Stuart Carlton 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes. A twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stewart Carlton. I work with Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant, and I know a lot about missing that which you used to have but you no longer have. And you think, maybe that's okay, that I don't have it, until you start to do the thing you used to have to do, and now you have to do it again. And you realize, no, I wish I had it, but I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes, and that's the point of this here show. Now this is our October episode, and normally in October, we like to schedule a Halloween episode we called the lake house of terror, but this October is a little bit different for a number of reasons. We just had our omnibus proposal due. There's a paper that is due on Monday that I have 1000 words in, and so I'm gonna have to ask for yet another extension, or just not do the paper, which is what I should on the first place. Which reminds me, I need to talk to Carolyn about that, um, and all sorts of stuff. And so, all right, there's Carolyn. Now, hey, Carolyn, Carolyn Foley research coordinator. And so the long and short of it is, like, I just didn't have time to get the episode together this year, like it just it didn't happen. And so, but, but we still have our good friends here who record the episode with us. So there's Carolyn, Carolyn Foley Research Coordinator with Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. How are you

Carolyn Foley 1:24
I am all right, I guess I'm sort of looking forward to, you know, not perishing in some weird way. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah.

Stuart Carlton 1:32
So here we'll bring out Geneva, and then we'll talk about that Geneva Langeland communication guru for Michigan Sea Grant. That's probably not your actual title, though. What is it?

Geneva Langeland 1:41
Oh, I'll accept it. Communications editor, sounds much less interesting.

Stuart Carlton 1:44
It does. Michigan.

Carolyn Foley 1:47
Brilliant communications mind anyway,

Stuart Carlton 1:51
Geneva's awesome Hall of Famer, immediate Hall of Famer. And we weren't even going to do this, and I happened to see Geneva at the we had a meeting that Geneva was at, and I saw I was like, Oh, we got to get together with Geneva. So you Geneva. So even though we're not doing Halloween special, um, we were super glad to have her over here. So that's good. And yeah, so the deal was, right, as Carolyn was saying was, um, you know, maybe we'll put some of these up in the feed or something, as a rerun or whatever, right? So we get together and we make like, this fake story, right? We pretend like a couple years ago we were at a campfire or whatever. And this year or last year, what was it? Last year, we were on a on a boat that's right, with a Mizzou, yes, on a boat by John, yes, yes, yes. That's right, yep, yeah, the Great Lakes bull sharks, which, again, may it's not clear. They don't exist, right? Great Lakes bull sharks. Many people say that they're, they're out there such

Carolyn Foley 2:44
as, so is that what we're going to talk about today? Great Lakes bull sharks?

Stuart Carlton 2:47
Well, we could, but no, I thought. I thought we just, sort of just, you know, I don't have a lot planned for today, right? I did, actually, I got a, I prepared a poem. Why didn't prepare a poem? I've written poetry since I was a teenager, and I wrote the same poetry that every teenager writes, and that poetry shall not be shared. But, no, no, but I got so. I was thinking about, you know, since we're not doing the whole deal and telling the stories or whatever, but I still like to be in the spooky season spirit and the Halloween spirit, because it is a fun time of year. And so I thought that'd be important. And so one of my favorite poets is from Portland Maine. That's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He's from Portland Maine. When he was born, it was actually in Massachusetts, I believe Portland, but since then, it's becoming in Maine. So he has a really great poem for Halloween, which I thought I would just go ahead and read, and we can sort of talk about the Halloween process, I think, and what we do, and then maybe hear, you know, what's going on over in Michigan. Maybe start to get ready for the lakeies, and then we'll look at an episode on it. But I'm not, I'm not too worried about it. So this is, um, yeah, this is called haunted houses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Portland Maine. All houses wherein men have lived and died are haunted houses. Through the open doors, the harmless phantoms on their errands glide with feet that make no sound upon the floors. We meet them at the doorway, on the stair, along the passages. They come and go. Impalpable impressions in the air, a sense of something moving to and fro. There are more guests at table than the hosts invited. The Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant inoffensive ghosts as silent as the pictures on the wall. The stranger at my fireside cannot see the forms I see nor hear the sounds I hear. He but perceives what is, while unto me, all that has been is visible and clear. We have no title deeds to house or lands owners and occupants of earlier dates from graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands and hold and Mort means still their old estates. The spirit world around this world of sense floats like an atmosphere and everywhere wafts through these earthly mists and vapor stents, a vital breath of more ethereal air. Our little lives are kept in equipoise by opposite attractions and desires, the struggle of the instinct that enjoys and the more noble instinct that aspires. These perturbations, this perpetual jar of earthly wants and aspirations high come from the influence of an unseen star, an undiscovered planet in our sky, and as the moon from some dark gate of cloud Throws over the sea a floating bridge of light, across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd into the realm of mystery and night, so from the world of spirits, there descends a bridge of light connecting it with this or whose unsteady floor that sways and bends wander our thoughts above the dark abyss anyway. So that one always gets me in like the spirit, you know, this idea of this ghost world that exists, right?

Carolyn Foley 5:53
Can I that yours is very thematic? Can I share, you know, one of my favorite Halloween Oh, yeah, get you in the mood. It's that song that you may have heard that goes

Unknown Speaker 6:07
spooky, scary.

Carolyn Foley 6:13
The Great Lakes disappeared.

Stuart Carlton 6:17
Oh, trees. I'm sorry. Hey, that's the fire alarm. Um, well, I guess, should we, I guess we got to go outside. Let's grab our mics, I guess. Yeah, cool, all right. Well, here, let's just walk out. Yeah, let's just, you know what? Let's just take a walk outside.

Unknown Speaker 6:55
What a tune. Well,

Stuart Carlton 6:59
it's a little darker than I thought it would be, huh? Well, who knows,

Unknown Speaker 7:03
I didn't realize. Yeah, I

Stuart Carlton 7:06
guess the time got away from us. Well, anyway, anyway, yeah, so Halloween episode, the lake house of terror. So I think, you know, again, a little bit underprepared this year, but that's how it goes. I bet you Illinois having the time off anyway, and a little bit less to work on.

Geneva Langeland 7:19
Yeah, it took the time to make my Halloween costume instead.

Stuart Carlton 7:22
Oh, nice. What do you owe? Nice this year, I'm taking a page

Geneva Langeland 7:24
out of Megan gasses book. My coworker who dresses up as the bag must. Yes, you're

Stuart Carlton 7:30
going as a huge pile of garbage. That's always one of the best things to go with this Halloween that's really great. Yeah, no, every arm, same thing. I'm a unicorn every year because we found this costume at Target, and it's perfect.

Carolyn Foley 7:42
So I'm going to be honest, like I thought we were still recording. So I am sorry about that. I spent a little bit of time trying to write up a story. So since we're waiting out here anyway, do you guys want to I don't know. Do you want to hear it?

Stuart Carlton 7:58
Yeah, sure. Yeah, that'd be great. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's

Carolyn Foley 8:04
okay. I mean it, you know, you'll see why I wanted to write about this particular topic. I have a bit of a love. So, all right, all right. It's called the Great Lakes have disappeared. So, oh,

Stuart Carlton 8:18
wait, hold on. Well, I mean, since we got it, we might as well, let's see. We might as well do the full thing if we're gonna have that title look I brought, I happen to bring my, my little sound effect thingy. Look, very

Carolyn Foley 8:29
important things to take out during

Stuart Carlton 8:33
fire. So, yeah, I brought the sound effect thingy. So let's, yeah, do that. Do the title again. Might as well do it, right, all right.

Carolyn Foley 8:39
So this is called the Great Lakes have disappeared.

All right, so one morning, okay, and this is a little bit more loosey goosey than I normally go. But one morning, just north of Chicago, there was a Sunday morning where a swimmer was getting ready, and she would go out swimming in Lake Michigan every single Sunday morning with all of her friends. So she got up, she got her suit on, she got her wetsuit, because it was a little bit chilly, she got her goggles, she got her swim cap. She biked down to the lake to see all her friends, and she was getting ready to jump in, and when she came up to the edge where normally she would just kind of do a flip into the water, there was nothing. She was like, What the What the heck is going on? And she looked around to see if any of her her colleagues were there, and they were starting to show up too. The other Sunday morning swimmers were starting to show up, and they all kind of spread out along the edge. And they were like, What the heck is going like? They could just see down to the bottom of Lake Michigan, and there was nothing. There nothing at all. And so that same Sunday morning up on the north coast of Lake City. Superior. There was an elderly gentleman was getting ready to go out fishing for one of the last times of the year, and he's in his little motorboat, and he's heading out in his little John boat with this little, you know, humongous motor on a very tiny boat, and he's getting ready to head out, and he's going down the river, and he gets to where he's supposed to be able to enter Lake Superior. And again, it's just like, it's just solid, like there's no water. There's nothing there at all. And the same thing happened in the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, way down by Watertown, New York. There were some people who were going for a run along the beach, and they normally were used to seeing all these things, and there was just no was just no water at all. And we're talking like nothing at all, like you could see the bottom. There were no boats, there were no fish, there was no garbage, there was nothing except for the sediments, no plants, nothing. Everyone was just extraordinarily confused and a little bit alarmed. Honestly. I mean, you know, you've got, like, the largest freshwater thing on in the entire world, and suddenly it's like, you know, not there. So that's problematic, potentially. So everybody starts calling up their favorite, favorite people who, because, you know, they listen to, like, teach me about the Great Lakes and things like that. And they start calling up the scientists, the specialists. So they call Ed, Virginia of limnotech, and they say, the ED, what's going on? Why? Why? Why is the water gone? Ed is like, why are you talking about Sunday morning? I'm fine. I'm fine with and, and Ed, who happens to be up in the up, because he lost the up, he stepped out. Same thing. He's like, What the heck is going on? And then somebody called Ashley Elgin from Noah glero. And same thing, like, Ashley, there's something crazy going on, Ashley. Ashley rolled out of bed. Actually, Ashley's probably an early riser. She got it. She was already out of bed. But then she went and she went in Muskegon, she went to the water and she said, My goodness, gracious. What is going on? And so they and many other scientists all across the Great Lakes Basin were getting calls, and we're stopping and thinking, what the heck's going on? So they start calling each other, and they stopped, and they thought, Okay, what do we have that we can use? Data, Data, we've got these things that transmit data. If we go take a look at them, we're pretty sure that we would be able to find out, like, you know exactly what happened. Maybe you know, like, Are we all in some weird simulation that something's going on or whatever? So they called the trusty boy wranglers at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant, and they said, Hey, and I the Great Lakes observing system, and at the NOAA Great Lakes environmental research system, and at all of the places, all the places. And they said, Wait, okay, can you guys check your date up? Please to see like, because the lakes disappeared, and we're trying to figure out, like, when did it happen? What the heck is going on? So people started looking at the graphs, and started looking at the graphs. And it did seem like there was kind of one point where all of a sudden the data just stopped reporting all over the entire Great Lakes. No more data being reported. And they started stretching out to, like some of the autonomous underwater vehicles and different things like that. No data anywhere at this particular time like this is all extraordinarily so several weeks later, as people are pouring through the data, still trying to figure out, Where the hell did our roots are, where the heck did our resources go? I There was somebody. It's an undergraduate student who was a summer intern who had stayed on at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. They had been helping with the boy, and they started looking deep into the data, and they started looking into the code. Because they said, you know, this is very, very, very strange, like, let's, let's double check. And they look specifically at the three Illinois Indiana Sea Grant buoys, the Michigan City buoy, the Wilmette buoy and the Chicago peer buoy, or chewy chewy, and they started to notice some really crazy in chewy. They started to notice like these, these weird patterns in the data that looked like, suddenly you're seeing like 1000 foot waves. But they seemed to be repeated, and they were very confused. And so they happened to be friends with someone who was a linguist. And so The Linguist student came in and started looking and said, those, those don't look random, those, those look like a pattern. And so they started analyzing them together. And they stayed up late at night because they couldn't understand what was going on. And they were looking at different things. And they said, these patterns, they are repeated. There's like 1000 foot wave and then a 60 foot wave, but what the heck's going on? And so they took it all. The way up, because, of course, you know, everybody's being monitored all the time. They started being monitored by different people, and they got taken up to the national governments. And the governments were saying, Yeah, you found something that we were hoping you wouldn't find. They overlaid, it turned out that the governments had known about this for a while. They overlaid the language over top of the anomalous data, and it demonstrated that chewy in particular, had just all of us like decided to turn its back on all of the people in the Great Lakes basin. It had been communicating for the past year and a half with aliens, and aliens came, and on that certain day, they grabbed all of the resources and took it with them into the universe. And the reason that chewy gave because he did want to he slash she, they did wind up leaving a thing. It was just like because you didn't care enough about the Great Lakes and the aliens cared.

Unknown Speaker 16:22
Music.

Carolyn Foley 16:34
Yeah, so I mean, there's always love for the buoys, right? So there's always and I also love this episode. So, so that's my oh

Stuart Carlton 16:44
gosh, Carol, that's great. Oh, it is a terrifying thought, too. Oh, I thank you for writing that. That was, yeah, the idea of, like, the buoys, like, Whose team are they on, really, right? And you notice it verbs like, too, kind of makes you wonder. Makes you wonder, it sure does anyway, jeez. Well, that's good. Um, yeah, wow. No,

Carolyn Foley 17:10
I heard something weird. You're probably just jacked up because I was doing such a great job. Yeah, no. Carol

Stuart Carlton 17:18
dark out in the wind and stuff. It does make you that's not the wind. It is dark out, like the wind and stuff kind of makes you, yeah, wonder what exactly is going on. You know, it is kind of eerie out. It is spooky season. Oh, gosh. Anyway, yeah, so no, I too would be scared. But, like, you know, I mean, what would happen? We're at campus. It's very safe place to be. Overall, Gary, yeah, especially,

Geneva Langeland 17:43
I'll try to, I'll put a I'll try to shake off the nerves. Glad to be here with you guys, and not out here alone, that'd be terrifying.

Carolyn Foley 17:51
Mm, hmm, agreed,

Geneva Langeland 17:53
agreed. Well, I'm glad you shared your story, Carolyn, because I was afraid to admit that I had also spent a little time of prep, so I didn't know if I was going to bring it up, but yeah, I do have one in my backpack, if you guys listen to it, yeah. I

Stuart Carlton 18:17
mean, what the heck yeah. Like I said,

Carolyn Foley 18:19
Yeah, we're still, and, you know, we we're still out here. So, yeah, yeah, we're

Stuart Carlton 18:23
stuck out, I assume, yeah. I mean, let's see we can head back for just a second.

Carolyn Foley 18:36
Great way to in time go for it. Geneva,

Geneva Langeland 18:39
all right, so back in the early 1800s there was a young cartographer who set out to map the shoreline of the Detroit River, where it winds its way from Lake St Clair in the north down to Lake Erie. And he started up in the northern end of the river, up by Belle Isle, and got in his canoe so he could start paddling along the river and mapping its curves. He did a lap in the canoe around Belle Isle itself, and sketched out the shoreline as he went. But as the cartographer rounded the last bend, he noticed something unexpected on the banks of Belle Isle. It was a dark opening, like a hole or a tunnel right by the waterline on the shore of the island. So he canoed a little bit closer, tried to peek at it, but it was so dark, you couldn't see if there's anything inside. He went a little bit closer, he couldn't hear anything coming out of it, just the lapping of the waves of the river. And he got a little closer, and a current swooshed him into the hole, and he disappeared from sight. He was surrounded by darkness. All he could hear was the sound of water sloshing. Him, and he could feel the wind on his face as he was pulled faster and faster through the darkness. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, but all of a sudden, he poof, popped back out into the sunlight, winking. He he looked around and tried to figure out where he was, because it surely wasn't the Detroit River, and he wasn't looking at Belle Isle, he he looked out instead at an endless expanse of water reaching all the way to the horizon. And he turned around in his canoe, and behind him there was a craggy, rocky cliff leading up to some weather beaten gnarled trees up on on the top of some rocks and and no sign of the tunnel entrance that he must have just popped out of. He was utterly bewildered, and paddled his way over to a lower spot on the shoreline so he could clamber out of his canoe and get on land in this unfamiliar, Rocky, tree filled territory. He peered over the trees and saw a trail of campfire smoke rising into the air. So he decided to trek inland and try to figure out where that came from. And lo and behold. Lo and behold, he found a group of fur trappers who were who were working in the area, and they said, I don't know what you mean. We are up in the northern reaches of you know what would be called Michigan. We're up by the Great Lakes that they call Gitche, Gumi Lake, superior. And the cartographer was utterly stunned. How had he gotten from Belle Isle all the way in the south to the Upper Peninsula, what we would know is the Upper Peninsula now, but he didn't really see a way to get back home. He didn't know how to get there or what route to take. So he just accepted his fate and started a new life and joined the fur trapping group as they moved around the area, and spent the rest of his life mapping out this, this new Northern Territory. But he could not have known that a couple 100 years later, the people of Michigan would see that connection between Belle Isle and the south and that point all the way up in those wooded territories of the north, and they would create something called the iron Bell trail, a connection of walking and hiking and biking paths that stretches all the way from Belle Isle, snaking across the state, up to Ironwood, the far western point of what's now known as the Upper Peninsula. And that trail, if only it had existed when the young cartographer got lost, he might have been able to find his way home. You

Unknown Speaker 23:11
that's amazing.

Carolyn Foley 23:14
I mean, I'm glad you wrote the story to be like, Okay, I'm just gonna roll with it, because I would probably just be like,

Geneva Langeland 23:24
sometimes the take the lake, superior size lemons life throws at

Stuart Carlton 23:30
you, yeah? But you also tied in. One thing that you do nicely is tie in, like, you know, I tend to just make, like, far chokes or what. And so I really like how you sort of built in that thing. So that trails real, right? And so, yeah, Oh, interesting. Hey, we're near the school. Have you seen this park on campus before? Carolyn? It's kind of wooded.

Carolyn Foley 23:47
I haven't actually. I you know, campus has changed so much in the past, like 20 years. This one is, seems, seems like a new one to me. Yeah?

Stuart Carlton 23:57
Well, pretty thick, yeah. I

Unknown Speaker 24:00
can't really see this guy anymore.

Stuart Carlton 24:02
Let's just go see what's up here. Let me I happen to have a torch. Let me just like the torch here. You

Unknown Speaker 24:10
got a torch

Speaker 1 24:11
to British. Are you the reason that the fire alarm

Stuart Carlton 24:18
went off? Not? Not the reason. Let me just hold on. There we go.

Unknown Speaker 24:26
Ah, that kind of torch kind of

Carolyn Foley 24:28
warming up a bit too.

Stuart Carlton 24:30
Yeah. Well, it's a fairly substantial torch, alarmingly similar to the campfire sound effect. Anyway, um, yeah. Well, let's just go see what's back there. But yeah. So what I really like about what you do the way you tie in, like someone who actually Katie and Titus. We also do this other show, ask Dr fish. I don't have seen this. And what always impresses me about that is I see half of my job, and that show is to derail it with stupid asides and whatever, or just lean in for like, the comedy valve. Your thing, or whatever. And what's so great about Titus and Katie is that they're able to do that, but they do it in a way, and, like, they almost always just kind of bring it back, you know, to the educational point. And so I like that too. Well, it sure is dark here. But anyways, that's really great. Yeah. So then, in terms of Halloween, what we do, what I like about this? It reminds me of what is this doesn't make any sense. No, this doesn't make any sense because we're on land and like so there may be bull sharks, but why? Why would there be land sharks? But anyway, what we're trying to do with the podcast here, you know, especially the Halloween episode, is, is trying to do, are you sure

Geneva Langeland 25:39
there aren't any land sharks, because that sounds an awful lot like what we experienced last time.

Stuart Carlton 25:45
It does. It does well, I'm sure that there are land sharks, as Carolyn is sure that there are sharks and like, oh

Unknown Speaker 25:50
my god, you

Unknown Speaker 26:05
all right goes over quite Some time.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
We have met our fate yet again. I.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai