In the summer of 1949, just before my tenth birthday, I was serving as navigator aboard my father’s tub of an automobile, a large black machine actually more like a hearse—a fit simile given that a year later he would nearly die in it when a drunken corn farmer drove into him on a Missouri highway. But in the July before the crash, we were passing through the eastern edge of the dark North Woods of upper Minnesota. With a topographical abruptness hardly typical of the state, the road seemed to fall away as it rolled down a cliff; ahead was a distant horizon, not of dark trees but of a pencil line linking two radiant shades of blue. It was impossible to discern which reflected the other. There I had my first glimpse ever of a body of water showing no opposite shore.
With a road map before me, I knew it had to be Lake Superior, but how could a lake so far inland have a shore beyond the horizon? I was about to learn the Ojibwa name for it: Kitchigami, “big sea water,” or, in Longfellow’s less correct if more famous version, Gitche Gumee. That lake was the largest body of entirely fresh water in the world, big enough for 17th-century voyageurs to consider it a sea.
I was also about to learn that the Empire State Building would all but disappear in the deepest part of Lake Superior. Here was a realm more awesome than the somber forest lying behind, a watery world a boy from Kansas City could fill with creatures escaped from his imagination. The blueness, its depths, the wind having at it, all bespoke remoteness and cold even in midsummer. I couldn’t then have articulated it, but I felt I was on the brink of a wilderness, an intimidating mysteriousness.
Almost as soon as we turned southward from Minnesota Route 1 onto U.S. 61, the lake showed more of its strangeness. Every few miles small hand-painted signs cropped up, each advertising in one wording or the other:
Ahead: Smoked Ciscoes
What a cisco was—smoked or unsmoked—I had no idea. My father, who had just taught me how to catch a northern pike and who seemed to know northern waters, had no answer either. A cisco must be a creature from the deep, some rarity, maybe a freak of nature like those a traveler back then might find on exhibition along rural highways: jackalopes, two-headed alligators, mermen.
One of the few things that could move my father to stop and get out from behind a steering wheel was the scent of barbecue smoke across a road. In Kansas City, such a whiff usually led us to brisket of beef or so-called burnt ends laid over a slice of white bread. But along the bouldery shore of Superior a little north of Two Harbors, Minnesota, the occasional wooden cafés hanging along its high edge and showing smoked cisco signs didn’t look like the smokeries we knew. Here was promise of unknown fare, the kind that can make the labor of travel worth its undertaking.
We pulled into a rickety café held up by wooden posts seemingly insufficient in number and diameter to keep the place above the lake then banging ominously far beneath. The buckled floor was manifest warning that one diner too many could send the entire enterprise into the water. My father, a cautious man who sometimes wore a belt with his suspenders, stepped as gingerly as a heavy person can toward a table by a bank of windows giving onto the lake and a fog coming toward us. Pasted to the walls here and about were menus. Under one heading, From the Lake, between the herring and trout, the café offered several When Availables, among them smoked cisco. So, we nodded, a cisco was not a beast but a fish. My hope for an alien tale to take home vanished.
I knew from my father’s example that a jolly equatorial amplitude, a fulsome girth, does not guarantee an adventuresome eater; yet he could be bold—provided there were certain assurances like “Anything smoked probably won’t kill you—unless it’s turned green.” He ordered up two plates of smoked ciscoes to demonstrate a belief to which he usually gave more utterance than practice: From a mere vacation, one goes home older, but from true travel one returns changed by challenge. To him, an exotic dish could provide the happiest of challenges. I was about to learn something else: Of the highest order among travelers are those moments when a place and a comestible indelibly link to write themselves deeply into one’s memory. That day, Lake Superior wrote itself into me.
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