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.
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:
Dockside Fish Market
Fresh & Smoked
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.
I said I was looking for ciscoes, and he said, “I am too.” He shook his head. “They’ve just kind of disappeared. I take out herring, Menominee, whitefish, and trout—but ciscoes, no.”
Next door was Tom Eckel’s cutting house, where he, too, in orange waders was preparing his morning harvest, this one primarily lake trout. He grew up on a Superior island, something harder to do these days, and he was old enough to remember the area before World War II. His Gitche Gumee pedigree was pure. I rephrased my question to reflect the sad news I was finding: “Did you ever catch a cisco?” He looked at me as if I’d asked, “Did you ever catch a cold?”
With North Country politeness he said, “A long time ago,” and returned to a big trout under his knife. Then, “I don’t think you’ll ever see the ciscoes come back—not in this area. Too many predators.” When he put the fillet knife down a moment later he said, “But then I didn’t think we’d ever see the lake trout back like this.” Halfway through the next filleting (in Minnesota, one learns conversational patience), he mused, “The lampreys are under control, I’d say, and I’ve heard ninety percent of our fish right here are natives again.”
Everyone’s commentary about ciscoes was historical, about what had been. Worse, in less than an hour, I’d just talked to two thirds of the commercial fishermen remaining in Grand Marais. As I left the cutting house, I asked about a stretched-out black sock tacked to the wall. “Found it in the belly of an eight-pound trout,” said Eckel. When I reached the door, he added, “Don’t know what happened to the rest of the guy.”
I sat on the dock in an easy lake breeze and opened my smoked-herring lunch. Two details gave me hope yet for finding a cisco: Eckel had said he preferred to go after larger species and mentioned a couple of fish stands along the southern end of the North Shore, down near Knife River, places closer to the café where I’d first tasted cisco.
After two days of wandering around Grand Marais and exploring the coast all the way to the border at the Pigeon River, I headed southwest, my hopes further raised by a growing awareness that part of the difficulty in my search might be linguistic: One person’s cisco might just be another’s chub (a name loosely applied), or blind robin, or (even more loosely) whitefish. Where was there a commercial fisherman who uses genus-species nomenclature to describe what comes up in the net?
I was looking for Coregonus artedi. I liked the Latin version because of a story attached to it: The latter term refers to a Swede, Petrus Artedi, father of ichthyology. After Artedi fell into a canal and drowned, Carl Linnaeus, coincidentally the creator of binomial taxonomy, wrote of his colleague, “Thus did the most distinguished of ichthyologists perish in the waters, having devoted his life to the discovery of their inhabitants.”
I was about to learn that a cisco is also known as a lake herring, even though it isn’t a true herring but rather a member of the salmon family, along with lake trout and various so-named “whitefish” of the Great Lakes.
Overharvesting, pollution, and the spread of foreigners like lampreys and alewives have all affected smaller fish such as ciscoes and the larger species that depend on them, so that certain fish today have declined precipitously from their populations in, say, 1949. I also began suspecting that my quest would have gone better had I arrived in the autumn, when ciscoes rise from the depths and cluster to spawn in warmer shallows. Like a fellow whose inamorata slyly eludes him, I was drawn on by the challenge of the pursuit.
Late one afternoon, near Knife River, Minnesota, I came upon a beat-up tavern with a worn sign promising smoked fish. The place was closed—it looked like for days—but I managed to raise Betty Kendall, the proprietor, who lived next door in a trailer. The airless and dark bar, redolent of years of cigarettes and spilled beer, was abundant with reds—carpets, chairs, curtains—and hanging baseball caps and dozens of representations of Betty Boop, a character from an era Betty Kendall shared. Also a sign: To hell with the dog—beware the owner. By the look of things, I thought I should heed it. Diffidently, I asked my question, “Any ciscoes?”
She said, “How many do you want?” Half expecting a laugh of derision to chase me out, I said, “Three or four—enough to make a dinner.” She disappeared into what I took for a closet and returned with several sheets of newspaper cradling golden ciscoes. She wrapped them. I asked were they fresh. “These were smoked yesterday at four o’clock. They come from over on the Wisconsin side.” I recited a nutshell rendition of my quest, and she said about her late husband, Smokey, “He used to eat three or four while he was smoking them. You would have thought they were popcorn. Now, only a couple of fishermen in Knife River still go after them.”
When I left, my wrapped ciscoes snug under my arm as if rare first editions of books I’d long sought, I noticed across the road another fish stand, this one shut down; but only a little farther on was yet another. I was in a hotbed of smokeries. Russ Kendall, brother of Smokey, had built his place as a proper market, small but with appropriate glass-fronted cases, refrigeration, and a happy spread of smoked fish. He knew the cisco story through the whole of the 20th century, from abundance, when a cisco stand popped up about every 15 miles, to the near scarcity I’d been encountering. A local Indian had shown Kendall’s father how to build a smokehouse. He said, “People don’t fish them so much now because ciscoes are the most trouble and least money, but I’ll tell you this: They’re good enough that, years ago, when this place was just a roadside stand and our catch was out in the open air before government regulations, a cow wandered up one morning and ate a couple ciscoes right off the table. Later the owner complained his milk tasted fishy.”
That evening I unwrapped packages from three different vendors and began a celebration of a memory, a fulfillment of what Lake Superior had written in me some half century earlier. On the table lay slender, streamlined creatures, fish of classic lines, their round eyes blanched from the oven. I cut along the back and pulled free the scaled skin once nearly luminescent, now turned golden by smoke. Flesh, the color of parchment, lifted easily from insubstantial bones almost invisible. The ciscoes—lake herrings—were so delicate I wondered how they could survive in the dark and cold, eat-and-be-eaten deeps in which they spent most of their lives. They were tender and moist—“oily,” people say on the North Shore—and reportedly rich in salutary omega-3 fatty acids. Their sweet delectability made finishing one almost a regret; even having a dozen others iced down, enough for several more lunches and dinners, didn’t relieve my sense of impending cisco deprivation. But, beyond that, in mind was a wobbly café, a smiling father freed from a steering wheel, a smudgy window opening to a lake reaching out till it disappeared in distant fog. I felt I’d followed a small, silvery fish into a long corridor back toward 1949.
The Details
With its remarkable views of Lake Superior, the stretch of U.S. 61 from Duluth to Grand Marais is like a midwestern version of California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Watch the waves from a table at the New Scenic Café (5461 N. Shore Scenic Dr., Duluth; 218-525-6274), where a modest exterior belies the ambitious cuisine within. Everyone with a cabin “up north” knows to stop at Betty’s Pies (1633 Hwy. 61, Two Harbors; 218-834-3367) for fresh-baked varieties like blackberry peach and spicy walnut raisin. For smoked fish, try Mel’s Fish House (223 Hwy. 61, Knife River; 218-834-5858) or Russ Kendall’s Smoked Fish House (149 Hwy. 61, Knife River; 218-834-5995). Overnighters will want to check out the lake homes at Superior Shores Resort—most with kitchen, fireplace, and deck (1521 Superior Shores Dr., Two Harbors; 800-242-1988; $49 to $439). Farther north, the historic Naniboujou Lodge (20 Naniboujou Trail, Grand Marais; 218-387-2688; $79 to $99) is known for its unique architecture and Cree Indian-inspired décor. —Nichol Nelson