Published Jan. 18, 2004 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
Anytime your travel destination is on a special “inset” on state road maps because it doesn’t fit, you know you might be going somewhere fairly remote. Such is the case with the city of Grand Marais up Minnesota’s north shore of Lake Superior.
I tagged along with my wife Christina on a work visit to Grand Marais so I could visit my sister. It was a nice trip, and I learned a little more about life 100 miles up the cold shores of the big lake.
For those of you following at home, I have abandoned the daily rigor of newspaper journalism for academic pursuits, which means that I am spending the month of January answering some important questions. They include: 1) Should I feel guilty about having little to do in January? 2) Can I grow a beard? 3) Is Game Boy just for kids and 4) isn’t there something more important I should be doing with my life? (Answers are 1) “No,” 2) “Yes, but people will laugh,” 3) “No, but it should be,” and 4) “Dear God, I hope so.”) This free time allowed me the opportunity to go explore the Grand Marais known only to its year-round residents.
Grand Marais is like a lot of tourist towns. It becomes very quiet during the off-season. The only people you see are the locals, and they live too far away from Duluth to drive there for excitement all the time. Nightlife in Grand Marais is what you make of it.
One thing we learned is that entertainment standards in remote towns are considerably lower than they are in large metropolitan areas like Chisholm or Hibbing. One of the big draws in Grand Marais is trivia night at the local pizza parlor. Almost 75 people, young and old, showed up at 7:30 to play “trivia,” a complex game in which the pizza guy asks trivia questions and people clamor to answer them correctly – and drink whiskey. We didn’t stay long enough to understand the prize structure, but most of the people we saw were playing for glory, not prizes.
I also got a chance to admire how my sister and her fiancé knew everyone we encountered enough to have an in-depth conversation, except for the people they were deliberately avoiding. Now that’s a small town.
I also got in a literary disagreement with the folks at the local bookstore. I believed that a children’s book depicting the 25-year-old sinking of the giant ore ship Edmund Fitzgerald was, perhaps, a little odd. The clerks believed that the lovely artwork made up for the macabre kiddy fodder.
One woman thought that the book would be a lovely tool for descendants of the sailors lost on the Fitzgerald to read with their children, but that seems to be quite a narrow target audience. After some thought, the two of us agreed that maybe it’s just better that kids learn what it means when Canadian folk superstar Gordon Lightfoot said “the big lake, it’s said, never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early.” Kids, stay on the good side of Mother Superior or you’ll spend eternity dancing in her ice water mansion.
After a trip along Lake Superior, it’s hard to contain your awe for the mighty body of ice water. You can see why generations have cherished this precious lake, and written hit songs and children’s books about it.
Anyone for a round of trivia?
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for The Daily Tribune.