Lake Superior, The Cold Inland Sea
Near Duluth, Minnesota
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. It holds enough water to flood all of North and South America to a depth of one foot. Its average depth is nearly five hundred feet; its deepest point is over one thousand three hundred feet.
The water is so cold, averaging around forty degrees Fahrenheit in the deep zones year-round, that it does not fully warm even in August. Bodies of drowned sailors, the old saying goes, do not rise to the surface the way they do in warmer water. The lake keeps what it takes.
Those are statistics. What the statistics do not convey is the experience of standing beside it. Superior does not look like a lake.
It looks like an ocean. On a clear day, standing at Canal Park, you cannot see the opposite shore. The horizon is water and sky and nothing else.
When the wind rises from the north, the waves arrive with a fetching distance of three hundred miles behind them, and they arrive with the accumulated force of three hundred miles of open water. This is why the storms of November are what they are. The lake's size and coldness create its own microclimate.
Duluth gets lake-effect snow from Superior just as Buffalo gets it from Erie and Ontario. The city's summers are cooler than the interior; the autumns longer; the springs delayed. The lake moderates what would otherwise be an even harsher climate.
In return, it occasionally swamps your ship. The Anishinaabe people called it Gichigami, the great sea, and they were using a precise word. It is not a lake in the sense of something you can comprehend at a glance.
It is a presence, autonomous, geologically ancient, indifferent to the port city on its western shore. Duluth exists because of the lake. Whether the lake cares is a different question entirely.
