Jim Richardson (aka Lake Superior Aquaman)
Co-op Insider Tells All
Think you know what’s going on inside Duluth’s Whole Foods Co-op right now? You don’t.
But I’m going to tell you, from my subjective vantage point as a 28-year employee. I am also a member of our union, the UFCW 1189. I am not speaking for the Co-op or the union. Telling you this stuff is a tricky balancing act because I have to not get in trouble with my employer or my union; I need both of them. So, I can’t do a document dump of work product, and I can’t use names or say anything stupid; that might create a hostile work environment or whatever, if anyone I work with reads this. But I do want to be blunt, as in, direct. I recognize that anybody taking exception to what I write here on my own time could still go to HR if it made working with me weird. So this is just me explaining it all conversationally like I would explain it anywhere in a neutral tone. If I were then to get in trubs anyway, I would need the union in my corner — but, if my fellow organized workers get pissed at me for writing this, then the union might lift my veil of protection — the union president himself warned me of such things. But I think I know where the line is, and I have to thread the needle. This is an extraordinary moment in Minnesota co-op history. Member-owners of the Co-op and the general community legitimately want to know WTH is going on, and I am well-positioned to spill the bulk organic tea, haha. (more…)
Dog Water Rescue Emergency
Video from the Oct. 2 rescue in the Duluth Ship Canal after a dog jumped onto and over the pier wall into the water. The United States Coast Guard, Duluth Fire Department, St. Louis County Sheriff’s rescue boat and Duluth Fire Boat Marine 19 all responded.
Meanwhile, the bulk carrier Algoma Niagara waited to depart through the canal. (more…)
Lake Superior’s Nazi U-boat Wreck
Notes of UMD Professor Joseph Marrow on discovering and exploring the World War II wreck of the U-61 in the waters off Duluth, 1975:
“The shifting silts of the lake floor parted, revealing the submarine, rising from its secret history on a wave of sand 200 feet beneath the surface. Our sonar scans detected it and we dove it a week later. By the wreck of a small fishing boat, it was the U-61, the old Nazi training sub repurposed late in the war for a desperate suicide terror mission. Long regarded as a Great Lakes myth, the 150-foot-long wreck lay deep in America all along, deep enough to require technical diving skills to access it. The conning tower hatch was open and my team and I swam inside, passing our tanks ahead of ourselves to fit through. Our lights revealed human remains stirred by our arrival. A severed limb in a white jacket sleeve greeted us, the Captain’s arm had thrown its last salute. Corpses floated around dressed in German seaman’s garb — oiled leather trousers, worn pullover sweaters — suspended like bad dreams. I read their faces: shock, anguish, resignation. (more…)
Duluth’s Little Libraries
Missing: Our Little Billy
Duluth’s little library boxes hold dangerous books. Our little Billy, age 10, noticed this the first time he peeked into the lil library, painted with starscapes, in the middle of our Central Hillside block. He opened the lil door to get a closer look at the books, which he assumed would be about stargazing and astronomy. Instead he found cosmic horror in the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft, including illustrated editions and graphic novels, with supplemental books of criticism and analysis, even a film section. The little library contained a cosmos.
After he consumed his fill he noticed the lil library on the next block. It was a plain pine box stocked with vintage pornographic woodcuts, volumes of them including Hokusai prints worth a fortune depicting copulation with sea creatures. We complained and the library box was removed leaving an empty post.
But the lil library scene in the walkable neighborhood was “lit” as our little Billy put it. He found one constructed with movable panels and shelves that changed the library design according to whim. It held the inscrutable works of the revolutionary Guy Debord and his apologists, with the subversive roman-à-clef novellas of Michèle Bernstein, and rare books by the architect Constant, lavishly illustrated with plans for post-capitalist sky-cities of perfect freedom. Even some books devoted to armed rebellion: The Anarchist Cookbook and its descendants, including the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang which is actually a manifesto with practical recipes for good trouble. They were way above our little Billy’s reading ability but he stepped up, processing the bizarre information. By the end of the summer, our little Billy was reading at a college level. (more…)
Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad Destroy a Duluth Hotel Suite
Introduction
Historic hotels worldwide falsely claim the globe-spanning author Joseph Conrad was a former guest. However, it should come as no surprise that, while struggling with the untitled manuscript that would become Heart of Darkness, Conrad stayed the winter of 1898-1899 in a top-floor suite of Duluth’s Spalding Hotel. It was a suite he destroyed with Mark Twain after the two writers met in the gilt-muraled hotel bar and things got out of hand. The incident might have been forgotten but for the young Duluth Herald reporter on the scene who wrote an article about it.
Conrad, 41, the Polish exile living in England, was stranded in Duluth because he’d missed the departure of his cruise ship. He’d dashed into town to get a tooth pulled and it simply took too long. He was going to catch the next steamer out, but the freighter Marchande wrecked at the mouth of the canal. Then winter arrived and shut down the shipping season anyway — and he was only interested in traveling by ship. So although he missed his wife of two years back in England, he decided to winter in the Spalding, dreaming up ideas for his manuscript, and hopefully, a title. (more…)
Lake Superior: Biggest Skate Rink in the World
One last skate.
Duluth in the Olympics
Big news from a few days back, posted now because it must be acknowledged here.
MPR News: “Duluth curling team claims silver medal at Winter Olympics” (more…)
Skating the big lake
I saw ice houses out there so I got my skates.
The Last Duckbilled Dinosaur in Duluth
Final entry in the field journal of UMD paleontologist Franklin Hall Moore, Sept. 1, 1984
The last duckbilled dinosaur in Duluth, down and out on the sand beach in the tropical climate of the late Cretaceous, feels drunk from the fermented newly-evolved berries of a now-extinct genus. Minnesota is closer to the equator, the constellations strange. He chases the scent of increasingly rare juicy ferns along the beach toward prehistoric Wisconsin.
The duckbill whips his tail against the harassing blue-feathered velociraptors trying to run him down like a pack of dogs. He’s ten feet tall at the hip but they see he’s got a small limp from a wound that won’t heal on his right foreleg. They also see the sore tumor on his tiger-striped orange back. So they’d separated him from his herd — over the hill in what will evolve into the mallscape of Hermantown — and chased him to this strip of sand, the border between a retreating lagoon and the forested rift valley that will become Lake Superior. (more…)
Become the Dark
It took me 25 years to acclimatize to Duluth, and the big hurdle was these long winter nights. Here’s how I did it.
One day I thought, as long as I’m hopelessly depressed and dysfunctional, maybe I should dig a crawlspace under my all-time low and sort of, you know, make it cozy in there?
Step one: Uncouple your mood from the weather, to the greatest extent possible.
This took me two decades to get the hang of, but it can be done. Duluth is going to give you some ass weather. Conversely, when Duluth is nice, it’s God’s country. But if you let Duluth’s ass weather get to you, you’re effed. It’s a bad place to be sensitive to gray days and one of the coldest, longest winters anywhere in the country, the world even. Duluth in February — when winter is more than half over! — may be compared to the ice moons of Jupiter. And then you might get a chilly summer. So, welcome to town, buckle up, get ahold of yourself, and appreciate the city for what it is besides the weather.
We’re so far north, the path of the sun weaves dramatically across the sky as the seasons progress. You can feel the wobble of the globe. Don’t let it dizzy you or give you motion sickness as the sun stays out a different number of minutes per day. We can have extreme and long winters, and short summers of varying quality. It’s not personal.
Dirty Knobs – “Squid Crow Pro”
Dirty Knobs, a music project of Duluth’s Zac Bentz, part of The Electric Witch and The Surfactants, released the new album Scorcher on Halloween. On Youtube the tracks come with psychedelic visualizers as above for “Squid Crow Pro,” a track I have on repeat. I would loosely characterize the album as a collection of ambient electronica soundscapes, textured and chewy. These tracks are going to get me through winter.
The True Story of the 1963 Duluth Third Place Little League World Series Champions
The 1963 Little League World Series was played Aug. 24 in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, at the Howard J. Lamade Stadium to 10,000 spectators. The series has since been given a cover story by the deep state, including the first-ever little league television footage, which was faked to keep America calm. The true story of the Duluth All-Stars is so explosive that it could not be told until now, more than half a century later.
A Midwest ring of Soviet spies developed a signaling mechanism invisible to the CIA, or so they thought. Eschewing radio and microfilm dead drops as vulnerable to interception, the Russians infiltrated the global little league ecosystem, and used manipulated game statistics to convey coded messages to agents in the field. One or two closet communist coaches in prime positions, a handful of greedy assistant coaches tactically placed, and a blackmailed umpire were enough to communicate covert instructions to sleeper assassins from Missouri to Manitoba, printed in every regional paper in the local sports stats. (more…)
Duluth tourism concept art
I made these dank memes. (more…)
Adrift in the Duluth Triangle
[Author’s note: This originally ran in the 2024 Boubville zine. My title does not refer to the “Bar-muda Triangle” promotions of the West Duluth bar scene. This story was intended to be the start of a novella, a roman-à-clef about a barfly surviving depression. Each chapter was going to take place in a different establishment and be based on actual events, a “hero’s journey” bar crawl through the underworld one night. But after writing this first chapter, it seemed complete in itself as a short story, so I am calling it done. Borges wrote, “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in 500 pages an idea that can be perfectly related in five minutes.” That said, this story of life before Covid could be a prequel to this essay about when Covid hit.]
2019. From Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake, to Vikre Distillery, to the Pizza Lucé bar, then back to Sir Ben’s: This is the Duluth Triangle. Stranded in its vortex for five years, between myself and my hillside home lies a gauntlet of the finest distilleries, tap rooms, and bars in the world. It is a puzzle solved differently every night. Like the doctor in Nightwood said to Djuna Barnes: “The night is not premeditated.” (more…)
Lakewalk Panoramas
In which I appear in panoramic shots by Allen Richardson. (more…)
Overheard
Q: What is Duluth like in winter?
A: Have you seen The Shining?
The Aerial Lift Bridge as impossible cube
Not too long ago I looked at the Aerial Lift Bridge, and for a moment my mind mis-read it as having the wrong angles of an Escher-like “impossible cube,” pictured here. The optical illusion has stuck with me and now I have to force myself not to see it. It is beyond me at the moment to produce my mental image as a drawing or doctored photo, but I wanted to get the idea out there in case the vision inspires anybody. Post images as comments if you’re feeling it, otherwise I am content to just keep privately seeing an impossible lift bridge.
Sir Duluth Historical Timeline
Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Luht, was an influential French explorer whose name anglicizes to Sir Duluth. He signed his letters “Dulhut,” participating in his own casual anglicization despite the constant conflict his nation had with England. I call him Duluth, synonymous with our present-day, American city, whose name he inspired.
1639: Duluth is born in Saint-Germain-Laval, France.
1650: Duluth is 11 when the first modern philosopher René Descartes dies age 53 in Stockholm, Sweden. A letter from the young Duluth lies on the bedside table, offering a common-sense critique of Descartes’ notion that animals are automatons who may be vivisected. “I guess you’ve never owned a pet,” the boy’s careful handwriting says. The letter continues, “‘I think therefore I am’ is meaningless since grounds for doubting existence do not exist. You torture language like you torture dogs.” It has been suggested that Descartes was so distressed to have his life’s work effortlessly eviscerated by a child that he quickly succumbed to pneumonia and died.
Lakewalk Photobomb
(Photo by Allen Richardson)
Weird clouds on July 11
Images taken over the span of a few minutes as dark rollers split off the main cloud bank like sideways funnel clouds, conflicting air masses in turbulence. (This kind of thing scared the heck out of me when I first moved here.) (more…)
Dollhouse City Lift Bridge
Photos of the Richardson brothers Dollhouse City taken by their mommy Nell Richardson, except the last image by the Richardson brothers. Dollhouse City is a Duluth-based psychogeographical freakout representing the city and oh yeah the universe in fractal miniature. It is our joint toy collection plus the toys of my adult daughter which I never discarded, including most of the dollhouses. This three-sided collection was displayed locally at many of Sarah Heimer’s Dioramarama shows. (more…)
On Board a Great Lakes Fireboat
Local YouTuber Vibe with Mike took a ride on the Duluth Fire Department’s fireboat.