Exploring a Great Lakes freighter?
By Greg Evans
Standing on an old restored, straight-deck freighter from the 1920s, floating in place on the tenth largest lake in the world, is a strange feeling. It’s a timeless feeling. This must have been sort of what Mark Twain felt right before sailing back to Buffalo after his American Vandal Abroad Tour; albeit, in the year 1868.
I’ve been to historic sites many times, but this is different. I think I need about three Dortmunder Gold Lagers though to give me some clarity. Is the bar open?
The metallic-musty smell of history mixed with cleaning supplies, and maybe the hint of upwelling, reminds me odorously of venturing onto the Intrepid, in New York.
I am talking about the 618-foot, floating maritime museum, the SS William G. Mather, a fully restored bulk freighter, located on North Coast Harbor, dock 32, one of the maritime gems of Cleveland. It is managed by the The Great Lakes Science Center, which offers a variety of interactive exhibits, including different tours of this remarkable ship.
If you are an old ship enthusiast, then you know what I mean about them being a different kind of historic site. Old ships are like apparitions that you can touch, analogous to the pulsating energy felt on Civil War battlefields. And extra points if it has a working bar.
The clanks, clinks, and echoes that resonate, are like the last gasps of former industrial glory that hang in the still air with a heaviness that suggest there are stories yet to tell.
Cleveland was once a booming industrial town, made so thanks to steamers like the William G. Mather. However, industry and even the population today, is just a fragment of what it once was (a population decline of nearly 50%, today, from what it once was in the 1920s). But good things are happening. They been happening.
Though remodeled, the Mather maintains a historic aspect. On the main deck, you can still feel 10,000 years of indigenous, Attawandaron winds blowing through your hair - cold, crisp, and refreshing, and a bit nostalgic - like peeking into an old diary.
Standing there, alone, staring out over the lake, I feel like I have been transported in time. This must be what those old seafarers felt, without the comfort of knowing they could step off at any time and slip into a restaurant for a greasy kielbasa Polish Boy sandwich, with extra BBQ sauce and slaw.
The magnitude of the history here is hard to put into words. Especially knowing that an estimated 2,000 vessels met their watery end in just Lake Erie alone, due apprehensively to the shallow depth, shifting sandbars, and ubiquitous violent storms that can appear out of nowhere. But nobody really knows for sure how many ships have been lost.
These stats make Lake Erie one of the most dangerous bodies of water for shipwrecks, historically speaking. And yet the Mather survived, adding to its exemplary design and construction (by The Great Lakes Engineering Works, 1925) and celebrated status.
Therefore, if being around or on this ship doesn’t get your goose flesh crawling, then you are probably a sociopathic killer and should go back to your dusty trailer outside Reno.
Just thinking about the maritime history is heavy. I haven’t had a mental taser blast like this since reading my first Hemingway novel.
I try to imagine being a sailor in the late 1920s, on a harrowing journey over minimally-charted lake waters, dodging haughty, Lake Erie rollers, passing oil refineries (Standard Oil - Sohio, and Canfield Oil), iron and steel (Lackawanna, U.S. Steel, Republic, Inland and Corrigan, Mckinney) and pulling into forgotten ports, to trade and share stories and drink with other travelers.
Mornings on the Mather, gold and mandarin rays bath the plush guest cabins in the forward deckhouse, the pilot house and the elegant dining hall, with a warm fresh new midwestern day, a reaffirmation that anything is possible with enough tons and barrels of iron ore and oil.
Living a life of perpetual safety, where my greatest and most harrowing events are scalding my fingers from the flecks of hot oil while frying my tortillas, or sidestepping the charging cockapoo from the neighbor’s yard, I find it difficult, with a thick mixture of timidity and temerity, to attempt to envision what life would have been like on one of the Great Lakes freighters, as a worker, long before GPS and Coast Guard Rescue choppers, leaving the C&B or East 9th Street pier on a bleak, snow-laden, and foggy night. Ice flows crunching up against the hull. The whale blubber lanterns disappearing into the inky Lake Erie darkness, as the freighter rumbles into the unknown.
So, what was life, for a seafarer on an old Great Lakes Steamship, such as the William G. Mather, or even the City of Cleveland III, really like?
Hard, manual labor, and long days. Not hard work that you imagine, rolling into work at 9 am, fumbling through a few spreadsheets, napping through some meetings before dining out at the Marble Room, stuffing your face on a Long-Bone Tomahawk and two Peppercorn Boulevardiers on the company dime (Yes, please.). Theirs was exhausting, hair-on-the-chest work. The conditions at times harsh and perilous but it wasn’t all bad. The crew often built a family-like camaraderie with each other. The pay was good and there was significant time off to spend with friends and family in between voyages.
It has been described as a hard but rewarding life, not suitable for everyone.
The same could be said about a soldier, an astronaut, an offshore oil rig worker, or even a neurotic journalist.
You have to go see it for yourself though. You have to be in the moment, standing there, absorbing the energy, listening to the sounds of 100 years of pent up history, smelling the air, letting yourself be taken away. Stand on that deck and close your eyes. Read the literature. Write your own story. Become a part of Cleveland’s lore. Explore. Geek out. Get wild. This is what it’s all about.