Tuesday, June 19, 2007
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Those Polish Sailors Need Me, DAMMIT!
I recently rediscovered del.icio.us and Technorati, which are both highly addictive, and I need to take a break from them every once in a while. That led me to discover this article.
Lake Superior, according to the article, has dropped to its lowest level in 81 years. The water is 20 inches below average and a foot lower than just a year ago. Which is alarming news. Because if Lake Superior dries up, I can't welcome the Polish sailors coming through the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, and - DAMMIT - those Polish sailors need me!
Also, what else is there to do when I'm visiting my mom in Wisconsin for the summer?
I'd also like to point out this quote from the article: "Lake Superior is the 'Gitche Gumee' referred to in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha, based on the legends of the Ojibwa Indian tribe: 'By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water.' Gitche Gumee is believed to be an older spelling of a Native American phrase meaning 'big sea' or 'huge water.'"
Specifically, I'd like to point out that it's an Ojibwe phrase, not a Native American phrase. There is no "Native American" language; rather, there are more than 800 indigenous languages to the Western Hemisphere. The subject is fresh in my mind from my interview with Irene Bedard last week, in which she said, “I’ve done 41 films, and there have been several where I’ve come in and they’ve expected me to speak that language.”
And "believed to be?" Why not ask somebody? I can tell you off the top of my head that "gitchi" means "great" or "big." Spelling may differ because Ojibwemowin is predominantly a spoken, rather than written, language, but it's by no means a dead language. This would explain why an alarming number of schoolchildren think Native Americans as a whole went the way of the bonnets and buckled shoes and disappeared. (Of course, when I was little, I assumed pilgrims still lived in Virginia somewhere. Once I saw a group of Amish people in a restaurant and announced loudly, "Look, Mom! Pilgrims!")
Anyway.
For those of you unfamiliar with the lift bridge, here it is up...
The Polish sailors coming through aboard the Polsteam (Ahoy!)...
The bridge down again...
And my sister and cousins showing how it's done later at the Great Lakes Aquarium...
I took these pictures two summers ago in Wisconsin, the summer I cracked my head open on the roof and fell down two flights of stairs, which my mom thought was funny but not really cause enough to take me to the hospital. Even after I continued falling over for no reason for a week afterward. Not to mention, I had a huge bloody gash on my scalp.
More pictures in the photoblog (not of the bloody gash - you're safe!).
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Comments (4)
I was this kid see, 14 yrs old and my parents sent me to what's now Voyager Outward Bound School in Ely. 21 days of canoing the BWCA and rock climbing the north shore of 'the lake that they call Gitche-Gumee'. (Superior, they said, never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early but I wouldn't know cause this was in June and nobody died.)
It was the bestest, i saw a moose like 10 ft away looking right at me when i was on my solo. And one time we were canoeing across this big lake (did you know they have 10,000 of them up there? I'd swear we hit at least 7,473 of them) and out of the sun swoops down a Bald Eagle. He snags a fish and flies out. I was in the back of the canoe but my partner could have smacked him in the head with the paddle. I'm glad he didn't cause he'd probably have tipped us.
So any ways after 21 days of living as much like a "savage" as one could in 1978 They drop me off at the grey hound station in Duluth around noon. My bus didn't leave till around 6. So for 6 hrs I wandered around Duluth. Had my first burger and fries with a coke in three weeks. Played "Only the Good Die Young" on the juke box 5 times straight before the owner asked me not to play it again. I told him that it was the only song on the Juke box that i really knew and i that i had been out on Outward Bound for 21 days. Then I told him all about Outward Bound and the moose and the eagle. and flap jacks. and bulgar. (I wasn't a particularly shy kid.) And about...
He gave me a dollar, (9 songs for a dollar), But made me promise not to play "Only the Good Die Young". He also gave me a piece of Chocolate Cake, said i reminded him of his grandson.
The one song he did make me play was "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" Then he told me all about it. He had been a sailor on the lake when he was younger. It was one of the coolest afternoons of my life. In Duluth MN at 3 in the afternoon.