This morning, I awoke early to the blast of Armageddon. It was a deep rumble that shook the hotel for thirty seconds, so loud that I couldn't hear myself say "what the jesus fried christ is happening?!?" as I leaped out of bed. Groggy, I clambered to the door, but there was no scramble in the hall, and I could not smell smoke. In fact, the din ground my teeth to dust just a wee a bit less. Standing there in the grey pre-dawn light, I turned to the windows that overlook the Sauk Creek inlet and glanced down; two fishing boats rocked haphazardly on their moorings despite a seemingly calm morning. Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I looked right over the town, then left over Lake Michigan as the blast shook me again.

I blinked three times before remembering to breathe. To say the freighter was massive would understate the term: it was massive the way one would think of a god's plastic bathtub playboats and submarines. It eclipsed my pre-dawn view of Lake Michigan, which was no small feat since my room was four stories up. It was that small realization setting in on my groggled morning mind -- that I was standing almost naked behind a large sheet of 1/4" thick plate glass about two feet south and fifty feet above the slowly churning green-gray surface of Lake Michigan's Sauk Inlet -- that redistorted my perceptions.

I suddenly -- and frankly, far too rudely for 5:17 a.m. -- found myself to inhabit an existence on a nearly infinitesimally small scale, and that was just while standing in a Holiday Inn hotel room. Had I been able to reach out a 200-foot long finger and touch the freighter at my eye level, I would have poked it in the equivalent of the sternum to the chin of its deck; or, had the freighter a mermaid on its bowsprit, I would have landed my poke right where no decent gentleman would ever poke a lady who was a stranger; or a relative.

My line of sight fell a good 10-15 feet below the surface of the vessel's main deck; and above me -- and most of Port Washington -- towered the ship's island, despite it being at the bow end of the vessel, which was pointed away from me, out toward the lake.

As a third clarion blast vibrated through what could no longer be a sleepy seaside town, the freighter began very slowly pulling away from its moorings. It took nearly five minutes for the bow to come about only ten degrees port; but as it did, the light of day broke across Lake Michigan. (Shouting gold trumpets, their crescendo immediately obliterating the low, suspenseful timpani rumble of the grey dawn light, is what the view would have sounded like.)

The vista before me opened up into a glittering horizon of blue as the ship, unmoored and cruising out to sea (out to lake?), no longer had the perspective ratio of the land to warp its true scale: with the shift, my perception twirled its finger around another brain tweak and pulled as the freighter suddenly seemed downright little compared to the body of water it was about to traverse. Not lost on me was the fact that had the boat begun moving toward me instead of away, I would have been squashed like a bug (and the Holiday Inn like a roach motel). While Lake Michigan mimicked the Atlantic, the ship and I hoped the day would remain clear.

It was then I noticed movement, a tiny motion. Barely discernable from my window was the figure of a man sitting on a small rock jetty between me and the departing ship. Despite being 100 feet away and still shrouded in shadow, I could see as he forward cast, puffed a cigarette, reeled, puffed a cigarette, back cast, and repeated with a motion and rhythm steady enough to have been set by an astrolabe.

I yawned and headed for the shower. By then my brain had done enough break-of-dawn backflips to be unsurprised when he began humming and, somehow, I could hear him:

"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee; Superior, they say, never gives up her dead, when the gales of November come early...."

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