North of Superior
Engels, Vincent
NORTH OF SUPERIOR By VINCENT ENGELS IN MY hearing lately someone mentioned Port Arthur, hesitantly as though pronouncing a name which really exists for Rand-McNally alone, and I felt ill at ease....
...Look out across the bay to where Thunder Cape rises at the rim of the world like some fabulous mirage...
...In this world it is one of the most satisfying of cities, and if it is ambitiously preparing for an industrial future with its elevators and warehouses, there is strong medicine yet in its background of hills, timber and running water, and its foreground of capes and islands reaching out as though to clutch the sea...
...No wonder it became the spiritual harbor of that Very Strange Man, the tall, lean, darkly-garmented One whom I used to see every fair afternoon and evening, at the municipal bowling green...
...It is too much like a mythological monster, a beastly demon...
...Now The Very Strange Man was regarding it intently...
...He seemed happy that I had joined him...
...It is in bad state of repair...
...So far as I know he never played...
...and one was half prepared to see turf and players vanish upon the moment...
...And two centuries from now when this country was being reexplored by the Japanese or the Arabs, some traveler hearing of the legend would investigate and find nothing...
...From all sides and from every rib spring jets of spray, making it the most delightful fountain in the world...
...For I know it well, that curious haven on the north shore of Lake Superior, and most deeply respect it...
...If I passed by at four or at seven I could see him there, leaning against the railing which kept spectators from falling off the walk upon the men below...
...One foggy morning I met him near the aqueduct, an elevated tube some five or six feet in diameter, made of wood, bound with iron hoops, which drags its slow length along the banks of the Current River...
...We left the path and strolled through the grass not too intimately near the tube...
...He'd race back to his village...
...True, as a picture it fitted in so well with the general spirit of the landscape that it seemed at once too perfect and too slight for life...
...Not a nail...
...Not a hoop...
...Wouldn't it be a terror in the wilderness...
...It was because there is some evidence of reality in a bowling green which is not in a grain elevator or a derrick, because wherever men play at a game which is merry and graceful and decently grounded in antiquity there is a sign of reassurance for such as lose their bearings occasionally, and know not whether they live in the past or the future, heaven, hell, or the midst of savagery...
...Well, I do...
...When next I saw him at the bowling green I knew that he had given away his secret...
...But the game would go on in an even rhythm, the bowlers oblivious of spectators and merry among themselves as men in a picture, or a legend, should be...
...back of it is a forest unbroken to the Arctic, and at its front door is the Big Sea Water shining...
...flood lights were turned on, and the bowling would continue into the night, so that one who turned to his couch at ten would be spared the disillusionment of seeing it break up...
...At least I understood why he did not spend his time at the grain elevators, on the wharves, or about some proper business...
...Did he mean to fix in his mind every detail of its appearance in this fog, or, by facing it, to fight down and conquer some remembrance from another morning when he had seen it thus...
...One road leads out of it-westward to Duluth...
...Darkness brought no cessation...
...Children would be frightened by it...
...I could not admire, but rather feared, his patience, appreciating but slightly the fascination which the game had for him...
...A mass of pale green, with handsome red patches where the granite ledges have refused sustenance to a tree, it is surrounded by a haze, like that soft atmosphere through which one looks at figures in a dream, or scenes called up from the past...
...I am sure it was his only occupation...
...And I, too quickly, hoped not...
...Or perhaps I should say not a tooth or a bone...
...What would happen if all our cities should vanish suddenly, Port Arthur with them, and only this be left...
...The first far-wandering Ojibway who happened here-what a fright he'd get...
...A legend would grow up...
...a work of art not of accident...
...east there are only the granite hills and the marshes...
...There is no quality of reality about it: it is far off, yet plainly seen, and it floats like a colored cloud upon the water...
...But I am sure my friend sought that disillusion...
...He said, "Don't you wish they would repair it...
...Hunting parties would detour around the spot...
...an imagining, merely...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 12
