THE BLUE CANOE

We called it "Godspeed the Warriors" and we did it every year on graduation night. It was a peculiar ritual, where the seniors got together, in the hour before sunset, with canoes and paddles in a cove beneath the high bluffs on the southern shore of Lake Superior and rowed across the shallows to Otter Island. Our observance of this rite went all the way back to World War I, when the people of the peninsula bade a patriotic adieu to four brothers from Ashton who'd joined up. Folks had heard about what went on over there and expected, no doubt, that some of the Olson boys would not be coming back.

The year our turn came around was the first hot day of the season. We were sweaty, high, and sun-weary from two hours that morning getting roasted like heretics in our black robes on the soccer field behind the gym. For the rest of the day we had drifted from one crepe-papered back yard to another, drinking champagne from the Kroger.

The local newspapers back in 1918 recorded that the pageant lasted three days. There was a parade, Indian dances and foot races, a professional baseball team, and on Sunday the first Godspeed. It had been the idea of Alfred Bigelow, the mayor of Ashton, to capture the military spirit of the moment by recreating another savage battle, one fought on these waters centuries ago between the Ojibwa of the island and an invading party of Sioux.

Whatever happened to the Olson boys? True to the fears of the locals, none of them made it back home. None of them died in France, either. The war was over before they reached the front lines. They lived through the war (and for years afterward as far as anyone knew) but didn't come back home. And so Godspeed became for the grown-ups about going away and for us kids about the chance to never return.

After the Armistice was signed — an event also recorded in the local papers of that year — no one wanted another pageant, but they liked Godspeed the Warriors, and so it was kept and performed every year on graduation day. Since kindergarten I had watched from the bluffs with Grey Reed and the other kids my age, jealous and admiring of the seniors, who looked as grown up as we ever thought we'd want to be, and counted off the years until it would be our turn. Now that day had come, and we stood on the shore next to our boats.

Grey Reed was shirtless, with his hair leather-strapped into a ponytail. He stood surveying the water in front of us and the island beyond it, and flicked a caterpillar off the prow of the canoe, which was wood and twelve feet long and belonged to Callie's stepdad, Ray, until Grey offered to take the thing off of his hands and hauled it out from behind the barn on the Dobbses' property where it had sat hull-up across two sawhorses for so many years that the sun and the elements had stripped the wood bare of paint. Grey had refitted the ribbing in the hull and the benches and laid on three coats of polyurethane marine paint, indigo blue (because he said he'd seen his share of red canoes). When he was done, Callie said it was "pretty," which was a hard word for her to part with, since she'd made no secret of how much she resented the time he put into the job. Ray Dobbs admired the work Grey had done so much he told him he wanted the boat back.

Nobody needed to be told what to do: carry boats to the water, line them up in even rows, and wait for the signal to begin, which was three blasts of a whistle. When it came, we flipped our boats over and waded into the rocky shallows. The water was frigid and snatched at our ankles as we launched the canoe, which glided across the surface of the lake like an eager mallard, until the three of us jumped in at the same time and the hull groaned and settled among the waves. At the bow, Callie sliced the water in easy, shallow j-shaped strokes. Grey steered, and I sat without paddle on the center bench. "Riding cargo," Grey called it.

Somewhere in the history of Godspeed the idea had become to tear across to the island as fast as you could. Coming up on our right, Kurt Rossmeier and Randy Storer — two-thirds of the first line of the Norsemen varsity hockey squad — slashed at the waves with their paddles. Grey and Callie maintained their measured pace. None of the three of us, least of all Grey, was in any hurry for the maiden voyage of the blue canoe to come to an end.

The water churned as dozens of other canoes plowed past us, making the whole spectacle seem more like a water ride at Great America than like the actual historical event that this ceremony was supposed to recall.

Callie stretched her paddle over her head with both hands and twisted her hips, baring the copper skin of her lower back. "God," she said, "it's good to be out of that dress." She was talking about the black velvet number she had worn to graduation, which had looked stunning, no question, on a tall and slender girl, but wasn't a wise choice to wear under a graduation gown on an early summer scorcher. "Dolores picked it out," she said. "I only wore it because I thought my dad was coming." However, her father hadn't arrived from La Crosse like he said he would. Now she was barefoot and wearing the blue fake-satin shorts that Dolores bought her in Duluth on an otherwise perfectly good spring afternoon.

Our original plan was to stick together, Grey and Callie and me. We were going to go down to school, the three of us, and Grey and I were going to room together and Callie would live in a girls' dorm nearby with some girl from Oostburg or someplace, who we would talk to or not, depending on how we felt. Then Grey went and flunked AP English. Walt Smalley, our principal, only let Grey go through graduation on the condition that he make the credits up in summer school, which Grey had no intention of doing. Instead — jacked by his success with Ray's canoe — he was going to make boats. So now Callie was staying behind, too, and she was going to take classes at the Catholic college in Ashton.

The shadows cast by the birches on the bluffs at our backs stretched far ahead of us into the channel. Grey steered us clear of traffic, until even the slowest of the other boats had passed us up, then we idled just off shore until everybody else beached their canoes and had nothing to do but stare at us as Grey and Callie put their paddles to the water and we glided in on the waves.

* * *

Otter Island is basically a sand bar, a narrow spit of land, jutting two miles into Superior to the northwest from a point above the mouth of the Mulberry River, separated from the mainland by two hundred yards of shallows. The otters that gave the island its name are gone, victims of the timber trade, which stripped the shoreline of trees, and of the lumberjacks, who spent the hours they weren't laying waste to the forests drinking whiskey and blasting their furry ilk off the rocks with Colt revolvers. Here the Sioux raiding party swam the shallows and ambushed two Ojibwa boys from St. Raphael. Then the Ojibwa came swiftly by canoe to cut off the enemy's escape to the mainland. The result was a slaughter, with knives and fists and bows and rocks.

None of us knew much about that battle but we laid up our boats — like the Ojibwa did — on the beach that stretched northwest along the leeward length of the island.

Standing on a granite boulder among the dunes was Craig Hauser, senior class president (elected, after three defeats, in a pity vote)....