In Great Waters: Four Stories

by Thomas A. Janvier

Jutting out from the rocky coast, a sand spit nearly seven miles long, Minnesota Point is as a strong arm stretched forth to defend the harbour of Duluth against the storms which breed in the frozen North and come roaring down Lake Superior. Wisconsin Point, less than half its length, almost meets it from the other shore. Between the two is the narrow inlet through which in old times came the Canadian voyageurs—on their way across Saint Louis Bay and up the windings of the Saint Louis River to Pond du Lac, twenty miles farther westward. That was in the fur-trading days of little sailing-vessels and birch-bark canoes. Now, close to its shoulder, the Point is cut by a canal through which the great black steamships come and go.

Five-and-twenty years ago—before the canal was thought of, and when the Duluth of the present, with its backing of twenty thousand miles of railway, was a dream just beginning to be realized—Minnesota Point was believed to have a great future. Close to its shoulder a town site was staked out, and little wooden houses were built at a great rate. Corner lots on that sand spit were at a premium. The "boom" was on. The smash of '73 knocked the bottom out of everything for a while. When good times came again the town site moved on westward a half-mile or so and settled itself on the mainland. The little houses on the Point were out of the running and were taken up by Swedes—who were content, as Americans were not, to live a few steps away from the strenuous centre of that inchoate metropolis. That time the "boom" was a genuine one. The new city had come to stay. In course of time, to meet its growing trade requirements, the canal was cut which made the Point an island—and after that the Point was dead for good and all.

Nowadays it is only in summer that a little life, other than that of its few inhabitants, shows itself on Minnesota Point—when camping-parties and picnic-parties go down by three miles of shaky tramway to Oatka Beach. During all the rest of the year that sandy barren, with its forlorn decaying houses and its dreary growth of pines stunted by the harsh lake winds, is forgotten and desolate. Now and then is heard the cry of a gull flying across it slowly; and always against its outer side—with a thunderous crash in times of storm, in times of calm with a sad soft lap-lapping—surge or ripple the deathly cold waters of Lake Superior: waters so cold that whoever drowns in them sinks quickly—not to rise again (as the drowned do usually), but for all time, in chill companionship with the countless dead gathered there through the ages, to be lost and hidden in those icy depths.

The ghastly coldness of the water in which it is merged seems to have numbed the Point and reconciled it to its bleak destiny. It has accepted its fate: recognizing with a grim indifference that its once glowing future has vanished irrevocably into what now is the hopelessness of its nearly forgotten past.

II

George Maltham, wandering out on the Point one Sunday morning in the early spring-time—he had just come up from Chicago to take charge of the Duluth end of his father's line of lake steamers and was lonely in that strange place, and was the more disposed to be misanthropic because he had a headache left over from the previous wet night at the club—came promptly to the conclusion that he never had struck a place so god-forsakenly dismal. Aside from his own feelings, there was even more than usual to justify this opinion. The day was grey and chill. A strong northeast wind was blowing that covered the lake with white-caps and that sent a heavy surf rolling shoreward. A little ice, left from the spring break-up, still was floating in the harbour. Under these conditions the Point was at its cheerless worst.

Maltham had crossed the canal by the row-boat ferry. Having mounted the sodden steps and looked about him for a moment—in which time his conclusion was reached as to the Point's god-forsaken dismalness—he was for abandoning his intended explorations and going straight-away back to the mainland. But when he turned to descend the steps the boat had received some waiting passengers—three church-bound Swedish women in their Sunday clothes—and had just pushed off. That little turn of chance decided him. After all, he said to himself, it did not make much difference. What he wanted was a walk to rid him of his headache; and the Point offered him, as the rocky hill-sides of the mainland conspicuously did not, a good long stretch of level land.

Before him extended an absurdly wide street—laid out in magnificent expectation of the traffic that never came to it—flanked in far-reaching perspective by the little houses which sprang up in such a hurry when the "boom" was on. In its centre was the tramway, its road-bed laid with wooden planks. The dingy open tram-car, in which the church-bound Swedish women had come up to the ferry, started away creakingly while he stood watching it. That was the only sight or sound of life. For some little time, in the stillness, he could hear the driver addressing Swedish remarks of an encouraging or abusive nature to his mule.