House Calls on the Brineless Briny

The terms “house call” and “country doctor” do so readily join hands.

“Did you really make house calls?”

Such a revealing question. To those rural physicians from my vintage, the answer is, “Of course.” Clearly, the high tech medicine of today cannot be carried to someone’s home in a little black bag. Still, the number of queries I receive, and their wistful tone, suggests that the public—our patients—feels that something is missing from what medicine offers today. What if it is something important?

Sometimes, “house call” needs to be defined more precisely.

The northeastern corner of Minnesota forms one hundred and fifty miles of mighty Lake Superior’s northern shoreline. The lake was first named by Europeans because of its “superior” elevation above sea level, compared to the four other Great Lakes. We who are fortunate enough to live beside it appreciate its superiority in broader scale. Its face can shine, Gitchee Gammi, for those who pause to see. Its blue can challenge the most azure of skies. Its moods are painted large on nature’s canvas; they vary by season and time of day. Fog dense as grey cotton muffles any view of reefs capable of sinking a second Titanic. On a morning when air temperatures are twenty or thirty below zero, wisps of frozen mist rise from its surface to crowd together crookedly, mirroring smoke from chimneys on land. Waves so seldom silent sweep gravel onto shore, to the sound of a thousand gentle castanets, only to reclaim loaned pebbles with the next wave in line. Sometimes ice shackles the restless water, and Superior becomes a version of the arctic.

The lake struggles to shrug off man’s casual pollution. Yet, it rewards us with sparkles and smiles even in its pain. When aroused by November’s passion, it dashes tsunamis against the rocky headlands containing it. Hundreds of boats, great and small, lie buried in its dark, icy depths. Superior must never be taken for granted!

Its vital statistics are impressive: broadest body of fresh water on earth; the third largest volume of contained fresh water among the world’s grandest lakes. Its greatest depth is more than thirteen hundred feet.

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I have made “home visits” aboard three separate ore carriers on Lake Superior. For those who do not know, iron ore and taconite iron pellets are hauled in enormously long boats that load cargo at Minnesota ports in Taconite Harbor, Silver Bay, Two Harbors and Duluth. These products of Minnesota’s famed Mesabi Iron Range mines end up in places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Driblets return to the north country in the form of our latest-model sedans. The boats range in length from six or eight hundred feet to more than a thousand. That’s a fifth of a mile, to give you perspective. From the dock alongside, a boat’s steel bulwarks, painted black or barn-red, tower overhead. A hatch near the bow opens onto internal catwalks stretching toward the rear, alongside bins holding pellets. Cacophony and dust, light bulbs that tickle darkness without dispelling it. Quarters for the crew are at the very aft of the boat, prison-sparse cells.

One of my calls aboard such a boat was to treat a seaman who was a foreign national. Immigration authorities would not let him come ashore at Taconite Harbor, because the place he called home was on some taboo list. What lurking menace he posed I did not understand, but I recall thinking that he seemed like an ordinary guy, if with an accent. Makes a person wonder how ultimately ferocious are all of those “others” we “have been lovingly taught to hate and fear,” in the poignant words of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

On a second occasion, a sailor thoughtlessly had a heart attack just after an ore carrier had cleared its loading dock and headed down-lake. Time is money with these symbols of corporate America, and the captain was not about to return to dockside so the guy could easily be taken ashore.

As is usual with so many house calls, the request came after midnight (Murphy’s Law number twenty-eight, I believe). The boat arrived at 3 a.m., stopping just outside the breakwater guarding Grand Marais’ harbor. I was summoned to the Coast Guard Station, plopped still half asleep into one of those overgrown lifeboats the service uses, and was ferried out to the side of the ore carrier. Up close, those suckers are big! We... well, mostly I clung to any handhold... got the patient down from the deck in some kind of metal basket affair, secured him in the Coast Guard lifeboat, and we headed for shore. By the time we reached the dock, the ore carrier was already well out to sea. I’ve been told it takes the better part of a mile to stop one of those monsters when it is loaded with ore and has gained momentum, but can their great propellers churn out acceleration!

The patient healed, even sent me a Christmas card one year.

My third call aboard an ore carrier came about because of Lake Superior’s love affair with November gales. When a boat is coming up-lake... that’s us here in Minnesota... it pumps ballast while still a ways out from shore. (Ballast: filthy, cruddy water that has been known to catch on fire while still loose in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River—Ohio’s attempt to clean up and recycle some of its worst effluent to Lake Superior. Of course, eventually it returns to Lake Erie. Fair enough.)

To enter Taconite Harbor’s bay and shipping dock, the boat must do a turn just beforehand, a matter of ninety to more than one hundred degrees. For a while it is broadside to any little breeze out of the northeast. A real gale will set that lightened boat to rolling side to side, rivaling any ride in an amusement park. My patient that night (yes, three o’clock again) became hysterical, convinced the boat was going to capsize, not a totally unreasonable assumption. He refused to stay on board for a return trip down-lake. No one at the ore-loading facility was quite sure what to do with him, so they called me. I gave the man a sedative and a ride to the hospital in Grand Marais for what was left of the night.

The guy had a better night’s rest than I did.