossible to miss the 8 foot chicken by the side of the road. Link. Two Harbors is also famous as the birthplace of 3M.

On The Road To Duluth

My dad invented traveling "econo", way before they ever made a word out of it. We use to camp out during these diving trips, except for the last night when we'd stay in a motel to take a shower and get cleaned up before heading back. So there were really few comforts of home. My mother would have never stood for that, nor would he have done that to her. He did take her up there once or twice when we were really little (more on that later), but that stopped after a while (I think she hated it actually). But things were different with us boys-he had things to show us.

Now many of the wrecks we visited were best accessed from private property and my dad maintained contacts with the property owners over the years. Sometimes, (I'm thinking of one very photogenic wreck in particular) we camped right on the grassy shore just yards from the wreck itself (I'm going to do a whole blog post on that one when we get there). But mostly there was a lot of roughing it. I remember spending one night camped at a turnout on Highway 61. A big truck pulled over there too at midnight and idled all night until dawn.

We always set out in the morning from Madison, driving all day, stopping only for a Big Mac for lunch (my dad's favorite road food) but then not again until we hit the other side of Duluth. We always took I-90/94 to Eau Claire and then US 53 to Duluth to catch US 61. We'd always camp just on the other side of Duluth at a small commercial campsite.

Duluth is a very aesthetically pleasing city and well worth a visit. The city is built along a hillside and descends down to the harbor. It has lots of old Victorian homes and many old fashioned elm-lined streets (the perma-cold keeps Dutch elm disease in check and many of the elms are original). I'm sorry that I don't have any photographs of the city, except those in my mind. We were usually in a hurry to get on through and on with the trip. If I were to ever go back, I could see spending a little more time in that fair city.

Revisiting Highway 61

That photo was taken along Minnesota's Highway 61 by my late father sometime in the 70's. The concrete wall is kind of unsightly (imagine it's not there) and is a safety eyesore only then recently added. [Added: that stretch of Highway 61 no longer exists and has been replaced by a tunnel].

State Highway MN 61 follows the Lake Superior coastline from Duluth all the way to Canada. Prior to 1991, MN 61 was part of US 61, or as Dylan referred to it, Highway 61 (yes, that Highway 61).  Highway 61 was also called the "Blues Highway" and it stretched from Canada all the way to New Orleans. Before the interstate system, US 61 was a main route north-south, much like US 66 was a main route east-west. In my humble opinion, that particular stretch of MN 61 is one of the most beautiful and scenic drives in the continental US (and I'm including both coastal California and New England!).

Minnesota's Lake Superior coastline is shipwreck rich. Map The reason there are so many wrecks is simply because there were so many ships and also because the lake was a cruel and harsh place to navigate before modern navigational equipment. Duluth was once a leading shipping port city (at one time it had more millionaires per capita than any other America city). The ships came first to carry away furs and pelts from the interior; then they came for timber and grain; then for copper, and then finally, for the iron.

The Iron Range is (or was) a massive geological deposit of iron ore-so much that it fed the entire steel industry "downstream" at the other Great Lakes [added: about a quarter of it came from just one pit]. Great old industrial cities like Detroit, Cleveland and farther inland, Pittsburgh were built from it. Arguably, the only physical reason those cities were ever great (laying aside the great people for a moment) was simply the melding together of Appalachian coal and Minnesota iron to make American steel. The boom years lasted for well over a half century.

My dad started scuba diving up there in the early 1960's. He had an acquaintance who lived up there and who had discovered one or two shipwrecks. Back in those days scuba diving was still relatively uncommon, not at all like it is today. There were no dive shops (in Madison at least). Scuba tanks could only be filled at welding shops or fire stations. Some gas stations had air-compressors that went to high enough pressures but they usually didn't filter and the compressed air tended to be contaminated with pump oil. Diving gear had to be bought by mail order from companies that advertised in the back of magazines like Skin Diver or the likes. Most equipment was still manufactured either in California or Italy (it's probably all made in China now like everything else).

When I was 15 my dad took me on a scuba trip to Lake Superior along Minnesota's North Shore. My brother and I had been around diving since we were little kids, but he waited until we were older and had passed a certification course before taking us up there. He took us separately (there's a 3 year age difference there), mostly for reasons of space and equipment limitations: we always drove up from Madison and had to pack a week's worth of gear, camping equipment, and food.  I recently got around to digitizing some slides he took and so have decided to start yet another blog post series to remember all these things before I get old and forgetful. I'm still looking for some photos I took. At least there'll be pictures this time so don't go away.