We were fishing off Ashland, Wisconsin’s Soo Line ore dock, hunting the monstrous northerns storied to lurk underneath the massive structure. We’d been there most of a Wednesday morning, hadn't caught anything, when Danny decided to start a fire between two huge concrete pillars by introducing a collection of twigs, branches and whatever detritus he could find to the lighter in his pocket. We were two-thirds out the total length, which placed us approximately 1,200 feet offshore, and I was painfully conscious of the thick smoke his weak, green fire was creating and the attention it might attract. But Danny hadn’t mellowed much since kindergarten; he was brutish, a young man not to be trifled with, and I was not all together comfortable telling him I thought the fire was a bad idea.
Besides, it was providing him his lunch. Impelled by the frustration of not catching anything as much by hunger, he had taken to cooking the fish we were supposed to be using for bait, and did not appear to think what he was doing was unusual, neither the fire, nor the half-thawed smelt he impatiently placed in his mouth after just a few turns over the flame on a makeshift stick skewer.
“You think you should keep the fire going?”
“Yah,” he shrugged, reaching into the Styrofoam bucket for two more fish. “You ain’t hungry?”
I threw a nervous gaze toward shore. “Naw, I’m good.”
It was a cool, gray day in June 1992. Across the canal into which 50,000-ton ore carriers once nestled on a daily basis, my hometown appeared as a dichotomy not likely to get captured in any local artist’s watercolor: a naturally beautiful stretch of Lake Superior thoughtlessly blighted by 'progress', both past and present: a public beach strewn with garbage, driftwood and taconite pellets. Just beyond, a tired mini-golf course on the verge of disappearing forever (having lasted barely two years...). Beside that, the city sewage plant, smelling exactly as you'd imagine one would. More than a mile down shore, past the splendorous hotel constructed within the last four years in the style of a splendorous hotel that had stood nearby 100 years before, the coal plant that provided electricity for a large portion of northern Wisconsin. There was no wind; the water was calm. The only movement, outside of Danny’s conspicuous billows of smoke, was the odd seagull gliding crossways through the gray, lighting on a wooden piling and huddling against the lake-effect chill with a surly flutter of plumage.
More than twenty years later, that ore dock has finally been demolished. A series of inspections in 2007 concluded the deteriorating superstructure (the portion rising some 80 feet above the base) was not only a safety hazard but too structurally unsound to try preserving, dashing the hopes of nearly everyone. The largest of its kind in the world, it was one of several similar structures lending pin stripes to Chequamegon Bay in the early part of the 20th century, over time had become a last-remaining totem to a proud history, and news that its demolition was imminent swung in with the force of a wrecking ball.
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HISTORIC, OR JUST A RELIC? - Ashland, Wisconsin's 1800-foot long Soo Line ore dock, on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay, ceased operation in 1965, and stood until 2013.
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My hometown has long reveled in the memory of its glory days shipping iron ore from Michigan’s Gogebic Range to the steel mills of the east, its role as a worthy cog in the mighty tradition of Great Lakes shipping. The end of each shipping season back in the day was heralded in the local paper with a final tally of total tonnage, which ballooned, and dramatically, in war years. The region’s contribution to both the good fight and the building of a nation in the first half of the 20th century became nothing less than its legacy, lauded in story and song.
But legacies can get interrupted, knocked off their feet, by shifting sands before reaching their destination, and that's what happened in Ashland. Like many communities that pin their very livelihood to an extraction industry, the good times didn’t last. Foreign ore and ever-changing mining techniques provided insurmountable competition, and once all the Gogebic mines were tapped, ‘industry’ simply snuck away, leaving its mess behind. The last shipment was loaded off that ore dock in 1965, just a few years before I was born into a post-mortem reality, where all that was left of the good times were the school teams called the Oredockers and the white elephant they were named for, jutting a third of a mile into the bay and already deep into Frost’s 'slow smokeless burn.'
Danny and I grew up together in this reality...or at least in the same town in the same era, not really together. He was a tough kid, and I avoided him when I could, always had to be on the lookout for him and his (bicycle) gang of 12-year-old giants. But we both carried out our youth amidst the skeletal remains of Ashland’s proud history: a bone yard of abandoned railroad tracks, trestles and cars, vacant buildings, lots and storefronts, concrete refuse lining the shoreline and wooden pilings jutting from the otherwise gorgeous waters of Lake Superior.
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OMNIPRESENT - The ore dock was visible from just about any vantage point along Ashland, Wisconsin's beautiful but blighted shoreline.
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Paramount among this post-industrial playground was the ore dock. It was left open to the public after ceasing operation (in a far less litigious world), and kids of our generation were given free rein to explore through every stage of our development. At ten, we raced our bikes along the length, fished the ‘diamonds’ (pools located in the interior) for perch; at fourteen we smoked purloined cigarettes and made our first contributions to the graffiti with purloined cans of Krylon; at seventeen and eighteen we crept there at night to drink and do other things grownups told us we weren’t supposed to be doing. There was never any hiding the fact that we’d been on the ore dock. The orange-colored dust left over from hundreds of millions of tons of ore shipped out over sixty years went home with us, caked into the treads of our shoes and bike tires.
But outside of the tell-tale trail we left swiveling up and down the driveway, or across the kitchen floor, adults never cared that we went there; they went there too. Everyone in town spent at least a little time on the ore dock, fishing or walking. As a young adult, I started doing a lot of both. With an interest in history and a new appreciation for what that dock represented, I would walk through the gargantuan center, stare up to the dizzying heights where seabirds nested, trembling a bit (seriously…) at the dock’s overwhelming physical presence, and listen to a narrative without words - a profound silence broken only by the hollow whisper of wind through those 80-foot pillars, as unnerving as it was intriguing.
And so on that gloomy day in June ‘92, it wasn’t being there fishing that was making me nervous. It was the fire.
“This sucks,” Danny muttered, lighting a cigarette and proceeding to collect more trees and twigs to feed the flames. He said it mostly to himself, and I wasn’t sure what he was referring to – the fishing, the fish, the company, or just the Wednesday - but the look in his eyes brought me back to our first day of kindergarten, the same childish hostility that got me uneasily picking a seat clear on the other side of the room. He was done eating, and I knew him well enough to know he was now keeping the fire going, adding to it, building it up, simply because he wasn’t supposed to.
He may or may not have realized it, but Danny likely would have been working on that dock in a different era, and been doing well for himself. Had he graduated from high school in 1941 or ’51, rather than ’91, he wouldn’t have worried much about his future; he would have concerned himself only with getting through high school…or not…and doing one of two things: joining what was at the time a far less discerning military, or simply going down to the waterfront and getting a job on the boats in an economy that required no specialization finessed by a world view, only physical ability fed by a work ethic.
For that reason it was Danny, more than me, who was screwed over when the dock closed, robbed of a promised (or assumed) livelihood, cheated out of a legacy. I was born and raised in Ashland, and it will always be ‘home’ in some measure, but all else being equal, Class of ’41, ’51 or ’61, I would never have been a candidate for life on the boats or docks. My parents were transplants from New Jersey, found their way to northern Wisconsin to open a bookstore. They helped start the local theater group, gravitated toward the college crowd, my dad thought Benny Hill was the funniest man ever to live (and was right, of course…). I could not have asked for better parents, but the sensibilities they handed down set my brother and me apart from other kids growing up. I was not shy and studious exactly, just culturally alienated. I didn’t know things that Danny knew. I had never hunted, never ridden a snowmobile or a mini-bike, was not nearly as hardscrabble, and at some point, I realized, as my brother had a few years before, that when I came of age, my future would play out somewhere else.
But again, legacies sometimes get interrupted. Sands shift. Shift happens. As it turned out I didn’t go anywhere after high school. I stuck around, took my turn standing in line, waiting - always waiting - and overnight the differences between Danny and me so divisive as boys hardly seemed to register as men. We’d grown up in the same post-industrial town, and in our post-high school lives were getting a taste of the struggle our parents knew: difficulty making a go of just about anything, bouncing between the few dead-end jobs that existed, living with a relative lack of amenities, in a scarred environment, and having plenty of time to fish off that ore dock on a weekday morning. The reasons were different, perhaps; I was there because I hadn’t lived up to my potential, Danny because industry hadn’t lived up to its promises, but we both knew the slow-roiling frustration of disenfranchisement, and to any outside observer, any traveler stopping in town just long enough to fill up on gas, the only thing distinguishing the two of us in June 1992 might have been the fish scales clinging to the tips of his saliva-stained fingers.
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JULY 2004 - Nearly forty years after it last loaded a Great Lakes freighter with iron ore from the Gogebic Range of Michigan, Ashland's Soo Line ore dock was in a state of deterioration, and had become a totem not to a proud history, but something else. Note the fence put in place by the dock's owner, CN Railroad, to prevent trespassing. This happened in the early 2000s after it was clear the dock's 80 foot high superstructure had become a crumbling hazard.
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Demolition of the Soo Line ore dock started in 2011, really got rolling in 2012, and finished up last summer, with the last of the dock’s superstructure being brought down. The end of an era has been bemoaned six ways from Sunday. As soon as news arrived that the dock's days were numbered, Facebook exploded with campaigns hoping to somehow save it. Those failed of course, and now, everywhere I look when I come to Ashland, the ore dock is being immortalized. Murals have been painted. Commemorative calendars printed. Photographs blown up and framed, hung in public places.
I understand people's love of it, and desire to commemorate it, but all in all, the loss of the Soo Line ore dock doesn't move me to sentimentality so much as relief. In the last ten years it had become a totem not of a ‘proud history’, which, let's be honest, ended when Lyndon Johnson was president, but the 45-year hangover that followed. It had come to represent the post-mortem reality I knew growing up in a town blighted by brownfield and economically hobbled by its dependency on an industry that pulled off a vanishing act worthy of David Copperfield once it got what it came for.
Happily, much of that brownfield has been removed from the landscape. The ore dock's demolition coincides with other great improvements to the look and feel of my hometown. Cleaner, prettier, more spacious, Ashland, Wisconsin has recently undergone a massive overhaul; it's definitely not the town I grew up in.
But once again, barely 20 miles to the south, winds of war have been blowing over a proposed open-pit mine in the Penokee Hills. Residents of the even smaller, more isolated (and thus more susceptible to the allure of any opportunity for prosperity, no matter how dubious) Mellen, Wisconsin potentially face the difficult task of trying to find an appropriate balance between that promise of jobs, of livelihood (which are very important, make no mistake...) and responsibility to the environment they and their children, and their children's children, will live in.
It would seem, for better or worse, the decision there might already have been made, but the story of Ashland's oredock, and that morning in June 1992 when Danny and I were fishing on it, should serve as a cautionary tale to Mellen and other communities and regions like it, to, at the very least, steadfastly observe a few basic tenets:
1) Be wary - always wary - when industry comes sniffing around looking to extract something from the ground; always be listening for the sound of shifting sands
2) Be able and willing to move on quickly when shift happens.
3) Before industry even gets a foot in the door, demand to see an exit strategy.
