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This is the hub of a community of about 5,000 sailors in continual motion. From April through mid-December they shuttle back and forth across the Great Lakes, from tiny remote iron ore ports on the coast of western Lake Superior, to Lake Michigan or Lake Huron for cargoes of construction stone or gravel, to Lake Erie's historic industrial ports like Toledo and Cleveland or even, especially on the Canadian grain boats, out to the oceans via the St. Lawrence Seaway. Sooner or later they all pass by here and look for the little mail boat to dart out from the dockside.

It is a community that is slowly shrinking. "This is the rust belt, a forgotten part of the country," reflects Jim Hogan, sitting behind what had once been his great-grandfather's desk. "I guess its heyday was in the forties and fifties, when everything ran on steel. There are so many fewer ships now [about 60 in the U.S. laker fleet, with another 80 Canadian ships], although they have gotten a lot bigger."

I heard a similar lament one evening high above the water in the pilothouse of the Buckeye, a 698-footer (212-meter) laden with 23,500 tons (21,300 metric tons) of iron ore pellets headed for Toledo. "Every time you look round, they've cut more men from the crews," grumbled Capt. Edward "Bud" Tambor-ski, as he eased the huge vessel down the river to Lake Erie. "This industry," he concluded, referring to lake shipping, "is dying."

The captain's gloomy mood became more understandable when I found out that earlier, as I was climbing aboard from the Westcott, the freighter's steering mechanism had momentarily failed. The Buckeye, with me halfway up the ladder, had come within a few seconds of plowing into downtown Detroit when the helmsman regained control. Blissfully ignorant of the near disaster, I had wondered why Tamborski seemed a little distracted when we met. Now, in the fading glow of a pink sunset, we were slipping silently along at just under 12 miles (19 kilometers) an hour, past the dramatic metal towers of the steel plants, refineries, and power stations lining the shore of what still looks like the industrial heartland of America. In the darkened pilothouse, lit only by the glow from the instruments, the quiet conversation was of storms on Lake Superior—25-foot (8-meter) waves—and the trickiness of navigating up the river to the ore docks in Cleveland, "like a snake," and how, working two months on and one month off, laker crews don't have weekends like most people, and whether the items they ordered from that catalog will be in the mailbag the next time they pass that way.

No one sounded like they'd rather be living somewhere else.

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