The Long Affair with Gitche Gumee

"Superior is more like a ocean than a lake. Duluth is the San Francisco of the Midwest."

Like many of us in the upper Midwest, I have had a long standing affair with something outside of my marriage. Alright - a poor choice of words. It is more like a Ménage à trois than an affair, as my wife has similar feelings about that something. That something has been known by many names to many different people over the years.

The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron during the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac superieur. Properly translated, the expression means "Upper Lake,"  the lake above Lake Huron. Today, most people use the most common name, Lake Superior. However, I prefer to use the Native American name Gitche Gumee.

It is a bit of a misnomer to say that Gitche Gumee is the proper Native American name.
The Ojibwe call the lake Gichigami, which means "big water." However in the book The Song of Hiawatha,  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as "Gitche Gumee". Gordon Lightfoot really gave this name recognition in his award winning song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I love this lake - loved it ever since I was a boy. When I was a young lad, I had allergies which peaked in August. My parents would take up to Duluth for some relief. Every year we would make our pilgrimage to Duluth and sometimes points north from there. One year, my Dad (who was very good at things like this) talked the Aerial Bridge operator into letting us ride up on the bridge when a big ship came through. It was awesome! I have many boyhood memories of visits to our world famous inland harbor, named after a French explorer, which sits on a lake the size of an ocean. 



My wife and I fell in love by the lake, we spent the first day of our honeymoon there. We took our kids up there from the time they were in strollers to when they were young adults. Now that the kids are raised and living on their own, my wife and I continue to travel up to Lake Superior at least once a year. Missing our annual trek to Duluth would be like missing the state fair.

My fascination of the lake is not just the beauty, but the unbelievable size as well. Here are some fun and interesting facts about Superior:

• Lake Superior contains three quadrillion (3,000,000,000,000,000) gallons of water. That's ten percent of the world's fresh surface water and over half of the water in the Great Lakes.
•  Lake Superior contains enough water to submerge all of North and South America under one foot of water.
• Lake Superior covers 31,700 square miles, about the same size as Maine or the combined provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. It is the greatest Great Lake--the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area, and the third largest by volume. Only Lake Baikal in Siberia and Lake Tanganyika in East Africa contain a greater volume of fresh water.
• Lake Superior could hold the water from all of the other Great Lakes, along with three more Lake Eries.
• Because of its great size, Superior has a retention time of 191 years. Retention time measures how long water stays in the lake, based on volume and the mean rate of outflow.
• Lake Superior is the deepest of the Great Lakes. Along much of Minnesota's North Shore, the lake is 700 feet deep within 3 miles of land. 

Last year we made our first trip to Gitche Gumee much later than usual. The storm that affected the North Shore did quite a bit of damage to infrastructure so we wanted to make sure that we would not be getting in the way of repairs. An interesting fact of the storm is the amount of rain which fell. State meteorologists estimate that over 2 trillion of gallons fell just from that storm alone! So much runoff went into the lake that it temporarily raised the lake level of this behemoth by three feet.

The affair with Gitche Gumee continues and shows no signs of abatement. Our greatest of lakes always interests, fascinates, relaxes, impresses and sometimes surprises. In short, the lake is our gift that keeps on giving. Gitche belongs to us, all of us. Together we have uncounted memories of countless trips to visit our state's most majestic treasure. Thank you Gitche for the memories you have given, as well as the ones yet to come.