The Lighthouse Road

He nodded and set about preparing her boarding card. He made change for her payment.

Thea, emboldened by the exchange, added, “I am new in America.”

Without looking up the ticket vendor said, “I’d never have guessed.”

She walked up Lake Street past Superior Street, dodging the mule-drawn streetcars, slipping on the rain-slicked cobbles. Farther up the hill, on the corner of Lake and First, she paid a quarter for a room in a boardinghouse, another dime for a hot bath. It was her first proper bath since leaving Hammerfest and as she soaked in the tub she was overcome with fatigue. So rather than going out for a hot meal, she finished her bath and dressed in her freshest clothes and, by the light of a window, read her Bible. She read it with a fervency she’d not felt in ages. Starting with First Corinthians. She read for a long time. Even as her eyes felt heavy and the softness of her rented bed called, she read.

When finally the evening fell and the light from the window waned, she laid herself down and slept, the good book clenched to her heart, for more than twelve hours. When she woke before dawn she felt a moment of panic before she realized where she was. She quickly gathered her belongings, washed her face, pulled her hair back, and donned her bonnet. By six a.m. she was back on Lake Avenue, headed for the docks.

The Opportunity was a two-masted schooner and her crew was drunk and quarrelsome even as the passengers boarded. The rigging and masts were plagued by a colony of gulls and the singing of the lines in the wind was a song that brought Thea back to the harbor in Hammerfest. It reminded her of why she was making this journey. She stood on deck, her bags between her feet, as the Opportunity was tugged through the canal and out onto the lake. The sails were raised and they filled and she felt the old pull of a boat borne by the wind.

The boat moved into a quartering breeze, its progress slow, the roll of the water sharp. The spray rose above the decking, met her waiting face. Four hours later the crew was already lowering the sails. The weather the wind had brought in turned cold and foggy, the conditions worsening the crew’s already sour mood. They weighed anchor and dropped a tender and announced Two Harbors. For an hour she stood on deck and watched as the tender made trips in and out of the fogged harbor. Ten travelers debarked, none boarded.

The rest of the day was slow moving. At sunset they anchored outside Otter Bay. All afternoon Thea had had the strange sensation of going back in time. Whether it was the way the boat moved under sail, the sharpness of the cold wind, or the prehistoric wilderness they were traveling past she could not have said.

At midnight they stood at anchor outside the settlement at Misquah. The boat’s captain told Thea and the three remaining passengers that they would have to wait until morning to sail to Gunflint, so Thea went belowdecks and found a bench to rest on, using her carpetbag as a pillow.

The ship heaved all night, even as the wind died and the rain began. Sleep was impossible, and not only because of the ship’s rolling. She felt, after this long month of travel and tribulation, the relief of being so near her destination. She felt the excitement that should have been accompanying her all along.

In the morning they woke to more heavy fog. The lake was now coming in slow undulations. The lines rang up on the masts, the gulls swarmed in the brume, and the crew was hungover and at odds over whether to weigh anchor or wait for the sun, which showed promise in the east, to come burn off the fog.

They waited for two hours, the fog more blown away than burned, and raised sails under a southwesterly breeze that brought as much warmth as it did smooth sailing. They traveled the last thirty miles of shoreline in little more than three hours. As they turned toward shore outside Gunflint Thea saw the town spread sparsely along the harbor: the fish houses, the hotel and apothecary, the church steeple up the hill. From the quarter mile offshore, with the exception of the trees, it looked just like Hammerfest, and as her heart raced it also sank. The boats rowing out to meet them looked exactly like her papa’s fishing skiff, the water was as hard and as cold as the North Sea. The wind, even as it brought a warmer day, had every quality of bitterness that the air back home had. Had she really traveled so far to end up where she’d started?

Rather than dropping anchor again, the crew reefed the sails and turned for harbor. It seemed a difficult maneuver, as the ship was large and the harbor entry narrow, but the crew was practiced and sidled her right alongside the Lighthouse Road. Two of the deckhands jumped ashore with lines and tied her off on the cleats.

On the Lighthouse Road several townsfolk had gathered. Thea, standing behind the mizzen shroud, her heart aflutter, looked from face to face for the welcoming smiles of her aunt and uncle. She panned the crowd twice, each time coming away empty. She sat on a crate on deck, disbelieving.

“Last stop,” one of the crew said. “Gunflint, Minnesota.”

Thea looked at him. He had a wind-worn face, his hair was a tousled mess, his coat was open and sagging on his large shoulders.

“Miss,” he said, as he stepped nearer, “all passengers must get off the boat now.”

Thea understood enough to grab her bags and land. As she rose, clutching her handbag and shouldering her carpetbag, she noticed the man with the camera box standing below her. He had the lens pointed at her and snapped a shot. It was Hosea Grimm, his Kodak at the ready as it was every time a boat landed in Gunflint.

Thea moved to the plank that had been laid down as a gangway. She crossed onto the Lighthouse Road and stood with the Opportunity in the background. Hosea Grimm took another picture, then flashed her a puckish smile.

It was not long after the crowd had dispersed, after the crew of the Opportunity had unloaded their cargo, after Hosea had collapsed his tripod and boxed his camera and arranged delivery of a pallet of dry goods for his apothecary, after the sun had come out full and all the morning’s mizzle had been burned away, it was not long after this that Thea sat on a bench on the Lighthouse Road with her bonnet crumpled in her fists. Her sobs were there for all the world to see and hear. Hosea approached her with his hat in his hands. He had been watching her from the corner of his eye as the crowd scattered, watching as the expression on her face shifted from expectant to nervous to despairing.

He knew all at once that he must help her. Simply help her. So he stood silently before her a long time, his feet surely in view of her downcast eyes. When finally she looked up, Hosea said, “Hello, miss. I trust, based on this attitude of despair, that your landing has not met your expectations.”

She looked back at her bonnet in reply.

“My name’s Grimm. I’m a merchant in town. I’d help. However I might.”

Now Thea met his eyes — an act that spoke as much to her situation as her tears, for she’d long been taught to avoid the gaze of men — and in a tremulous voice said all at once what a horror her journey had been. She talked a full minute before Hosea interrupted her.

“Beg your pardon, miss, but you’re speaking a language I don’t understand. Do you not speak English?”

She returned her blank stare to her bonnet.

“You’ve come from far away, I’d bet. From Norway, I presume. Judging by that gibberish you speak. Or Denmark. Or Sweden.” He was speaking as much to himself as to her, and he kept his chin in his hand as he studied the masts of the schooner tied to the Lighthouse Road. “Probably Norway if you’re staking a claim here.” Now he knelt before her, played his hat brim through his own hands. “Norge?” he said.

Thea looked up. She wiped her eyes dry with the backs of her hands, cleared her throat, and said, “I am new to America.”

Grimm smiled. “Welcome,” he said. Without asking for permission he lifted her carpetbag and said, “Come along with me.” With his spare hand he lifted his tripod and camera box and started up the Lighthouse Road. Thea followed because she knew no other option.

Outside the offices of the Gunflint Ax & Beacon Hosea stopped, set down all that he carried, and opened the door, holding it for Thea. There were four men sitting at desks, one of them was Selmer Gunnarson, who did the typesetting. He’d been in Gunflint for eight years, before there was a Lighthouse Road or brick building. He’d emigrated from Bergen eight years before that.

“Selmer,” Hosea said, “I need to borrow your old tongue, friend. This here young lady landed at noon, she speaks hardly a word of English.”

Selmer rose from his desk, wiped his huge hands on the apron he wore, and came to stand before Thea. He removed his spectacles and addressed her in Norwegian: “Hosea tells me you’ve just landed. Who were you expecting to meet?”

Feeling a surge of relief, Thea spoke rapidly, “I’ve come from Hammerfest, my uncle is Rune Evensen, I’ve