The house on the lake

So it's taken me a while to get around to this. The problem is I don't know where it ends. But at least I do know where it begins.

Russ picked out the house by himself. The first time Marge saw it was the day the moving van arrived from Nebraska. It would forever after be her favorite house of all. It stood on about half an acre fronting on Lake Superior (the superior lake) and the first thing Marge did when she'd finished unpacking was have a hole cut in the back wall and a picture window installed so she could look out over the water from the dining room. The lake changed every minute, she'd say, and was never the same twice.

And it is a beautiful thing - and stormy, treacherous, and cold. Russ hired a guy to help care for the yard on weekends - a guy named Marshall, who had been a sailor on the lakes in his younger years - and when Marshall was finished with his chores for the day he'd sit with me and tell about legendary storms and shipwrecks, about how the vast iron deposits in Northern Minnesota deflected the mariners' compasses, and how to recognize the ships by the rake of their stacks and the way they were painted.

The lake's surface sat 25 or 30 feet below the edge of the yard, separated by a steep bank of solid, water-carved rock. In the coves of the rock at the water's edge were little beaches of fist-sized rocks, not sand, that would shift from place to place in the storms - sometimes being behind our house, sometimes behind a neighbor's. The Neighborhood Mothers' Rule for swimming was to get out of the water when our lips turned blue - ten minutes was about the limit. And on summer afternoons when a softball would get hit or a football kicked into the lake accidentally, the next door neighbor's golden retriever, Rusty, would be employed to swim out and bring it back. It was a great place to be a kid.

In the winter storm waves would crash against the rock, splashing the row of birch trees that stood along the back edge of the lawn until they were covered with ice and glittered like crystal in the morning sun. Later in the season there'd be mountains of ice on the water, formed by successive splashings and freezings, and, as climbing out on them was strictly prohibited by the Neighborhood Mothers we climbed on them with a certain amount of guilty pleasure and care.

In the Spring, ships would race to be first into Duluth - the winning crew got a party and the winning Captain a prize of some sort - and get stuck in the ice for trying, occasioning a laborious process of backing and then crashing forward into the ice, advancing a few feet with each blow. More than once we went off to school in the morning with a ship stuck right off our lot, and come home in the afternoon to find it a few lots further on.

The house itself was comfortably large enough for the family but not the kind of place that stands out in memory. Aside from the picture window, which Marge added, the only thing I remember about it clearly was that it had the ugliest fireplace I've ever seen anywhere. It was the lake that was the thing, and the lake was unforgettable.

(The house was about a mile and a half or so from the location of the webcam in the sidebar. When they were just about even with our house ships would sound their horns requesting the bridge over that canal to be raised. Often on a summer evening we'd pile into a car and drive downtown, arriving in time to stand on the breakwater and watch the ship come through. In the late 40s and early 50s Duluth was the busiest fresh water port in the world and the third busiest port of any kind in the US, measured by tonnage. The principle cargo was iron ore.)

I still don't know where it ends. The house is still there, last I heard. And I still miss the Great Lakes.