Father Baraga

You've got to go a long ways to find a sandy beach along Minnesota's north shore. On almost any beach, the hard and humpy stuff roiling beneath your feet looks and feels a whole lot like lava--which it is, surprising as that may be with not a mountain in sight. Hardened lava, basalt, is unforgiving and almost impossible to walk on--if you're into your 70s anyway. It's pretty much unforgiving. 

"There's a cross just up the beach a ways," some friends of our told us. We'd rented a cabin on the north shore, a little ramshakle thing built in the 1930, but it stood right on the beach, a rocky beach, the one in the picture. 

"A cross?" I said.

They'd hiked up there earlier in the week. "Some priest who came to minister to the Native people," they said. They'd forgotten his name (they're our age). 

I know enough about missionaries and medicine to conjure a story out of some stone cross up the beach somewhere, in all that basalt, even if I'd never heard this story. Father Jean deSmet, a Belgian Jesuit, had blessed Lakota people with whatever medical help he could during a terrible reign of cholera and become much beloved. Andrew and Effa Vander Wagen, native Hollanders, gained blessed acceptance among the Zuni they came to serve when, in 1898, the meager medical provisions they had brought with them created inestimable good will. Besides, Effa was a nurse. Narcissa and Marcus Whitman had tried valiantly--and tragically--to help people deal with a plague of mumps that killed far too many Cayusas in Washington.

The mix of medicine and missions invested in a granite cross just up the rocky beach--a Catholic priest, a suffering people--was more than enough to get me up early to have a look.

Father Frederic Baraga (and, yes, there's a commemorative statue in Grand Rapids, Michigan) was coming over to the north shore of Lake Superior because he'd heard the Chippewa people (Ojibwe) were suffering--thus, at least, the story goes. He and his friend Lewis, a Native, took a birch-bark canoe forty miles across Lake Superior, a trek that would have been 200 miles by land, to get to the north shore. It may be difficult to extract history from myth, but it's not hard to imagine the two of them in a canoe, waves rising, finally coming to shore on a trip during which Father Baraga spent, literally, praying without ceasing.

And so the story goes that Lewis, who did most of the paddling, looked over at the land warily--nothing but basalt, nothing but stony shoreline capable of crunching the canoe. Father Baraga, with the confidence of Jesus himself, assured Lewis they'd be all right and directed him to carry on to sidle up to the shoreline. 

Divine intervention?  Judge that as you will, but by luck or Design they'd rowed up to shore at the inlet of a small, calm river where the landing was somehow manageable. Today, "Cross River" is so named for the wooden cross the two of them erected to signify the blessed answer to prayer. 

All of that happened in 1847. The birch logs they used for the wilderness cross they erected back then was long ago replaced by granite, still there, just up the beach from the cabin where I'd slept the night before. 

And, yes, someone placed a bouquet of fall mums at the base of that cross--purple as the robes of royalty, as if to remember--or not to forget. I am thrilled to report that two bouquets graced that cross that Saturday morning. 

Father Frederic Baraga, "the Snowshoe Priest" fluent in six languages, came to America from Slovenia in 1830, and once crossed Lake Superior on a very treacherous forty-mile passage in a birch bark canoe to a surprisingly easy landing on shore of a land that would become Minnesota ten years later. He came to help a suffering people.  

The story was too good not to tell, but the mums were, for me at least, a special blessing.