The announcement last week that Northland College of Ashland Wisconsin, my alma mater, would close at the end of this academic year, carried my mind back 50 years.
I graduated in 1975. I met my wife while hitchhiking in June of 1976. Then March 2, 1977, mover Lyle Rhine drove a house on to the ice of Lake Superior at Port Superior near Bayfield. Those were important events in my life.
They wouldn't have happened if my cousin Chris Choyke decided to go to the liberal arts college and prompted my interest. Northland announced it was going to start an environmental studies program. I had just read The Wolves of Isle Royale by David Mech. It was a year after the first Earth Day. I went North.
When I was done, after a stint interviewing river users on the Brule River for Tom Heberlein at the University of Wisconsin, i went to work for the Washburn newspaper.
The late Don Albrecht, who was my editor at the Washburn-Bayfield Times, had heard that Rhine was going to load the house onto a trailer and carry it on a road that had been plowed to Madeline Island, one of the Apostle Islands. Wednesday was the day we put the paper together and printed it. Don thought the house story would be interesting and he assigned me to check it out.
Rhine of the Minnesota-based company Dale Movers told me he planned to move four houses that had been sold to a buyer on the island and the one on his truck was the first. Bayfield has its own ice road across the lake to the island so it wasn’t out of the question whether he could travel safely on the ice. The winter had been unusually cold up to that point.
But a whole House?
"I wouldn't try it if I didn't think I could make it,” Rhine told me.
I wasn’t the only reporter watching the house begin its crossing. The late Charles “Chick” Sheridan, 72, was a long-time free lancer with whom I often covered stories. He was there with his own personal driver, the late Elmer Dagsgard.
We watched together as the truck, trailer and house headed across the lake. We headed in separate cars to the regular road in Bayfield across the ice to Madeline. They stopped to have lunch and a few drinks at the Beach Club on the island in LaPointe.
I drove my Volkswagen on the newly plowed ice road about a mile out, waiting for the truck with my friend Dave Kretschmar. As it came toward us, suddenly it tilted to the driver’s side. We drove right up to the scene as Rhine and local lake expert Harvey Nourse jumped out of the cab.
When we got there, Rhine was warming his hands. As I clicked my first pick he said: Rocky, now you have your story.”
Here’s the rest of the story.