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The way the NaNoWriMo novel startedIn the shipwreck season of 1949 she returned.
She never expected to drive the old blue Ford around the curve near First Sand Beach, never expected the way her heart leapt into a rush of feeling so strong she braked and turned the silver key off. Tears prickled at the edges of sight. Tears that felt like the preciousness of life curled up and fiercely demanded Memory to view it once again, to pay tribute, to utter thanksgiving.
She breathed deeply, wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. Breathed again. November's winds blew relentlessly off Keweenaw Bay. Ships caught in Lake Superior's autumn fury sometimes keeled over in the breaking waves. Those waves could take an iron ship and snap it open to the cold, could bring many a captain to the ghost-like and empty depths where only lake trout glided among the sailor skeletons.
Lake Superior. She lifted her damp eyes to the horizon, beyond the Ford water-tower, past the Bungalow, past the frames of empty wooden buildings. "We were so busy with our lives, with our dramas, did we ever know how the lake kept shaping us, kept lapping at our daily pains and wonderings and joys, kept urging us to be true to something deeper than our momentary unfoldings?" she mused. Or something mused through her.
She took another deep breath and started the finicky engine again, prepared to round the final bend into the ghost town of her youth. The Ford rumbled into compliance. She was glad she came alone, with no other voices to keep her on the surface of genial conversation and rote memory. If tears rose, if anger rose, if soft nostalgia rose, she wanted to experience it wholly, without interruption. She wanted to feel the way those years in Pequaming shaped her, molded her, made her into someone different than the naïve girl riding that train up from Chicago.
The car turned the last curve, and there she was. She reached for the metal gleaming silver door handle and pushed it open. Smoothed her skirt, and let the legs lead the way into the past.
There sat the high school. Boarded windows. Empty. No sounds of laughter, cheering, teasing. Around the corner, the old general store. Empty. The Odd Fellow's Hall. Mrs. Erickson's house. The empty churches, devoid of worshipers, devoid of songs. The crosses jutting into the sky with no choirs singing, "Amazing Grace, how sweet the song..."
Farther down the road, the little schoolhouses. Once filled with two elementary grades, each with a bright-eyed teacher attempting to drill ABC's or multiplication tables. Girls in long calico dresses, boys in shorts or pants with sturdy boots. Earnest gazes, innocent eyes. Children breathless at recess playing Blind Man's Bluff, screeching, free.
She was back in the past so quickly her heart hurt. This was her schoolhouse now, the schoolhouse she taught all those years ago. This was where Chicago met the shores of Lake Superior, where Chicago learned about small town living. This was where she ice skated after school with Mamie, where she met Christian, where David first rounded the bend.
Her hand lingered on the peeling white paint of the empty schoolhouse. Would the door be unlocked? Could she enter in the past even more deeply and sit down at the big oak desk, like in those first days? Would a child perhaps peek in the open door, looking hesitant, wanting to come in and meet the new teacher?
She turned the door knob. Nothing turned. Locked. The past was locked down tight and she couldn't get in. She moved to the boarded windows and tried to peer in between the cracks of boards and nails. Nothing.
Sighing in frustration, she turned and wandered down the empty streets. It seemed unbelievable that no one walked here, no children yelled, no men aimed toward the big mill with big Norwegian or Finnish grins. No women hollered hello from their wooden porches.
A loose board flapped in the wind. A seagull cawed and dove in the low clouds. Only silence. How could a town disappear? How could 1,000 people simply disappear?
Yet she was one of them who had packed her trunk and satchel and surveyed the small room one last time before locking the door and moving out. She had cried hot tears of goodbye back then. She knew it was a chapter closing, the end of a book. But then there were so many other plans crowding to the forefront, so many other ideas of the way Life would open up. She had been moved by the urgency of Life to find her own place in it that perhaps she had never paused to truly realize the treasure of Pequaming, the treasure of this town that Henry Ford built.
Henry Ford. You could never look around this town in the old days without feeling his presence in the background. He was always there. Ever since he bought the village from Hebard and made it his own, he was the commanding force that shaped the life of the people. He was the backbone. Telling everyone what they could and couldn't do. You can have a chicken, but no cows or horses.
You must save part of your pay. No drinking in Pequaming. You do it my way, or you find yourself another place to live. But I'll pay you good wages, $5.00 a day, better than in any other logging or mining camps. You decide. Stay or leave.
The mill stood on the edge of the water, defining it all. The hollow dampness of its emptiness seemed a louder language than the memories. She followed her legs toward the old mill and felt surprise as the heavy door opened effortlessly as she pushed it. Old wood over there in the corner. Rotting sawdust. A few pieces of rotting heavy rust-red machinery.
You could almost see Mr. Ford striding purposefully through the busy mill, his body-guards trailing him, calling out a hello to the Thomas Maki and Arthur Telschow and Samuel Giddings. The men stood straighter as he walked among them. There was something about him. A presence that commanded you to be a little better than you thought yourself to be. Your backbone stiffened. You remembered a code of honor, of ethics, or morality. And if you didn't, you were long gone from Pequaming over there in Aura or Skanee or L'Anse or Detroit, living your free and independent life with only $3.00 a day. Some men knew better or less than to hitch themselves to Ford's motor.
She pushed open a back door and found herself facing the Great Lake. The Superior. The biggest coldest most ornery lake in the world. The icy wind blew pellets of almost-snow at her face, shocking her into the present. That's what Lake Superior did. It kept you honest. More honest than Henry Ford. Its brutality kept you real. Kept you from drowning in the past.
The heavy black and grey stones gleamed up in their iciness at her.
"Oh, lake-" she started, and then stopped. What words would mean anything to the lake? Instead, she remembered David and his Native American way of placing tobacco, kinickinac, onto the earth or water as a sacred offering. She had not thought of bringing tobacco. Instead, almost without thought, she reached for a branch of cedar jutting off a crumbled ledge. Gently and reverentially breathed its fragrance and pulled off a small piece.
She held the cedar between her cold hands and let the wind blow escaped curls from her hat. Hunched down close to the stones, near the relentless waves.
"Megwetch," she finally said, remembering David's Ojibway word for thank you. "Megwetch for Pequaming, for the beauty of this place."
Hot tears burned again, just as the ice cold waves leapt inward to meet her offered cedar branch. Something in her heart began to loosen, to open, to allow space for the memory of those beautiful and painful days. The days when she had to choose. To choose between two that she loved.
Had Lake Superior helped her choose? And was the death of Pequaming part of her choice? She remembered hearing that Mr. Ford cried when he closed down the mill. Was that true? And if it was true, did not his tears make this all the more beautiful, all the more poignant and precious?
She turned away from the pounding lake and began to walk back up the road. The story of those days needed to be written. To memorialize that which was sacred, to memorialize the precious seed planted here in Pequaming. Already she was back on that dusty and noisy train, chugging north through Wisconsin, barely twenty years old, aimed for Lake Superior.