The Treachery of the Sea

Above: Kelleys Island

Ms. Mac commented on the Lake House post about how much she liked Lake Erie--she visited friends in Ohio recently, and they took her fishing. Yes, Lake Erie is beautiful, now that raw industrial waste is no longer being dumped straight into it, and now that it no longer catches on fire. But I had an experience on Lake Erie a few years ago that will forever brand it on my memory as The Lake of Treachery.

Just north of Cleveland and Sandusky is a series of islands--Pelee, Middle Bass, Put-In-Bay, Kelleys Island. Kelleys Island has a state park camp ground on its north shore, not far from the glacial grooves that you can walk around--when the glaciers carved out the Great Lakes 18,000 years ago, they left grooves carved in rocks.

So, a few years ago we took our Big-Ass Motorhome, as we called it, up to Sandusky and took the ferry to the island. We found a beautiful spot in the camp ground and settled in for a few days of relaxation and roaming. On our last night there, in the middle of the night, a wicked storm came down from Canada which is just a few miles north, and battered the north shore with howling winds, pounding waves, and driving rain. In the morning, I got up to check out the damage, but our BA Motorhome was intact, and I was able to make a nice pot of coffee and cook eggs and bacon for breakfast while watching the poor tent campers through my mini-blind covered windows. They were soaked to their very core--tents, sleeping bags, the weekend's supply of food. But hey, it was the end of the weekend, and we were all packing up anyway. Too bad for them, I thought.

We packed up our gear and headed to the ferry dock on the south side of the island, unsure if the ferries would even be running in that weather. They were running, and it seemed the island had protected the south shore from the storm--the water looked almost calm. So we boarded, and the ferry operators directed us to park the BA Motorhome right next to the captain station/house/whatever it was called. And we began what should have been a 20-minute ride back to Sandusky.

A few minutes away from shore, and I learned something--there is sometimes a barrier of calm waters around an island, but venture away from that protection, and the sea will swallow you whole. The waves were at times nine feet high, and they rocked the ferry in all directions, lapping over the cars parked in the front of the boat and causing every passenger to hold on for fear of drowning. There was an occasional woman's scream as another wave would leap up from below the depths to snatch us all with Poseidon's fury. Our BA Motorhome, which tended to rock side to side anyway, would sway in exaggerated degrees left to right and would sometimes slam into this captain's station/house thing, causing more screaming, not to mention tumbling dishes. After two or three startling encounters with the captain station thing, one of the deck hands ran over, removed the chucks from under our tires, and told my husband to start the engine. "Trust me," he shouts. He needed to move the BA Motorhome slightly away from the captain's station thing so we all didn't go down with the ship.

I could go on with the vision of sinking to the bottom of Lake Erie, trapped with my family inside a motorhome, unable to escape, glub, glub, glub, as I watch the demise of my children helplessly from the front seat, but I'll stop here by saying I was never more frightened in my life. We finally reached the shore after 45 minutes of absolute terror, and we have not been back to Kelleys Island since.

It's a shame, because it's lovely.