Lake Superior for the Soul

Gulls mewl and wheel, waves foam on the rounded pebble beach, great stands of crimson and gold forests shift and shudder in the wind, and far, far off, almost in the realm of imagination and desire, as fine as a high-wire vibration, I sense a whining, yipping howl that can only be wolves.

This is why I rush to the shores of Lake Superior. I come here empty, or hot or despairing, and in minutes of simply sitting near it, I am quietly happy, indifferent to everything but the small wonders and smells around me: a fish that jumps, trunks of birch trees that gleam, a chickadee that calls, a whitetail deer that slips past.

At every second, the big lake captivates and consoles.

Painters and sculptors, musicians and poets have come to Minnesota’s North Shore, too, all trying to capture what it is about this fundamentally mysterious, faintly melancholy and very chilly inland ocean.

Ocean? It certainly looks like an ocean. It sounds like an ocean. It provides ocean-size sunsets and ocean-size storms. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow praised its “shining big sea waters.” From Duluth, the lake shore curves northeast to Grand Portage, and it is clear that this is not an ocean as Californians know it, but a world of stone and water, fish and wild woods, and still-powerful ties to the Scandinavians who settled here for the fish, the timber, the privacy and peace.

The North Shore is in its glory in the fall, free of the curses of summer and the extremes of winter. In the warm months, there are bugs, horrendous and hateful. On a pre-Labor Day visit, I returned festooned with itchy bites from “no-see-ums,” biting midges that insinuate themselves into clothing, bite your belly and chew your hairline and the corners of your eyes. In summer, too, a malevolent mosquito orchestra tunes up at dusk, and stinging horseflies can make hiking miserable, especially on warm and breezeless days. And in winter, which can begin in November if the gods are feeling churlish, temperatures can plunge to 45 below. The best way to get around is by snowmobile, and the only way to dress is for survival: mukluks, down parkas, heat packs, Polarfleece and the like. But in autumn, the vast poplar, birch and maple forests along Superior’s curving coast burst into red and gold, interlaced with swaths of white birch trunks, deep blue-green spruce and pine.

“It’s such an inspirational area--it’s so invigorating up there,” says Jim Biesinger, an artist and exhibits specialist at the Minnesota Zoo, whose moose antler sculptures are one of the region’s treasures. “The North Shore gives me my fill of nature. It’s so beautiful, so good for the spirit.”

In fall, in particular, it’s all I can do to keep my eyes on the road, such is the showcase of scenery on the North Shore Scenic Drive. The road along Lake Superior was recently designated an “All American Road” by the Federal Highway Administration, joining California’s Big Sur Coast Highway, among others, as one of the country’s most spectacular drives. Along the road, cars carrying kayaks and canoes mingle with logging trucks bearing bumper stickers: “If You Object to Logging, Try Using Plastic Toilet Paper.”

my husband, peter, and i pity ourselves a bit, thinking we are the only ones in Minnesota who somehow failed to acquire a cabin or relatives up north. It’s not true, of course, as the countless cabins, lodges and inns suggest, and our real estate misfortunes free us to sample places along Lake Superior’s shore in the region called the Arrowhead. It’s about three hours--150 miles--from our St. Paul home to Duluth.

We make our first stop at Russ Kendall’s Smoke House in Knife River, 20 miles north of Duluth, for wild rice, cheese and oily bronze slabs of smoked whitefish, salmon or trout. The dark, three-room store is one of the most authentic spots on the shore. It was an ice cream parlor in 1924 and a dance hall in 1932, when Russ’ dad, W.T. Kendall, owned it. “This is an antique shop,” says Cody Olson, W.T.’s great-grandson, as he wraps our whitefish in newspaper at the fish counter. His mother, Kristi Olson, shyly disagrees. “It’s a museum,” she says. But they agree that it is a place mostly to sit and eat. Peter and I prefer to eat outdoors or on the road, however, so we assemble soda crackers, napkins and sodas to go with the moistly salty fish and chewy cheese curds.

A mile later, we pass through Two Harbors, known in the old days for whiskey, fish, timber and taconite, from which iron ore is pulled. Today it’s the gateway to the Superior Hiking Trail, begun in 1986 by a hardy handful who dreamed of a wilderness route along the Porcupine Mountain ridges that flank the shore. Now, 3,500 members help with trail maintenance and funding.

“On certain sections that are popular day-hike destinations, such as Carlton Peak, you may see 10 or 50 people in one day,” says Rudi Hargesheimer of Minneapolis, president of the Superior Hiking Trail Assn. “But 90% of the trail is a wilderness-like experience where you don’t see people, cars or buildings.”

Leaving our car at a trail entrance, we enter a meandering, shady path that rises nearly 1,000 feet above the lake. A blue and red ore boat carrying taconite floats below us where the sky meets the lake, and turkey vultures glide above. Perched on a warm boulder in the bright canopy of the forest, I think of myriad moose, snowmobile and ski trails that crisscross these seemingly uncrowded woods. Down below, in the cold water where I once learned to pull the release cord on a spray skirt and swim out of a capsized kayak, is a water trail with a series of campsites that runs 80 miles from Two Harbors to Grand Marais. As a summer and fall paddler, I have bobbed cautiously under Superior’s cliffs, beneath lacy doilies of orange lichen and purple harebells. At Split Rock Lighthouse State Park, we clamber to the top of the 1910 lighthouse, which is set on a 130-foot bluff.

The limpid quiet of the lake is deceptive: Gales can rise quickly out of the northeast, bringing huge swells and cross waves. More than 350 ships lie wrecked in the lakes beyond--haunts for scuba divers and the stuff of songs and myths. And it is so cold that Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad about the 1975 wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is often true: “The lake it is said, never gives up her dead, when the skies of November turn gloomy.” The North Shore is fissured with 62 rivers and streams, a picnicker’s paradise. Peter and I often make the short hike down to a sandbar or rock on the Temperance or Baptism rivers. On hot days, we have waded in the shallows or stood under the smallest of five waterfalls at Gooseberry Falls State Park.

This time, we make for the Cascade River, whose root beer-colored cataracts crash and foam through bowls and over boulders down to the lake. A narrow wooden bridge spans the river, ancient cedar trees belly up to the water and mist rises through its narrow gorge. We bunk in a simple room in the Cascade Lodge, and I awake the next morning with an unfamiliar feeling: North Shore joy and relaxation have set in. Maybe I won’t go home, I begin to think. Maybe I can live up here in a cabin in this timelessness and peace. Then I consider the winter and think better of it.

unlike my semi-sissy self, some folks--mostly swedes, Finns and Norwegians--were attracted by this climate and remoteness year-round. The Ojibwe Indians ceded the North Shore to the U.S. government in the 1854 treaty of LaPointe, Wis. Scandinavians began arriving in the 1890s, and immigration peaked in 1910. The forbidding North Shore looked uninhabitable to most people, but to the Scandinavians it looked like home.

“They took boats during summer or walked on the ice, because inland was tangled and bug-ridden and not pleasant to hike in, and there was no complete road up the shore until 1925,” says Hugh Bishop of Two Harbors, author of “By Water and Rail: A History of Lake County, Minnesota.” “They came because land was available and the fishing methods used in the old country were good here as well.”

And nearly everyone fished. From the late 1880s until the 1950s, the lake teemed with herring, whitefish and trout, and there was a fishing establishment every half mile or so of the shore. Now only a handful remain.

The North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum in Tofte displays the implements and stories of local families such as Ben Fenstad, the Toftes, Ragnvald Sve and Helmer Aakvik. The old-timers who worked the herring nets in frozen mittens and musty wool would be amused that city folks drive here to peep at leaves or play golf. Pleasure-seekers from the city who came to the shore to fish or hunt were initially put up in fishermen’s homes, the beginning of the 3.5 million visitors to Lake Superior nowadays.

Rustic cabins or plush condos tend to be booked in leaf-viewing season, when nature provides its fiery backdrop for fishing and, these days, viewing art. We decide to stay at the Dreamcatcher B&B;, a two-story modern home in the hills close to Grand Marais, to enjoy all of these things. Grand Marais was an Ojibwe settlement, a fur trade outpost for the Astor company, and then a logging and fishing town that shipped herring, wood and gravel across the Great Lakes in steamers.

Now the shops and cabins along the hills and on its two bright bays house artists and writers, escapees from many cities and more complicated lives. It’s also the gateway to the Gunflint Trail, a rustic road through the northern lake country that gives access to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, 2 million acres of lakes and woods along the Minnesota-Canada border. In the fall I have backpacked, canoed and camped in the woods, eaten fresh trout over campfires and swum under the October moon.

This time, I want to make a tour of the North Shore’s art, food and crafts scene. Internationally known Ojibwe artist George Morrison is one of the region’s best-known native sons, and the galleries also are full of up-and-coming artists. A converted church just up from the harbor houses the Grand Marais Artists’ Colony (founded in 1947), the lighthouse jetty ends in Artists’ Point, and Grand Marais bars, restaurants and homes feature a mix of trophy mounts and art of all kinds.

In downtown Grand Marais, two Sivertson galleries on the beach showcase the work of the Sivertson clan, Minnesota’s answer to the Wyeths of Maine. Besides paintings, prints and batiks by Howard, Elaine, Jan and Liz Sivertson, the galleries are filled with Inupiat and Yupik Eskimo hunter dolls and masks, porcupine quill boxes, photographer Jim Brandenburg’s images of otters, snowshoe hares, wolves and northern lights, and Betsey Bowen’s woodblock prints, including those from Reeve Lindbergh’s book “North Country Spring.” I covet fiber artist Jo Wood’s small, exquisite bead paintings, drool over fairylike cast-bronze plum blossom and ginkgo leaf jewelry by Silver Seasons, and am delighted by Liz Sivertson’s innocent blue bear triptychs.

Just a stroll around the bay from the galleries, stately herons deck the door of the Angry Trout Cafe, whose small waterfront room bristles with northland paintings, sculpture, furniture and stained glass in lake and fish motifs. We feast on lemon fettuccine, shiitake mushrooms, wild rice, delicate fried herring and carrot cake, much of it produced locally. Steps from the cafe, Tom Healy, sawdust in his thick black hair, clambers down from the roof of the North House Folk School to sit in the shade of a handmade timber peg shelter.

Behind him, I can see a schoolroom with light, shapely canoes in the rafters and students working on half-finished canoes perched on sawhorses. Across the yard, in another classroom, a half-dozen men and women burnish leather with bone, completing the sheath for a Norwegian knife following methods dating to the Viking era. Vacationers can take a course at the school, which teaches classes as diverse as raku ware and painting, knitting and blacksmithing. “We offer Scandinavian-rooted crafts and classes in nontraditional things like straw bale construction,” Healy says. “The folk school is based on the concept that learning is a lifelong endeavor that can be enjoyable for anyone at any time.”

While his mother, Lucy, paints a view of the bay and his father, Gene, supervises a half-dozen knife-making students, Ben Tokheim rows us around the harbor in a Norse pram. It was made in a North House class using a 1,000-year-old lapstrake technique (the skin is created first and framing is added later). Light and curving, it moves like a petal through the clear water, past fishing boats and motorboats bristling with rods and nets. In a screen shack on shore, men fillet lake trout, some a yard long or more. The next morning, as Capt. Jim Holzman raises the tanbark sails, we set out on the school’s 50-foot-schooner, Hjordis, named for the daughter of Erik the Red. It is an easy sail, with a view of the Sawtooth Mountains rising like their namesake in bright ridges along the coast.

That night, to check out rumors of pizza-topped lutefisk (a Scandinavian dish of dried cod preserved in caustic soda), we pop into Sven and Ole’s Pizza and its Pickle Herring Club bar. While this busy tavern frequented by backpackers is perhaps the only pizza place to serve herring, the Scando-Italian dish seems to be a myth.

So we head for the Gun Flint Tavern, which is almost next door. Its single room is stuffed with beer drinkers, cribbage players and journal writers, but a couple of families wave us over to join them at the long butcher-block tables.

farther north, past charming little kodonce Creek (walkable in low autumn water), beyond the white Jesuit church in vanished Chippewa City and near the mouth of the Brule River, stands an eerily beautiful lodge called Naniboujou, named for the Cree spirit of the outdoors. Peter had never seen it, and I can never get enough of it, so we zip up for dinner the following night.

It was launched in the 1920s by Ring Lardner, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and other celebs. It was intended to be a luxurious North Shore sportsmen’s club, replete with tennis courts and hunting chalets. The stock market crash of 1929 halted the project, but the lodge thrives today. We savor salmon and onion soup in the original dining room, which is ornamented with striking crimson, maize, sapphire and green Cree-inspired Art Moderne murals.

After dinner, we begin to circle back down the shore, but I have to investigate two more places. A curly-tailed Finnish spitz named Hedgie howls a greeting as we pull into Meidan Maa (Our Land), Elli Sundeholm’s farm in the pines near the town of Finland. We walk to the pasture, and four bright-eyed slate and white reindeer come running, gobbling cinnamon buns that they had taken from Sundeholm’s fingers. Her herd consists of three cows (Saimi, Sanni and Dolla) and a bull named Ahti. Two were raised in her kitchen, she says, where she bottle-fed them every three hours and they snorted gently to call her.

They also make another noise. “Listen!” Sundeholm says. “Hear that clicking? You know the song, ‘Up on the housetop click, click, click, down through the chimney with good St. Nick?’ Reindeer have special tendons in their ankles that click with every step, so they can find each other in snowstorms.”

Inside her home are the hand-hewn walls of an original 100-year-old Finnish log cabin. We clump down to the cellar, where Sundeholm rattles through a mound of reindeer antlers. I’ve always wanted a set--they seem not only bigger, but also more mysteriously graceful than deer antlers. And they are rare. She won’t part with the largest pair, shed by a late favorite bull, but I purchase a slim, elegant pair shed by Dolla.

Most bulls shed antlers in December, so Santa’s team, Sundeholm explains, would really be all females. “They are natural pullers, and it’s kind of a wild ride. You can steer, but they don’t want to stop, so you have to bail out and brake with both feet.” Sundeholm knows; she hitches her herd to a sled in winter.

Antlers secured in the trunk, we then drop by Our Place bar in Finland. It is just about the only establishment in this logging town (population 400). Inside the door is a photograph of the bearded bartender and owner, Larry Schanno, being smooched by a moose. “Female moose drive their yearlings away when they are about to deliver new calves,” Schanno says, as Peter and I sip beer and listen to Finnish CDs on his jukebox. “This lonely fellow wandered into town.”

While he tells the story, Schanno fans out snapshots of the encounter on the bar top. “There he was in the ditch looking all hung over, and I said, ‘Say, you look like you could use a friend. I’m a moose whisperer, and I know where you guys like to be scratched.’ So I made noises like his mom, you know, ‘Mwah, mwah, mwah,’ and he stood there for a while.”

Moose antlers form the chandelier over the pool table and sculpted moose antlers are proudly displayed on the shelves along the pine-paneled walls. Schanno is indeed a moose caller (he imitates the voice of a lusty female moose to lure bulls). He finds antlers in the woods around Finland and supplies them to Apple Valley, Minn., artist Jim Biesinger, who carves exquisite three-dimensional animals and forests in the curve of the horns. Biesinger’s sculpted antlers are Schanno’s prized possessions--not for sale at any price, he says. Elsewhere, Biesinger’s antlers go for $1,500 to $6,000 each.

Finland has moose and reindeer aplenty, but no lodgings. So we spend our last evening in one of my favorite North Shore inns, the Stonehearth B&B; in Little Marais. The Fenstad family, immigrant Norwegian farmers and fishermen, raised nine children in this big house on the shore. A century later, owners Charlie and Susan Michels have remodeled it. What would the austere and hard-working Fenstads think of us, we wonder, sipping champagne in a hot tub in what once was a boathouse where they salted herring, built skiffs and repaired nets?

The night is a parting gift from Naniboujou himself. The vast and foamy Milky Way arcs from one end of the sky to the other over Lake Superior. The wide, greenish-silver curtains of the northern lights fluoresce above the pine trees, firing spotlight beams into the air. And then we see a shower of meteors. I wish I had brought a tent so that I could have slept under this northern light show, but I settle for a warm fireplace and lakeside bedroom. Crows call at 5 a.m. If I were an old-time North Shore fisherman, I think, watching the lake from under my quilt, I’d be up by now, with a bellyful of black coffee and bread. A 6 a.m. loon song wafts through the poplars, and later the aroma of breakfast--Susan Michel’s blueberry-caramel cream cheese rolls with wild rice sausage--wakes me for good.

In the raspberry-pink dining room, Charlie Michel tells us a local tale from the 1920s: the lone Fenstad dairy cow escaped, and Ben Fenstad walked 24 roadless miles, crossing bridgeless rivers to Lutsen to find her. And then he walked all the way back. We listen and eat as if we’re facing a day of logging or fishing, as if we can take the land and the people home with us, trying to contain the vast beauty of the great North Shore.

GUIDEBOOK: On Superior’s Shores

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for Minnesota’s North Shore is 218. Room rates are for a double for one night. Meal prices are for two, food only.

Getting there: Duluth International Airport is the closest airport to Lake Superior’s North Shore. Northwest and American offer connecting service from Los Angeles.

The best way to see Lake Superior’s North Shore on Highway 61 is by car. Major rental car agencies are available at the Duluth airport.

Where to stay: The Stone Hearth Inn, 6598 Lakeside Estates Road, Little Marais, Minn., 55614; (888) 206-3020, fax (218) 226-3466, www.stonehearthinn.com. A B&B; in a remodeled immigrant farmhouse with four bedrooms in the main house, a carriage house and a boathouse featuring fireplaces, hot tubs, kitchenettes and shore views. Rates: Bedrooms, $88 to $98; boathouse, $132 to $147; carriage house, $132.

Naniboujou Lodge, 20 Naniboujou Trail, Grand Marais, Minn., 55604-2141; tel. and fax 387-2688, www.naniboujou.com. With its stunning and historic Native American-themed murals, the lodge on Lake Superior near the Brule River offers 1920s ambience. Rates: $65 to $120. Rustic creekside and hillside cabins overlooking Lake Superior as well as simple lodge rooms are available at Cascade Lodge, 3719 W. Highway 61, Lutsen, Minn., 55612; (800) 322-9543, www. cascadelodgemn.com. Rates: Cabins, $84 to $200; lodge rooms, $82 to $141. Lutsen Resort, Box 9, Lutsen, Minn., 55612; (800) 258-8736, fax (218) 663-0145, www.lutsenresort.com. Rates: Rooms in the main lodge, $87 to $139; condominiums with loft, $420 to $525; log homes, $230 to $289; sea villas, $185 to $279.

Where to eat: The Angry Trout Cafe, Highway 61, Grand Marais; 387-1265. Fresh, regional and organic salads, fish, pasta and imaginative desserts make the cafe the best dining on the shore; $36. Lunch and dinner daily May 1 to mid-October.

Gun Flint Tavern, 111 W. Wisconsin St., Grand Marais; 387-1563. Sunflower seed pesto, roasted vegetables, chicken mole, and bangers and mash are highlights; $30. Lunch and dinner daily year-round.

Dijon dill salmon, wall- eye and cranberry pork tenderloin are among the specialties of the Naniboujou Lodge, 20 Naniboujou Trail, Grand Marais; 387-2688; $30. No alcohol. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner.

For picnic or trail lunches, stock up on smoked fish and cheese at Russ Kendall’s Smoke House, Highway 61, Knife River; 834-5995 or the Dockside Fish Market, 418 W. Highway 61, Grand Marais; 387-2906.

What to see and do: Take a trek on the Superior Hiking Trail, which runs 235 miles along the Sawtooth Mountains from Two Harbors, Minn., to Canada. Maps available at the Superior Hiking Trail Assn., P.O. Box 4, Two Harbors, Minn., 55616; 834-2700, www.shta.org. If you prefer civilized comforts to camping but still want to hike, try lodge-to-lodge hiking offered by Boundary Country Trekking, 173 Little Ollie Road, Grand Marais, Minn., 55604; (800) 322-8327, www.boundarycountry.com.

Sail a schooner or take a hands-on course in traditional arts and crafts. Build everything from pots and furniture to boats at North House Folk School, P.O. Box 759, Grand Marais, Minn., 55604; (888) 387-9762 or (218) 387-9762, www.northhouse.org. See the North Shore from the water in a light, fast and maneuverable kayak. Day tours and two- to seven-day guided and outfitted coastal adventures with Cascade Kayaks, P.O. Box 215, Grand Marais, Minn., 55604; (800) 720-2809 or (218) 387-2360, www.cascadekayaks.com.

Artwork abounds at Kah-Nee-Tah Gallery, 4210 W. Highway 61, Lutsen, Minn., 55612; (800) 216-2585, www.boreal.org/kahneetah, and at both Sivertson galleries, 12 Wisconsin St. and 14 S. Broadway, Grand Marais, Minn., 55604; (888) 880-4369, www.sivertson.com. Learn about the Scandinavians who settled the shore at the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum, Sawbill Trail and Highway 61, Tofte, Minn., 55615; (218) 663-7804, www.boreal.org/nshistory.

For more information: Grand Marais Visitor Center, P.O. Box 1048 Grand Marais, Minn., 55604; (888) 922-5000, www.grandmarais.com. Lutsen-Tofte Tourism Assn., 7136 W. Highway 61, Tofte, Minn., 55615; (218) 663-7804, fax (218) 663-8012, www.61north.com.

A detailed driving guide to the shore is available through the Lake Superior Shore Assn., P.O. Box 159, Duluth, Minn., 55801; www.lakesuperiordrive.com.

More B&Bs; in Lutsen, Little Marais and Grand Marais can be viewed at www.northshorebb.com.