Duluth by d.c. beemon

Driving by the apparitions in the bay, there is a disconnect going on in my brain. It seems like we're in the middle of nowhere but there is serious stuff out in the water. Big derricks and ships. Duluth is at the very western tip of Lake Superior. After driving through the desolation of the Upper Penninsula, where the wooden statue of an Indian might seem spectacular, this mass of steel floating in Lake Michigan seems out of place. Trains from the west bring in loads of wheat and coal and these are loaded into the tankers. It all goes around the great lakes that surround Michigan to the St. Lawrence seaway, a spawn of canals and lakes that wind up along the Canadian border to the Atlantic ocean. Duluth is a capacitor for the distribution of raw material.

We only need gas.

I pay for it at the Seven-Eleven on the outskirts of town and the woman at the cash register makes a mistake counting my change and says, "The pressure must be getting to me."

There is a twinkle in her eye.

"You can handle it," I say. "I have confidence in you."

"Ah haa haa haaaaaaaah!"

Her cackle is a hacking, yodeling kind of affair that belongs right out there on the threshing floor and it's a treatise on the subject of having your home in the middle of nowhere, and grounded in the blood and sweat of her ancesters. They could have been miners, or farmers, and they would have suffered in the winter. Somehow they have transcended the agony. There is a photo on the wall of people with blackened faces and caps with search lights. There is a sense of place and purpose. Which we don't have. We somehow ended up living in Boston, a place of financial institutions, insurance companies, and big business.

And then we're swooping along the bridge that arches over a thundering river that pushes straight up to the land of pine and mosquitoes and Muskies and deer and wild rice.