By the Big Sea Water

The remembrance took me again to the North Shore of Superior in Minnesota early last summer. I’d heard the little cisco was not faring well in the Great Lakes and that to find a plate of them was increasingly difficult. As I made my way toward the Canadian border along U.S. 61, the North Shore Highway, a fine 150 miles opened only in 1924, I wasn’t expecting Ahead: Smoked Ciscoes signs so much as impetrating the lake deities to offer up a couple—just two or three for old time’s sake. The miles came and went, the roadside becoming less and less developed as I neared the last county before the Canadian border. I wasn’t far from leaving the country, and I’d turned up not a single smoked fish of any sort. The coastal road opened frequently to splendid lacustrine scenery, and the hues of Superior, modulated by sky and proximity to shore, might have been decocted from gemstones: here flowing sapphire, there aquamarine; at night there would be black opal; when I stopped to walk the shore and looked into a small catchment, I saw liquid chalcedony vibrating from the thump of the surf.

Superior, like its region, is an expression of water and weather working over rocks—hard rocks: granite, basalt, gabbro. The coast is a concatenation of steep and high headlands dropping to beaches strewn with stone from boulders to pebbles, the smaller pieces often indeed gemlike under the wash of the waves. The gleaming rocks are spheres and ovoids, globets and orbs, colorful rotundities turned to cabochons a beach walker can almost string into a necklace right there. One also finds irregularities in sometimes startling shapes. In fact, at the decrepit café where I first tasted smoked cisco, behind a glass counter under the cash register, lay a small­ beach stone shaped by water and weather into an old man’s head that, had it been excavated from a cave or midden, a ­seasoned archaeologist would swear was craft from a human hand.

The Superior of our time was probably created by incomprehensibly massive lobes of glacier ice moving southward and gouging out stone softer than the adamantine igneous rock around portions of its margin. The lake today is the outcome of fire and ice, a place relinquishing its fierce origins but slowly. Once, its waterline was almost twice its present height above sea level, a fact one can readily see in downtown Duluth in the steep, stairsteplike former shores of the ancient Superior.

The earliest voyageurs called it Lac Supérieur, a name having nothing to do with altitude, size, depth, excellence, or (these days) comparative cleanliness. Rather, Superior refers to its position “above” its four sisters: Its uppermost coast is 500 miles north of the southern shore of Lake Erie, nearly enough longitudinal space to hold France from the Mediterranean to the Channel. For many residents of the Superior shore, its finest aspect is a coast free from cities—except for Duluth (population 86,000)—which means that fishermen working beyond breakwaters still drink straight from the lake, a detail I hoped would mean that somewhere yet swam a cisco.

As the miles rolled under me with no sign of the fish—smoked, grilled, steamed, boiled, fried, chowdered, fresh—I at last fetched up in Grand Marais. Not far across the city line, in a collection of brightly painted buildings rambling down to a small harbor, I made out a fading sign: Fresh Lake Superior Fish. When I pulled over, in front of me was a much newer one:

Painted on the window of the market door were two golden herrings, smiling, and beyond them, inside, behind the counter, lay rows of the actual fish accompanied by other species, some not native to Superior. “Any ciscoes?” I asked. “No,” the clerk said with a kindness elicited I think by my crestfallen expression.

At the market, the only commercial smokehouse on the upper North Shore, I bought two herrings and walked toward the dock, stopping on the way to look into a fish shed where Harley Toftey, bright in orange waders, was cutting his morning catch, 80 pounds of herring, each about 12 inches long and weighing about a pound. He deftly and nearly bloodlessly opened the bellies of the sleek and fulgent fish, removed innards while leaving head and tail, and tossed each into a bin ready for 12 hours in his small smokehouse, the next-to-last stop on a voyage from 150 feet down in frigid Superior to a warm dinner plate.