The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes
352
The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes
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Overview
Chronicling the author’s 10,000-mile “Great Lakes Circle Tour,” this travel memoir seeks to answer a burning question: Is there a Great Lakes culture, and if so, what is it? Largely associated with the Midwest, the Great Lakes region actually has a culture that transcends the border between the United States and Canada. United by a love of encased meats, hockey, beer, snowmobiling, deer hunting, and classic-rock power ballads, the folks in Detroit have more in common with citizens in Windsor, Ontario, than those in Wichita, Kansas—while Toronto residents have more in common with Chicagoans than Montreal's population. Much more than a typical armchair travel book, this humorous cultural exploration is filled with quirky people and unusual places that prove the obscure is far more interesting than the well known.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781569765050 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Third Coast
Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes
By Ted McClelland
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2008 Edward McClellandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-505-0
CHAPTER 1
East Side Stories
Illinois — Chicago's East Side; Indiana — Hobart
The Great Lakes begin in Chicago, in a neighborhood known as the East Side, because it lies on the east bank of the Calumet River. The Calumet is an oily channel with concrete banks, running at ruled angles between pyramids of coal and snarls of scrap metal. The river sulks alongside the weedy ruins of steel mills. It oozes past monstrous Hulett shovels, whose iron jaws dip into ship holds, scarfing up seventeen tons of ore with one bite. It flows beneath the collapsible bridge the Blues Brothers jumped in their 1974 Dodge Monaco. This is as far as thousand-foot lake freighters and oceangoing "salties" can travel. A few miles upstream, next to a garbage heap punctured with natural gas wells, is a lock connecting the Calumet to a network of canals and rivers that drift down to the Mississippi. Only barges and pleasure boats can thread that needle.
The East Side is a remnant of the Rust Belt, populated by Croatians, Poles, and Mexicans. When the steel mills were still burning coal and melting ore, the nights glowed red and the mornings sparkled with a metallic confetti of steel and graphite. In the afternoons, the soot was so heavy that steelworkers needed three shots of whiskey to wash it from their throats. Then, the Calumet was busy with freighters from Minnesota's Iron Range. Sailors roamed the neighborhood, passing out in bars and waking up in rooming houses. Peckerhead Kate ran a tavern where she greeted all her customers with that eponymous insult. The long-jawed Horseface Mary owned a flop where merchant seamen wintered over while the lakes were locked in ice.
Chicago always stowed its industry on the East Side, so the wealthier neighborhoods wouldn't have to smell the smoke. Now, Chicago hides its industrial decay there. The East Side is, literally, the city's flyover. It is bypassed by the Skyway, a toll road that walks across the neighborhood on hundred-foot-tall iron legs, hurrying motorists from northwest Indiana to the Loop. If they look down, they see blocks of brown bungalows, punctuated by steeples marking the location of St. Francis de Sales or Our Lady of Guadalupe —"OLG" to the Mexicans who began settling here in the 1920s.
The neighborhood's last foundry was extinguished in the early 1990s. Now, most days, you can see a ship flying a foreign flag, docked across from a cornmeal-colored wall that is all that remains of U. S. Steel. The East Side was once nicknamed "the Ruhr of America," but today, it's cheaper to import steel than to forge it here. That was why the Neva Trader, a Norwegian freighter with a Latvian crew, was docked in the Calumet, with fifty-nine-hundred tons of plate in its hold.
* * *
I first became fascinated with the East Side in 1996, when a newspaper hired me to help compile a database of Chicago's restaurants and nightclubs. Down on the East Side, I didn't find many nightclubs in the neighborhood, but as I walked the prosaically named streets — 106th, Avenue O — I was taken home to Lansing, Michigan, the factory city where I'd grown up and gone to high school in the shadow of an auto plant.
I saw my first Great Lakes freighter near the mouth of the Calumet River. I'd led a friend on a biking expedition to this secret neighborhood. We were lounging on the beach when I caught sight of a dreadnought, looming offshore. Seven hundred feet long, it seemed ludicrously out of proportion on Lake Michigan — so dark, so angular, so Teutonically modernistic that it looked like a rusting sculpture on a public square.
"I'd love to get on one of those things," I said to my friend.
I pedaled to the river to watch it sail upstream, heard the gull-scattering horn blast that signaled the tender to unfold the bridge, watched the boat slide between banks, as snugly as a bolt in a lock, and waved to the sailors on deck. Jaded by quayside gawkers, they ignored me. As the bridge subsided, the ship displayed its stern, where its name and port were painted: Fred R. White, Wilmington, Del. Not exactly romantic. But I was hooked.
For a year afterward, I bugged a manager at the Illinois International Port. Most Chicagoans didn't even know we had a port, I argued, and if they did, they saw the fleet only as long, faded silhouettes, skating along the horizon. Finally, he relented. If it was OK with the captain of the Neva Trader, I could go aboard.
The Neva Trader is a salty, sturdy enough to cross the Atlantic, narrow enough to pass through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Ever since the Seaway, connecting Lake Ontario to the Atlantic, opened in 1957, the Great Lakes have been the eighth sea, a blue-leaved branch of the ocean reaching into Middle America. There is no other place on Earth a vessel so vast can infiltrate a continent so deeply. The Neva Trader is shorter than a lake freighter, but taller, and more stylish: with a white apartment block in its stern, it looks like a barge hauling a piece of Bauhaus architecture.
Unloading a ship is a longshoreman's job, not a captain's, so Oleg Mitirevs had two free hours to show me the Neva Trader. Oleg was thirty-eight, but had the slender figure of a man ten years younger, and the bald pate of a man ten years older. These clashing characteristics gave him the spry authority you expect in naval officers. He also wore a blue military sweater, although it was late spring.
"Would you like to see the bridge?" he asked.
The bridge was five stories above the deck. Oleg ascended the steep metal steps at a lanky jog.
The Neva Trader had been commissioned in 1977, so its lime-and-chrome control panel looks like a Sears oven. On the desk were a chart of Calumet Harbor and a sextant, the instrument that guided Magellan around the world. If the global positioning system breaks down, sailors navigate by the stars.
It's common to see Eastern Europeans on salties. Sailing was an attractive career for men living under communism. You had to be away from home four months at a time, but at least you got to see the world beyond the Iron Curtain.
"Those times in Russia, nobody could go abroad, but seamen had this privilege," Mitirevs said. "A lot of people join just for this reason. When I was growing up, I read books about the sea, about pirates, sailing vessels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I'm never thinking about how much money I could make. I could see the world, go to different countries. The position here as master is pretty much what I imagined as a child. It's still pretty romantic."
I told the captain I'd be glad to take the crew downtown in my car. I wanted to see how sailors spent their shore leave. Perhaps they would go shopping tomorrow, Oleg said. Could I come back then? But when I returned the next afternoon, the captain had bad news.
"We went yesterday to downtown," he said. "We will have to leave that part out."
I was already back on the dock when I saw a sailor at the top of the stairway. He was wearing a loud tropical shirt, narrow sunglasses with a rubber strap dangling down his neck, baggy chinos, and a knapsack. Without a word, he descended the steps.
Fjodorov Jurijs wanted to go shopping.
Fjodorov, known to his shipmates as Yuri, left no port unvisited, anywhere in the world. Older, jaded sailors spent their evenings watching videos, or reading in their cabins, but Yuri's motto was "five day port, five day city." On the Neva Trader's first day in Chicago, he'd taken the train downtown (after wandering for two hours in search of a station) and found the Gap.
Yuri saw America as a giant mall. Video cameras, cell phones, athletic shoes, PlayStations, jewelry, perfume — they all cost half as much in Chicago as they would in Riga. He wanted to take home bags of gifts for his family. In the post-Communist world, this was the greatest perk of life at sea.
"Very small price, shirt, jeans," proclaimed Yuri as we walked to my car. He was a pink, robust man with a thinning crew cut. "My country, very big price."
Yuri asked me to take him to the closest shopping strip. That was Commercial Avenue, fifteen miles south of Macy's, and a hundred times more ghetto. Our first stop was Foot Locker. Yuri wanted to buy shoes for his wife, Ludmilla, and his sons, Dennis and Karoll.
"New Nike," he declared, pronouncing the name as one syllable. Striding into the street, he began telling me what he knew about Chicago. He'd seen a lot of movies. On the ride down Lake Michigan, the captain had shown the crew No Mercy, a Richard Gere cop film. And back in Riga, Yuri had once run a video store.
As soon as we stepped out of the car, Yuri pointed at the emblem on the side of a police cruiser — four red stars between blue bands.
"Flag for Illinois?" he asked.
"Chicago," I said.
"Chee-cago!"
Yuri raised his arms, cocking his thumbs and forefingers. It's universal sign language for Chicago: the tommy gun. He pretended to spray the street with bullets as his lips vibrated at hummingbird speed.
"Russian movie, Brothers Two. Downtown Chee-cago, Mafia, gangsters!"
Yuri's English was limited, but he knew enough to discuss the important topics: food, women, movies, and brand-name products.
Yuri went into Foot Locker, where he began admiring a pair of workout pants. He wanted to buy them for his wife, but first he wanted to be sure they were the right size. He summoned a clerk.
"I want 103 centimeters," he explained. "How many centimeters is this?" "I don't know centimeters," said the clerk, who was dressed like a basketball referee. "It's thirty-two inches."
Yuri didn't know inches, so he pulled an electronic Russian-English dictionary out of his knapsack. It had a metric conversion function. As Yuri calculated, a security guard appeared.
"They want to know what is the purpose of measuring this," the guard said flatly. "This is the women's section."
"Is for my wife."
"How tall is your wife?" the clerk asked.
In her exasperation, she did not speak slowly, as most people do with foreigners, but forcefully, as you would with a shy child.
Yuri held his hand up to his eyebrows.
"Why don't you try a medium?"
Yuri folded the pants over his arm. Now he needed some shoes for Ludmilla. He grabbed a cross trainer, and held it out to the clerk.
"You have European size 39?"
The clerk sagged. Her forehead dropped to her arm.
"I'm gonna be here all day measuring shoes. Hold on, let me go in the back and see if I can find out. Shirley, help me out here!"
Yuri settled on the pants and a shirt. He paid for them from a sheaf of twenty-dollar bills, and left the store distressed by the bad American service.
"Latvia, no problem shop," he concluded, heading out the door. "Very quick. Here, very slow. No size."
Yuri had to get back for his afternoon shift — as a member of the deck crew, he worked in port. While the ship's cranes swung steel coil onto the dock, Yuri inspected the rubber packing on the hatches, to make sure it was airtight. Sailors work four hours on, eight hours off, and Yuri wanted to hit Commercial Avenue again before closing time. So I killed the time chatting with an elderly longshoreman. He was a wiry black man, sixty-two, with a lightly salted moustache. This was the world's second-deadliest job, he boasted as a steel plate rappelled through the air, descending on us from eight stories up. Only miners had it worse.
"Everything's overhead," he said. "There's nowhere to go but down, and that's where you are. Just like when the mine caves in, there's nowhere to go."
* * *
Yuri had shucked his coveralls and showered, and was again pounding down the metal stairs in full resort casual. We had less than an hour before the prowler grates were drawn on Commercial.
Yuri finally found his "Nikes" in a hip-hop shoe boutique where the sneakers were heaped in chalky piles. I'm not using those quotation marks to mock his pronunciation. The uppers were stamped with backward swooshes. "Made in China" was printed inside the tongues. They were twenty-five dollars a pair. After checking the lengths with a tape measure, Yuri bought shoes for his entire family. In Latvia, people might think they were the real thing, at least for the month they lasted.
Yuri could shop so ardently because, for a Latvian, he belongs to an elite profession. The average Latvian laborer earns two hundred dollars a month. The average Latvian sailor earns fifteen hundred. That's enough for Yuri to house his family in a fashionable Riga neighborhood. He explained this to me as we walked down Commercial in the graying evening, looking for a Mexican restaurant. He pulled out his Russian-English translator, so he could locate the right words for a sailor's story.
"My country, sailor, seaman — big money," he said.
The restaurant was nearly empty. A neon Tecate sign glowed in the window. A serape was pinned behind the counter. Sailing, Yuri said, after we'd ordered burritos, was not a life he wanted to lead forever. The long stretches at sea were lonely for a family man. But they were a family man's duty.
"Men work," he said, his shrug filling in the missing words of that spare sentence.
Besides the months away from home, there was the danger of shipwreck. A vessel as small as the Neva Trader was a toy to the North Atlantic. On its last voyage, a storm had swamped the decks. "This not cargo ship," Yuri thought. "This submarine."
Unlike his captain, he did not sail for love of the sea. He wanted money to start a business on land.
"I work, work, work, open a bar. My wife barmaid, experienced."
I know three Slavic words, all Polish. One I learned from a Kielbasa ad on Detroit TV. When the burritos came, I tried it out on Yuri.
"Smaczna," I crooned, pressing a thumb and forefinger to my lips.
"Smaczna!" Yuri slapped the table. His face flushed pink to the peak of his crown, where the razor-stubbled hair began. It meant "tasty" in Latvian, too.
"You coming tomorrow?" Yuri asked.
The ship was sailing then, half-an-hour after the last plate settled on the dock. I told him I'd be there to see it off.
"You bring mug?"
Yuri bought a mug in every port he visited, but he'd been unable to find his souvenir on Commercial Avenue. So I'd promised to buy him one myself. The next day, just before his ship sailed, I presented him a mug with a wraparound Chicago skyline. In exchange, he gave me a postcard of Riga.
When the Neva Trader arrived in Chicago, it had wallowed in the river. Now, after losing twelve million pounds in three days, it balanced on its winnowed hull.
The captain paced the deck in Bermuda shorts. On the dock, forklifts loaded steel into a semitrailer. A minivan with Wisconsin plates arrived, and a bald, burly man emerged. This was the Great Lakes pilot, who would guide the Neva Trader to Duluth, where the ship was loading grain bound for Scotland. As he ascended to the bridge, the red-and-white "pilot on board" flag slid up the pole. The diesel engines sounded an underwater note, fathoms below the scale. The ship quivered like an idling truck, the smokestack exhaled rags of exhaust, a pipe vomited ballast.
Once the Neva Trader had coughed and hacked and cleared its innards, Yuri and his bosun climbed down the metal staircase to gather its rope railings. They coiled it, and lashed the stairs to the hull. The propeller, spun by fifty-six-hundred snorting horses, whipped the river to lather. One by one, the mooring lines slackened. The long-shoremen slipped the nooses off their stays, and the lines were spooled on board, flopping and spraying like trophy fish. The ship sidled to mid-channel, then floated into the lake, as though freedom alone propelled it away from Chicago. The stern said "Neva Trader — Oslo," but ships don't really have homes, I thought. As restless as terns, or dolphins, or any other creature not bound to terra firma, they migrate from port to port. I looked up from the lettering, and there was Yuri, holding up the mug. I waved back, and turned toward land.
* * *
I met Oil Can Eddie at the Southeast Side Historical Museum in Calumet Park, a few blocks from the Neva Trader's anchorage. If I wanted to know what had happened to the East Side's steel industry, the museum director said, Eddie's the man to talk to. That afternoon, he was sitting at the bullshitters' table, drinking coffee with a pair of retired steelworkers. White-haired, blunt-featured, his head looked as though it had been chipped off a statue and grafted to a 260-pound man. Eddie couldn't sit around and drink coffee all afternoon, so he gave me his card. That Saturday, he was going out to Indiana to teach some wet-behind-the-ears ironworkers about their blue-collar heritage. I was welcome to come along.
"But you're gonna have to be there at seven," he growled. "I can't wait around. If you fuck up, you fuck up. I'm not trying to be a drill sergeant. ..."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Third Coast by Ted McClelland. Copyright © 2008 Edward McClelland. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Map of the Great Lakes,
Introduction,
1 East Side Stories Illinois — Chicago's East Side; Indiana — Hobart,
2 Suburbia's Waiting Room Illinois — Chicago's North Side,
3 The Drunkest City in America Wisconsin — Milwaukee,
4 Ya Hey! Wisconsin — Elkhari Lake, Howards Grove, Haven, Two Rivers,
5 Door to the North Wisconsin — Door County, Green Bay,
6 Yoopers and Trolls Michigan — Escanaba, The Garden Penisnsula, Manistique, Whitefish Point, Paradise,
7 Boat Nerds Michigan — Sault Ste. Marie; Ontario — Sault Ste. Marie,
8 Marquette's Only Son Michigan — Mackinac Island,
9 The North Country's Other Great Folksinger Michigan — Marquette,
10 A Long Way from a Long Way from Anywhere Michigan — Isle Royale, Ironwood,
11 Highway 61 Visited Minnesota — Duluth, Grand Marais,
12 Above Lake Superior Ontario — Thunder Bay, Pays Plat First Nations Reserve, Schreiber,
13 The Ojibway Way Ontario — Pukaskwa National Park,
14 The World's Largest Freshwater Island Ontario — Manitoulin Island,
15 Emancipation Day Ontario — Owen Sound,
16 Southern Ontario Gothic Ontario — Point Pelee National Park, Leamington, Port Dover,
17 Greetings from Niagara Falls! Ontario — Niagara Falls, Hamilton,
18 The New Canadians Ontario — Toronto,
19 For Queen and Canada Ontario — Prince Edward County, Adolphustown, Kingston,
20 The Burned-Over District New York — Sackets Harbor, New Haven, Oswego,
21 The Irony of Buffalo New York — Buffalo; Pennsylvania — Erie,
22 Ethnic Jazz Ohio — Cleveland,
23 Black Bottom Blues Michigan — Detroit; Ontario — Windsor,
24 Like 1812 All Over Again Ontario — Port Rowan,
25 The Great Bay Port Fish Sandwich Controversy Michigan — Bay Port,
26 What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor? Michigan — Rogers City,
27 My Home Lake Michigan — Mackinaw City, Suttons Bay, Glen Arbor, Ludington, New Buffalo; Indiana — Michigan City,
Epilogue,
What People are Saying About This
The Third Coast is much like the place it chronicles: interesting, not at all ostentatious, and a great amount of fun. (Tom Bissell, author, The Father of All Things)
"[A] hearty, good-natured homage." —Booklist
"The author struts an extensive knowledge of the area that makes this a must for fans of travel literature." —Kirkus Reviews
Captures a slice of North Americana with the precision of a Walker Evans photograph, and sentences worthy of John McPhee." —Neal Pollack, author, Alternadad
"To [Ted McClelland], the North is a state of mind, and it is the Great Lakes region that fuels his imagination." —Chicago Tribune
"Is there a Great Lakes culture? Damned straight, and Ted McClelland nails it." —Jerry Dennis, author, The Living Great Lakes and A Place on the Water
"The Third Coast is much like the place it chronicles: interesting, not at all ostentatious, and a great amount of fun." —Tom Bissell, author, The Father of All Things
"[A] quirky travelogue." —Kenosha News
"A very good read. I learned more about the Great Lakes region from it than I had in a half century of living in Michigan." —The Bay City Times