Of Family, Fires, and Prehistoric Fish
If there is a better way to close out summer than this past weekend, I’m at a loss to imagine it. The entire family was home—Grace flying in for a long weekend to celebrate Shari’s birthday and Isabel marking her final days before heading off to school. The Northland’s weather, not usually known for its hospitality this time of year, pulled out all the stops. It was the sort of weather postcards would reject for being too cliché: clear blue skies, a polite breeze, and temperatures lingering in the low 70’s. Superior, usually the diva of inland seas, sat quietly for once, a rare show of manners from a basin famous for theatrical fits of rage.
Friday night we ventured to OMC, West Duluth’s BBQ luminary—where brisket and ribs are slow-coaxed into greatness via competition-grade smoking, earning its spot on Southern Living’s bucket list of American barbecue. I ordered an old-fashioned because I’m increasingly feeling, well, old-fashioned, and we sat there eating brisket and passing plates, laughing the sort of unhurried laughter that only seems to appear when everyone you love is within arm’s reach.
Saturday morning was the domestic idyll: pancakes on the griddle, eggs sunny and agreeable, the girls in soft sweatshirts, and the whole house smelling faintly of coffee and maple syrup. I snuck away for a few hours to join the dive shop group at Lake Ore-be-Gone in Gilbert. I rarely get to dive with the weekend crowd—working all non holiday weekends tends to keep my dry—but it was Labor Day weekend, and the family waved me off with indulgent smiles. Eight divers made the trek: an enthusiastic bunch, most still shiny-new in their neoprene. Visibility was typical group-dive mediocrity, but that didn’t matter. I busied myself trying to capture a few photos—people like proof they’ve done something most of their friends would consider perilously exotic, and nothing says “Look at me, I’m adventurous” like a picture of yourself floating serenely in 50 feet of cold water with an cylinder strapped to your back.
Just a casual hangout with a skeleton - Lake Ore-be-Gone keeps it charmingly weird.
That night, on Wisconsin Point, we enjoyed sandwiches from Northern Waters Smokehaus, the renowned deli founded by our friends, Lynn and Eric Goerdt. Their passion for smoked delicacies has earned them a dedicated following. The evening was perfect: a vibrant sunset, a calm lake, and the warmth of a beach fire. We ate, drank wine, and discussed everything from boyfriends, college loans to what we’d do with a billion-dollar Powerball win. (I bought five tickets—which I consider a tax on the mathematically challenged, but it added to the fun.) The girls—funny, bright, full of kindness—are the sort of humans who make a father silently thank whatever cosmic lottery dealt him this hand.
When summer decides to show off: sherbet skies, a still Superior, and two of my favorite humans laughing by the fire.
Sunday was moving day. The sort of day that involves two cars, a lot of optimistic packing, and the awkward geometry of trying to fit furniture through doorways. Isabel’s apartment in St. Paul was charming, in that way apartments always seem charming when they belong to your children. We hung a photo collage—a gloriously elaborate arrangement that took a few attempts to get right. There were hugs, a cheerful lunch at a little St. Paul spot, and then Grace vanished into the airport crowd, bound back for Colorado.
It was already the best weekend in recent memory. And then Monday arrived with another gift. Heather invited me along on her friend Angela’s boat for a dive on the Niagara wreck off Knife River. The lake was perfect, its surface smooth and shining, sunlight pouring down as if the sky itself was celebrating the week. Below, the wreck whispered its 125-year-old stories—wooden ribs and decking somehow still steadfast in the quiet, cold water.
The ascent, though, was a reminder that Superior does not suffer complacency. No visual reference, no line, just me, dumping gas like a lunatic and watching my computer with the intensity of someone waiting for biopsy results. Everything was fine until it wasn’t, and then I was gliding past my 15-foot stop like an overeager elevator. A quick corrective swim downward, a sheepish mental note to practice that, and we surfaced into a world of glassy calm.
Tuesday found me back in the Great Lakes Aquarium, performing the noble work of feeding fish and playing rock-paper-scissors with small, delighted humans pressed to the glass. The excitement of the day was an O-ring blowout on my tank—an eruption of compressed air loud enough to summon staff from several exhibits over. We handled it, with brisk efficiency but just enough drama to make it interesting.
And then came Thursday. Heather suggested a point-to-point dive at Gooseberry Falls—a novelty in Lake Superior shore diving, where the norm is usually more “out and back.” The entry was cinematic: a giant stride from the old lava flow ledge rock, into water that was a surprisingly hospitable mid-50s. The first stretch was the usual Superior scenery—rocks, sand, the occasional indifferent log. Then, a flicker of silver: a school of fry too small for any decent video. I had just resigned myself to artless footage when Heather signaled big fish. I glanced over a boulder and nearly swallowed my regulator.
There, cruising across the sand flats like some serene emissary from the Jurassic, was a lake sturgeon. Three feet long, armored in bony plates, with that peculiar shovel snout that makes them look like fish designed by someone who only had a vague description of what a fish is supposed to look like. They have endured for more than 100 million years, surviving ice ages, shifting continents, and every reshuffling of life that erased countless other species. They can live a century and a half, weigh 200 pounds, and in Lake Superior, they are about as common as unicorns. Old-timers with thousands of dives will tell you they’ve maybe seen one or two in their entire careers. And here we were, watching one in the wild. And then, impossibly, a second—smaller but no less magnificent. I had the camera rolling, lights blazing, heart thumping. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most extraordinary wildlife encounters of my diving life.
The moment my head cleared the water, I spat out my regulator and bellowed, ‘Sturgeon!’ as though Heather might have forgotten the prehistoric submarine we’d just shared the lake with. It wasn’t just a good dive; it was the sort of encounter that sends a little electric thrill through your bones—the kind that reminds you nature still has a few astonishing secrets up its sleeve.
If summer had to end, it could not have ended better.