Armed with a dustcloth and toothbrush, Rebecca Gordon worked from a ladder to polish the replica pilot house at the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center last week. Over her shoulder was a lake stirred up by a winter storm.
It was the right day to be inside as big waves crashed ashore and swells pulsed through the canal outside. Gordon, a park ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, stopped cleaning for a moment to take stock of what was unfolding.
"I keep looking for whale spouts," said Gordon, a recent transplant from Alaska where she also worked as a park ranger. "It truly is an inland sea."
Gordon was joined throughout the center's two stories by a busy cadre of volunteers and fellow park rangers. They were getting the center into shipshape condition as it moved from weekend hours in winter to daily hours for the tourist season.
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The gallery windows overlooking the lake from the center - especially on a bad-weather day - are one place tourists can use to take in the ships that arrive and depart through the canal. With the start of the Great Lakes shipping campaign this week, the system's most inland port becomes a gawker's paradise.
"The subculture of boatnerds and maritime enthusiasts - they're wonderful and passionate people," said Tammy Sundbom Otterson, executive director of the nearly 700-member Lake Superior Marine Museum Association. "We wouldn't exist without them. It's what Duluth is all about."
One of the first attractions tucked into Canal Park, the free museum has faced every sunrise, every squall and every visiting ship since 1973. It receives more than 400,000 visitors annually.
In the engine room below the gallery, Stan Salmi of Duluth and others employed sweet-smelling metal polish as they buffed every length of copper tubing, each brass fitting and all the bronze bushings they could reach across several antique marine engines.
"We like to have them sparkling before things open for the season," said Salmi, a longtime association member.
Across the room from Salmi was Dave Poulin. Both 74, they were in the Navy together and go way back.
Poulin polished hard-to-reach places on a Loew-Victor gasoline engine he donated to the museum years ago.
"I want to get down to the nameplate on it to take a picture of it," Poulin said. "It leaked an awful lot of oil, and it was hard to start."
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After struggling earlier this century following personnel cuts within the Corps of Engineers, the museum is back on solid ground.
"It's the volunteers that drive this," Sundbom Otterson said. "It's amazing the time they put in."
The center's exhibits evolve annually to stay current, and new pieces get introduced to the collection. The association also is using money from its membership drives, annual lake freighter cruise raffle and Gales of November conference to explore bigger projects outside of the museum.
Sundbom Otterson said the association recently received $5,000 worth of grant money to explore the possibility of restoring the Minnesota Point Lighthouse at the end of Park Point. The lighthouse is a graffiti-ridden relic and has appeared on the doomsday list of most-endangered lighthouses by Lighthouse Digest.
"We're waiting to get engineers out there to do a survey of what can be done," Sundbom Otterson said. "It's boarded up and looks pretty bad. It needs attention. Lighthouses are considered a national treasure."
Back in Canal Park, the museum earned a bump in business this winter with the arrival of rare gulls. Bird-watchers took over the lookout deck normally occupied by boat watchers.
"First there was the ivory gull and then some other ones," Sundbom Otterson said. "People kept showing up."
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COMING SUNDAY
Meet the ship watchers: documentarians who click away with their cameras in an effort to capture the perfect shot of the ships that ply Lake Superior and come and go through the Duluth and Superior harbors. Read about them in Sunday's News Tribune.
