The big lake they call Gitchee Gumee
Friday, September 17. The drive on the Trans-Canada Highway across Ontario from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie, traversing the northern shore of Lake Superior, is lined with spectacular panoramic vistas and radiant fall foliage — but little else. The tiny Canadian towns that roll by, from Marathon to White River to Wawa, are little more than rest stops at which to fill the gas tank and grab some ketchup-flavored potato chips for the road.
And then there’s Schreiber. Back home in Seattle, Neko Case had alerted me to this little burg (pop. 1,903) a couple hours east of Thunder Bay, and in particular to the Cosiana Inn, a hotel run by a character named Cosimo Filane.
“Character” really is the operative word here: Filane also happens to be a lounge singer who sells his records — vinyl only, on his own label, Fallen Rock Records — at the hotel’s front desk. Cosimo wasn’t around when I stopped by on this sunny morning, but I spoke with his kind and friendly wife, who sold me a copy of This Is It! (featuring Filane crooning silky-smooth renditions of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon”, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, “Playground Of My Mind”, even Lobo’s “Don’t Expect Me To Be Your Friend”).
Then there’s Filane’s Canadian Spring Water, a bottled-water enterprise which stretches across Ontario (I spotted it in stores a few hundred kilometers down the road). Next to their hotel in the center of town (they’ve also got a new place, the Fallen Rock Motel, on the outskirts), you’ll find Filane’s Variety store and Filane Hollywood Sportswear. And, as you enter the city limits, there’s a sign that boasts, “Welcome to Schreiber, home of Domenic Filane, Canadian Boxing Champion.” That’s their son, who represented Canada at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Saturday, September 18. Perhaps the root of my fascination with this region goes back a couple of decades to that mid-’70s Gordon Lightfoot classic “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”. Whitefish Point, home of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, is just a few dozen miles from Sault Ste. Marie; a few miles off the coast, about 500 feet below the surface, is the spot where the Edmund Fitzgerald came to rest on November 10, 1975. (“The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay/If they’d put fifteen more miles behind her.”)
The first thing you see when you walk into the museum is the gleaming bronze bell from the Fitzgerald, which was recovered four years ago. The bell stands as a solemn reminder of the 29 crewmen who lost their lives on the Fitzgerald; a replica bell inscribed with the victim’s names was lowered to the wreckage site as a memorial.
Saturday night was spent just south of Whitefish Point on the Bay Mills Indian Reservation, at a Whiskea Bay waterfront cabin that belongs to the family of Jennifer Jesperson. She’s married to Peter Jesperson, who some folks may recall from his ’80s days as manager of the Replacements; in the ’90s, he helmed Medium Cool Records and helped introduced the world to Athens, Georgia, songwriter Jack Logan.
The more immediate motivation for this Great Lakes journey stemmed from a summer jaunt to Los Angeles, where the Jespersons now live. Jennifer mentioned that her family is from the Sault Ste. Marie area, and that she and Peter would be spending some time there in September; I mentioned that I’d long had a trip to that part of the country in the back of my mind, and her suggestion of mid-late September to catch the changing of the colors locked the final pieces into place.
Sunday-Monday, September 19-20. The USS Badger, the only remaining car ferry service across Lake Michigan, made for a considerably shorter route back to Milwaukee, not to mention more adventurous and interesting. You get a good idea of just how expansive these Great Lakes are when you’re smack out in the middle of one for a couple hours and can see nothing but water in all directions.
Back in Milwaukee on Monday, there was just enough time to catch a Brewers game at Milwaukee County Stadium — somehow a fitting end to the journey given that our pal Melissa Seibold had also obtained Brewers tickets for my co-editor when he’d ventured up that way a couple weeks earlier (see this issue’s “Screen Door”). Then it was back to the airport, the rental car stocked with 2,000 miles more than it had when I’d picked it up a week ago. A long, strange trip, indeed.