By James Heinz

Although there are many nonfiction books written about Great Lakes maritime history, little fiction has been written about it, as far as I know. Other than a mention by Herman Melville in Moby Dick, I am not aware of any novels written about the adventures of Great Lakes mariners.

With one exception. 

In 2018 the University of Wisconsin Press published the novel Across the Great Lake by Lee Zacharias. One reviewer described it as “One of the most intensely written and beautifully conceived novels to come my way in many a season. It is also among the most gripping, and it maintains its hold until the final period.” Having read it, I agree. Recently the author spoke via Zoom with members of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s book club about the novel and the inspiration behind it.

Zacharias was born in Chicago but raised in nearby Hammond, Indiana, at the south end of Lake Michigan, the epicenter of the American steel industry and oil refining. When she looked out of her window she saw nothing but giant steel mills belching smoke. “I could not wait to get out of Hammond,” she said. At age 11 she did.

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Her father was her connection to the Great Lakes. He was a Great Lakes mariner who never talked about his work. Letters he wrote to her mother before Pearl Harbor speak of his desire to get off the lake boats and come ashore. With the coming of World War II he chose to stay in the Great Lakes merchant marine. The letters mentioned two ships he worked on: SS ANGELINE and SS ARTHUR ORR. That connection to the lakes was severed when her father took a shore job after his daughter was born.

A steel bulk carrier, the ARTHUR ORR was built in 1893. She was 286 feet long and 41 feet wide with carrying-capacity of 2,329 tons. She was driven ashore on Lake Superior in 1898 but salvaged and returned to service. She was scrapped in 1948.

Launched in 1899, the ANGELINE was also a steel bulk carrier. She was 437 feet long and 57 feet wide with a tonnage of 4,644. She was converted to a barge in 1955 and scrapped in 1965.

As a child Zacharias remembered her father’s favorite recreation was to sit on the shore, watching the ships sail by — which was her mother’s least favorite recreation. The author feels that ships are in her blood.

When she was about 10, her family vacationed in Frankfort, Michigan. She thought then that life must be so much better there than in Hammond. While visiting relatives in Michigan in 2002, she took a side trip to Frankfort intending to write an essay about what the city meant to her as a child and discovered that it was largely unchanged. Except for one thing.

The car ferries had stopped running.

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With their bells and foghorns, the ferries had impressed the young girl. She felt that the vessels seemed not to have made much of an imprint on the residents of Frankfort. No one seemed to remember them or, if they did, had any idea when they stopped running. 

“That’s what led me to buy Grant Brown Jr.’s history of the Ann Arbor railroad ferries, Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan, she said. “In reading I was plunged into a world of tricky currents, dangerous shoals, fierce storms, and so much ice, because the ferries did not lay up for the winter. I was so fascinated I began reading more books about the ferries, the lake, the area, etc. I couldn’t let the material go and finally thought there’s got to be a novel in this.” She chose the pre-radar era because it was more dangerous and the 1936 setting because that year Lake Michigan froze over from shore to shore.

Zacharias did not have a stepmother, as the story does, but her mother disliked hers. The sailor characters’ Ole and Lena jokes led her to find the individual voices of the sailors. “Essentially if you’ve ever heard anyone tell an ethnic joke, you know how they speak when they’re not telling jokes,” she said. “But individually. Each sailor has a different voice.” Brown connected her with retired ferry sailors who filled in details. The ghost in the story was inspired by Great Lakes ghost stories.

The actions of the ghost in the novel came from personal experience. While vacationing on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina she stayed at an inn said to be haunted by the spook of a murdered innkeeper’s wife. Previously not a believer in the paranormal, her experience that night was validated when the clerk the next morning asked, “Would you like to change rooms?” That, she said, is how she knew she hadn’t imagined the ghost.

That spectral experience influenced her when she toured the car ferry SS CITY OF MILWAUKEE, preserved as a museum and bed and breakfast at Manistee, Michigan. “I had already booked a cabin when I thought to ask, ‘The ship doesn’t have a ghost, does it?’ The answer was ‘Depends on who you talk to.’ That’s not a yes, but it was yes enough for me!” Docents would later show her where the ship’s ghost was supposed to be. Not until the twenty-third draft of the novel did she realize who the ghost in the her ship really was.

The SS CITY OF MILWAUKEE was built in 1931 for the Grand Trunk Railroad to replace the car ferry SS MILWAUKEE, which disappeared in a storm in 1929 and was found off its namesake city in 1972. The CITY OF MILWAUKEE served until 1982. In her life as a museum, she is the last surviving unaltered ship of her kind. She is 354 feet long and 56 feet wide and displaces 2,943 tons.

Not only people ghosts make an appearance in her story, but so does the ghost ship Chicora. That was inspired by boat trips to South Manitou Island where another ship emerged from the fog like an apparition. The Native American legend of the Sleeping Bear Dunes inspired the core of her story.

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A wooden packet steamer, SS CHICORA was built in 1892. She was 217 feet long and 35 feet wide with a tonnage of 1,123. On January 21, 1895, she disappeared in a snowstorm after leaving Milwaukee. Notes in two bottles that floated ashore claimed her engines broke down, leaving her to fall apart in the ice in the middle of a snowstorm. Although many have searched for her, she’s never been found.

“I read at Boswell Books (in Milwaukee) in July 2019, and the audience response made me feel like I’d come home,” Zacharias said. “The talk and reading I gave on the Badger (ferry) were on that same reading tour. I had never crossed the lake before that, (only) once when I was a child,before the bridge was built,” she said referring to the Mackinac span. “My family took the ferry across the straits, probably the Chief Wawatam.” Coming home meant a lot to her. Although she lives in North Carolina she is not considered a Southern writer.

SS CHIEF WAWATAM was a railroad car ferry that crossed the Straits of Mackinac from 1911 to 1984. She was the last hand-fired, coal-fueled boat on the lakes. She had three propellors — one in the bow for ice breaking. In 1989 she was cut down into a barge before being scrapped in 2009. The steam engine of the 338 feet long by 62 feet wide vessel is preserved at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum at Manitowoc.

One reviewer described Zacharias as, “one of those profoundly rare writers, a natural. Her voice is one you can trust, and her characters are real, moving, and come from the experience of someone who knows what trouble human beings get themselves into.”

Welcome the author home by reading her novel.

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Photo at top of page
Lee Zacharias, author of Across the Great Lake, published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2018. Photo Credit: Image provided by Lee Zacharias; photography by Michael Gaspeny

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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.