"Grand Marais" pt 2 (Tim Blighton)

Morning, the sun docks at this port of call.

Morning, artists drift from their sunlit houses and settle along their shops, like pebbles along a beach. Artists who bake on the warming stonework, who would rather sip tea or mint juleps and talk about art than sell it, but pitch their wares anyways.

This morning, Grand Marais is a bride again, smiling, pink and tipsy, greeting her long line of photographers and well-wishers against an upturned beach.

And that beach—by the way—is already being devoured again by fog and storm. Hard rains will pillage earth, tree and water like a plein air painter. When it all blows over, right before this tourist town turned ghost town resets its tent for the tourist revival, this lake pretending to be an ocean, and all the shadows that haunt my travels will recede with the next fog.


"The Dockbuilders" (Staci Lola Drouillard)

Canoes
Rowboats
Outboards
Steamers
Freighters
The boats just kept getting bigger.

Paddlers
Trunks
Fish boxes
Tourists
Timber
The cargo just kept getting heavier.

Anchors
Footings
Nails
Steel
Decking
The men had no choice but to build it.

Gulls
Kids
Officers
Photographers
Sailors
They come from miles away just to use it.

"Malley's Accordion" (Staci Lola Drouillard)

Always a quiet man, Malley spoke loudest through the keys of his accordion. The rumor was that he acquired it in a card game on his way back from the war, winning it fair and square with aces over queens.

He returned home with it to the North Shore, the choking air of battle still trapped inside his chest, like the dank air at the bottom of a dry well. Not knowing how to play, Malley would sit on the gravel beach outside of his family's shack on the east bay and extend the bellows this way, then that.

He eventually found the notes to “Sentimental Journey,” extending the chorus into long, melancholy lines of tinny vibrato. Soon the accordion took the place of his voice, the rhythmic breathing of the bellows becoming an extension of his own lungs. Both visitors and residents grew accustomed to seeing Malley, in his military jacket and newsboy hat, perched on the edge of the break wall, the voice of his accordion carried out across the surface of the harbor, and up into the streets of town.