Travel writers are perpetually rediscovering the five Great Lakes of North America. With each new tourist season they remind us that the lakes are the largest body of fresh water in the world, that technically they are not lakes but inland seas, and that skeptical merchant sailors from abroad quickly acknowledge the lakes’ waves, winds, and currents to be as treacherous as any salt water. They also tell us the lakes can be astonishingly beautiful and restorative.
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The sole exception is the S.S. (that means “Steamship”) Badger, making two daily sailings in summer and one a day in winter between the Wisconsin port of Kewaunee and the venerable west Michigan port of Ludington. You can board any sailing, even occupy a private stateroom with berth and bath, if you like. Your car can go along, too. If you’re in the business of shipping freight, you can book passage for your semitrailer trucks or your boxcars. The Badger carries anything and everything, just as its predecessors have been doing since 1892, when the Ann Arbor Railroad commissioned a fleet of steam-powered ships to carry loaded railroad cars from its dock at Frankfort, Michigan, to several railheads on the Wisconsin shore.
Like the railroads that owned them, the ferries took a bashing from the construction of the Interstate highway system in the 1960s. Trucks ran from interior Michigan through Chicago and up into Wisconsin in less than a day. Tourist traffic began sliding too. In pre-Interstate days, Chicagoans bound for Traverse City or Mackinac routinely drove the 85 miles to Milwaukee, put the car aboard a ferry, and spent a refreshing five hours cruising to Muskegon or Ludington before resuming the punishing car trip north. But I-94 brought Muskegon within four comfortable driving hours of Chicago and Ludington within five, making the car-boat-car option a net loss in hours.
Minard sees another form of encouragement looming on the horizon–fresh traffic. “In the past three years the rail-car loadings have run about 3,800 cars a year,” he says. “Our main problem now is to supplement those railroad cars with trucks.” Minard claims he’s got a marketing strategy that should start attracting truckers soon and market data that document the existence of potential traffic.
The important thing was that the Badger was still providing transportation. We were actually going somewhere aboard a ship (oops–“boat”). When we made fast at Ludington four hours later we had done something mere party boats don’t do. Instead of returning to the same port, we had reached the other side of Lake Michigan. As the British say, “We had a good crossing.”
