Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  The Equinox’s wheelhouse looked like a steel ledge rising above the lock doors when it pulled in. The ship is almost the exact size of the sixty-story Carnegie Hall Tower in New York City, leaned over on its side. The bow is a seventh of a mile away from the stern, and at first it didn’t seem possible that the two were connected. The deck floated just a few feet above the water, weighed down by thirty-three thousand tons of iron ore pellets in the holds.

  Three crew members lowered a steel gangplank onto the parking-lot curb, and I dragged my ridiculously tiny-looking roller bag onto the ship. All three wore coveralls and hard hats. One, from Newfoundland, introduced himself as Tony. He had a black mustache, pudgy cheeks, and curly, black hair. “You’ll be in the owner’s cabin,” he said. “Better hurry up, supper’s almost over.”

  I carried my bag up five flights of stairs and dropped it in the cabin. The room was surprisingly large. It was generic and timeless in a way that any steel room, like a prison cell, is timeless. The queen-sized bed could have been transplanted from a Comfort Inn. Fluorescent lights gave the room a pale-blue hue. The separate sitting area had a chipboard desk and mini fridge, and there was an en suite bathroom. The walls were covered with white, plastic panels, and the curtains were a kind of textured polyester I had never seen before. Behind them, two oversized portholes looked out on a constantly moving scene.

  The mess hall was empty when I got there, except for one worker in coveralls, who ate while staring at his plate. He finished his meal, set his dishes in the sink, grabbed a plate of pie, and disappeared upstairs. Great Lakes freighter crews typically work two months on, one month off during the nine-month season. (The seaway freezes over and shuts down in the winter.) Eating is a routine. Sleep is a routine. The man had carried out these routines thousands of times. His job was to repeat: four hours on, eight off, twenty-four hours a day, for ten, twenty, forty years.

  The menu that night was chicken curry, steak, spaghetti, meatballs, short ribs, steamed veggies, salad, pie, and a choice of a dozen nonalcoholic drinks. I filled my plate, and the chief cook, Mike Newell, joined me. He has cloudy, blue eyes and gray hair, and he opens his shirt a couple of buttons lower than other crew members. He wanted to tell me about a tragedy. He was the main character. He’d been screwed, shanghaied, taken advantage of every day he was on the water. He’d gotten carpal tunnel syndrome. He’d gotten promoted, then demoted. He’d been punched in the face for no reason. He never wanted to be a cook.

  Mike self-flagellated with a dish towel as he spoke. Sweat beaded up on his forehead. He was sixty-two and had worked on ships for forty-one years. He told me about other hardships. “Strange people come here,” he said. “Not people you normally see at a job. Mental patients, Hell’s Angels, ex-cons. No one else will take them.” Mike had seen people die. He’d seen people arrested and others break down in tears. One time, four guys were driving back from a bar in a taxi. One was uncomfortable so he punched Mike in the face. Another time, Mike was walking to the mess hall when a sailor he didn’t know pushed him down the stairs. The captain saw the blood and asked Mike if he’d hit his head. Mike told him the story and the captain replied, “Oh,” and walked away.

  “Killer Kowalski was a chief cook,” Mike said. “He was always paranoid about something. Always running around saying, ‘What’s coming down the lake! What’s coming down the lake!’ Another guy worked as muscle for the union. His arms were like fire hydrants, and he was mean. He’d been in jail for killing his wife and told people on the ship he was going to kill them too. One day I put pepper on his eggs by accident, and the guy chased me through the kitchen until I locked myself in the pantry.”

  Back then, Mike said, there were fist fights every day and knife fights once a week. Sailors disappeared overboard in the middle of the night. Mike watched two guys brawl on deck once. One fell a hundred feet into a cargo hold and died. Canadian Mounties investigated the scene for five hours. They left without arresting anyone, and the ship headed down the lake.

  Something happens to your mind, your perspective, the way you speak and gesticulate after a few months on a boat. There aren’t enough square feet. There is no escape. Mike’s hands were all over the place as he told me stories. His tattooed forearms flexed, and a vein in his neck bulged. His silver hair was matted with sweat, and his eyes did not seem to be looking at the same plastic walls, tables, and chairs that I was. Part of him had left the ship a long time ago. “This place is full of lunatics,” he said.

  Mike missed the days when the crew came to the galley to drink, play cards, and scrap. They gathered around him like boys around a campfire because there was nowhere else to go. Now that ships are computerized, the Equinox operates with a crew of sixteen instead of thirty-five. Everyone has a private room, with a television, bathroom, and internet. After their shift and a quick meal, they usually disappear into a cyber world.

  I had no idea that life on a freighter was so violent. From the shore, it looked kind of boring. Mike checked on something in the kitchen, and I sneaked away to the deck. It was seven in the evening, and the sun was still above the treetops. The spring air smelled like honeysuckle and musty river water. The ninety-four-hundred-horsepower engine, and a twenty-foot propeller, pushing the Equinox through the South Shore Canal toward Lac-Saint-Louis vibrated the deck and every surface I touched. At top speed the propeller turns a hundred times a minute and drives the ship more than twenty miles an hour.

  Red and green navigational buoys slipped past either side. A hatch of river flies lifted off the water and hovered above the grasses. Skyscrapers in downtown Montréal looked like vertical shadows. Long, flat clouds slid east. A thunderhead hit with fierce wind and rain. It passed a few minutes later, and the evening sun hammered the deck. You notice things like this moving ten miles an hour: kids playing lacrosse in a dried-up hockey rink; a teenager peeking into his neighbors’ windows with a remote-control drone. Acts typically carried out in private are revealed, like a red fox an hour later hunching over and dropping a turd on a perfectly manicured lawn.

  You also notice the passing of time. In the next six days, Captain Ross said there would be two stops where I could get off the ship. The rest of the time I’d be looking out the window. Or over my shoulder for Killer Kowalski. No alcohol, no drugs, no smoking allowed. A subtle panic washed over me. I was not used to sitting still or watching other people work. From Mike’s stories, it sounded like the hardest job on a ship was off-duty time. It made people do crazy things. When Mike hit twenty-five years of service at his last job, he said, the company gave him a clock mounted on a brass helm. Mike told the guy: “You should have given me a fucking congressional Medal of Honor.”

  The canal opened into Lac-Saint-Louis, then narrowed again at Île Perrot. We were three hundred miles due north of New York City, on the same latitude as Portland, Oregon. Elms and cottonwood bent in the breeze, casting shadowy fingers onto the water. White cedar and ash grew close to the river, where 350,000 cubic feet of water passed by every second. Moraines and drumlins left by glaciers shaped the riverbanks, creating miniature highlands shrouded in red oak and sugar maple. In between, peat bogs lay beneath a lace of fallen trees.

  Two bicyclists on the dike pedaled past the ship. It was hard to believe we would be in Thunder Bay in six days. In my mind, it was difficult to connect Montréal and the Midwest by water at all. I was so used to driving and flying that the shape of the continent had become distorted. You get on a plane or a highway in New York and get off in Minneapolis. Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Most people don’t travel anymore. They arrive. Unless you’re riding the slow boat. Then you see every mile.

  IF THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET took place in a day, humans would appear at 23:59:56, and the Great Lakes would take their current shape across the northland a fraction of a second before midnight. The Great Lakes basin is set in the Canadian Shield, the geological core of North America. The shield floated on a sea of magma around the planet before ending up where it is today. At on
e point, it straddled the equator on the ancient continent of Laurentia. It was an ocean floor to several prehistoric seas; then it collided with South America and West Africa and created the Appalachian and Adirondack Mountains. Volcanic ash buried it, then glaciers scraped it clean. Geologists predict that in a hundred million years, it will merge with Asia and South America, creating another supercontinent they call Amasia.

  The Laurentide Ice Sheet gouged the bottom of Lake Superior thirteen hundred feet deep during the last Ice Age. It cut Lake Michigan nine hundred feet down. When the ice retreated fourteen thousand years ago, the basins filled with freshwater. Lake Superior topped out first and spilled into Lakes Michigan and Huron. The Saint Lawrence River was still dammed with ice, so water flowed north through the North Bay Outlet and south down the Mississippi and Hudson Rivers. When the last of the ice melted, water flowed to Lakes Erie and Ontario, plunged over Niagara Falls, and drained through the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic.

  It takes a drop of water about four hundred years to travel from Lake Superior to the Saint Lawrence River, meaning that the water Champlain navigated is still meandering east today. When Champlain first ascended Lachine Rapids, he was in a wooden bateau, headed west to find what he called la mer douce—“the sweet-water sea”—and a passageway through the northland to the riches of La Chine. It was May 1611. He estimated that China was between eight hundred and a thousand miles away. He had left a young Frenchman with the Algonquin and Huron tribes a year before to learn their language and explore the lakes. In return, he had hosted a Huron Indian named Savignon in France.

  Champlain was a week late for the reunion. It had been a difficult crossing and voyage upriver. He described Lachine Rapids as “seven or eight waterfalls” and watched as a Frenchman and Indian died trying to run them. The rendezvous site was empty when he finally arrived. The Huron chiefs had been on time and had left a few days before. Champlain followed them upriver and surveyed the riverbanks for settlement sites. He found a large meadow where the Iroquois had grown maize. His men leveled the ground and built a small structure and a stone wall. He named the site Place Royale, but for the large island across the river, he kept the name that Jacques Cartier had chosen: Montréal.

  A few days later, Champlain ran into two hundred Huron warriors onshore. He saluted his friends and summoned Savignon. The three chiefs leading the group were elated to see their friend and brought out the Frenchman, Étienne Brûlé. Brûlé was dressed in a deerskin shirt and traditional leggings. He had flourished during his winter with the Huron, learning both the Huron and Algonquin languages and gathering information about western tribes and waterways. He had unknowingly become the first European to travel up the Ottawa River and explore Huron country. Champlain spoke with him excitedly and, later, questioned the Huron chiefs further about the source of the Saint Lawrence and a possible route to China.

  Champlain had been planning for years to train and disperse truchements (interpreters) like Brûlé throughout the northland. He recognized the value of Indian knowledge and collaboration and had trained others before Brûlé. But none traveled as far as the young Frenchman did. Very little is known about Brûlé. His story appears sporadically in the journals of Champlain and fellow explorers Gabriel Sagard and Jean de Brébeuf. He was born around 1592 in Champigny-sur-Marne, near Paris, and was likely an attendant on Champlain’s ship during the 1608 expedition to Quebec. He would have been sixteen when he arrived in New France. He became interested in Indian culture and languages, and he asked whether Champlain would allow him to winter with them in 1610.

  Even less was known about North America at the time. Henry Hudson would not sail into Hudson Bay for two more months. Jamestown was still struggling three years after being founded. The Pilgrims were ten years away from landing on Plymouth Rock, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was twenty years away from putting down stakes in the Northeast. Cartier had turned around at Montréal during his 1535 voyage up the Saint Lawrence, as had Champlain in 1603. Beyond that, all Champlain and Brûlé knew about the frontier came from rough sketches that Indians made for them on birchbark or in the sand.

  Brûlé spent his first winter with the Algonquin chief Iroquet in the northland near the Ottawa River. The conditions were drastically different from those in Quebec. The Algonquin divided into small groups in the fall and moved upstream to hunt migratory birds, beaver, and large game. After the first snow, they moved into larger camps and lived in longhouses, with multiple clans sleeping in bunk beds. The tribe ate preserved food in the heart of winter and often fasted for days to make supplies last.

  Brûlé was likely treated with privilege in the camp. He killed caribou and deer alongside Algonquin and Huron hunters and spent most of his time learning to speak and write their languages. The Huron speak a form of Iroquoian. They were taller than the French and well built, wore beaver skin mantles, and greased their hair and faces. They came from Georgian Bay on Lake Huron and knew western waterways well. Brûlé was so content his first winter with the Huron that he asked Champlain at the rendezvous in 1611 if he could return for another year. Champlain agreed. He didn’t see his truchement again for years and considered him dead.

  On the contrary, Brûlé thrived in the northland. He had been raised in a world of seventeenth-century noblemen and monarchs, where a wrong action or word could land you in a stockade. In the northland, he found freedom and self-determination. He vanished into the woods with natives who prayed to the animals they slayed, honored prisoners of war by torturing them, and lived completely off the land. The Huron Indians were farmers. They moved their villages every twenty years to keep the soil fertile and hunted only when they needed extra food. They preferred female children over males, because females could reproduce. Murderers were tied to their victims and starved to death. Every ten years, the Huron held a Feast of the Dead, during which they reburied corpses in a common pit so that their souls could journey to the “land beyond where the sun sets.”

  Brûlé spent his second year deep in Huron country exploring the Ottawa and Mattawa Rivers, Lake Nipissing, and the French River. He was the first European to see the broad, blue stretch of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. He lived hundreds of miles west of the nearest Frenchmen and slogged through swamps, paddled lakes and rivers, and scaled mountain passes in the heart of Iroquois country. While his brothers in France discarded their hose and linen collars in favor of breeches and ruffs, Brûlé dressed in a mix of Huron and pioneer gear: knee-high moose-skin boots, loose-fitting wool tunic, deerskin shirt, wool cap, and a thick fur overcoat.

  Champlain was stunned when he saw his truchement again in 1615. They were both deep in Huron territory. Champlain was advancing his campaign against the Onondaga Iroquois and was in need of men. He dispatched Brûlé to locate the Susquehanna tribe and ask for their help. Brûlé found the tribe near Binghamton, New York, becoming the first European to explore Lake Ontario, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Chesapeake Bay along the way. He delivered the Susquehanna warriors two days after the battle was lost, though, and found Champlain wounded and on his way to Huron country to recuperate.

  Brûlé disappeared again after the battle. As he trekked, he inadvertently drew the border between New France and New England west across the northland. From Montréal to Ottawa to the site of present-day Toronto and Buffalo, he met tribes and learned their languages, customs, and boundaries. The information he brought back made its way to French fur traders, businessmen, nobles, and the royal court, and trading routes and outposts eventually appeared in his path.

  His time in the backcountry had distanced him from the French and their mission, though. He had his own plans and, in his last years, appeared only at trading posts now and then—usually with heaps of pelts to trade. Rumors of his lust for Indian women made their way east. Brûlé had a penchant for double-dealing—with rival tribes and even the English. His knowledge of the interior gave him considerable power in North America. He began his own fur trade and made an excellent profit ar
ound Quebec, appearing in the city in 1621 with four hundred beaver pelts. He sailed to France a few times in the 1620s and took a bride there. France’s prestigious Company of One Hundred Associates hired him as a consultant, but he was captured by the British on his way back to New France in 1628—and aided brothers Lewis and Thomas Kirke in their campaign to sack Quebec.

  Brûlé did not completely abandon Champlain’s orders. In 1621, he set out with another truchement, named Grenolle, to fulfill his original mission of discovering the extent of the sweet-water seas. He made his way northwest along the shore of Lake Huron, meeting the Beaver and Oumisagai tribes. He and Grenolle then followed Saint Mary’s River upstream to the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, where they encountered the “People of the Falls,” ancestors of the present-day Ojibwe tribe. Sagard wrote that Brûlé described the falls and a great body of water beyond them accurately, placing him on the shores of Lake Superior.

  The French servant who discovered the Great Lakes died in infamy. Champlain severed ties with him in 1629 after learning of his involvement with the Kirke brothers, and Brûlé vanished into the wilderness again. This time, his lust caught up with him. In June 1633, a Huron chief killed Brûlé over an argument about a woman and, as was custom, ate Brûlé’s heart.

  What Brûlé left behind was not so much a legacy as a passageway through the northland. The first to follow him were more truchements commissioned by Champlain—like the great explorer Jean Nicolet, who arrived on the shores of Winnebago country wearing a China damask robe while firing pistols from each hand. (He thought he was in Asia.) Next came Jesuit missionaries who proved to be adept explorers and mapped much of the Great Lakes, establishing missions as far west as Lake Michigan. They were followed by coureurs des bois, or “runners of the woods,” pioneers of the western fur trade. They all traveled along a line that was slowly trampled through the forests, lakes, and wetlands of the northland, much of which would one day become America’s northern border. French soldiers walked it, then regiments of the British army, then American militia, farmers, miners, shipbuilders, and finally merchants and captains who sailed schooners and freighters across the sweet-water seas.