![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
The first time I visited Marquette, I saw mostly Yooper Land.
I chuckled at a 10-foot mosquito, giant chainsaw and packages of Roadkill Helper. I noted the best-sellers in the bookstore window: "A Look at Life From a Deer Stand'' and "Leap of Faith 2: God Loves Packer Fans.''
This is the Marquette that's sports-crazy, hunting-happy and tough as nails, with a population descended from Cornish, Finnish and Italian immigrants who could put up with the rigors of iron mines and, later, their closings.
When Lake Superior lighthouses had keepers, there was nothing romantic about life there.
The posts were cold, lonely and meagerly furnished on the government dime. The work was physically taxing and repetitive. Through the long nights, keepers had to get up every two hours to wind the mechanism that rotated the lens.
It's no wonder many of the early lighthouse keepers were hermits or grouches.
Along Michigan's Pictured Rocks, there's no such thing as a bad view.
White sandstone cliffs line nearly 40 miles of national lakeshore, the nation's first when it was created in 1966. Named for the colorful swishes and whorls painted by mineral-laden water oozing through cracks, Pictured Rocks draws tourists from around the world.
This part of Michigan is inconveniently distant for tourists from big cities; Detroit is closer to Charleston, W.V., than Munising. But it may be just distant enough. Munising, 45 minutes east of Marquette, is an unremarkable town, but it sits in a remarkable setting that would be mobbed if it were any closer.
In Sault Ste. Marie, tourists find out what floats their boats.
For most, it’s watching serious machinery moving through the Soo Locks. What really floats a boat, however, is 22 million gallons of water, which is what it takes to lift a boat through the Poe Lock, a liquid escalator between Lake Superior and Lake Huron.
It’s a June evening at the Soo Locks, and the Earl W. Oglebay is coming from Silver Bay with a load of taconite. A camera aimed toward Lake Superior catches the 630-foot boat in the distance and projects it onto a TV monitor in the Visitors Center, where boat-watchers have started to gather.
