When I was first getting into learning more about the shipping industry, I wanted to immerse myself in what otherwise felt like a world away from my everyday experience. I then heard about the William A. Irvin Museum that has turned a decommissioned bulk freighter into a gigantic floating museum.
Visit One
The Haunted Ship Debacle
The problem was that I first visited in October, a season that historically was so low in visits that the owners of the museum thought to pair with the drama department at the University of Minnesota Duluth to transform the Irvin into the now infamous Duluth Haunted Ship. Despite this, I thought that I could still get a good experience of what it was like inside a bulk freighter. My thought was that if I didn’t go now, I’d have to wait the duration of winter until the museum opened back up. With the help of my girlfriend, we braved the long line that was frequently terrorized by menacing figures wielding tasers, knives, and the like. When we finally stepped inside the dark confines of the Irvin, everything seemed to happen all in one dizzying blur.
What I can say is this: in my life, I’ve been to a number of haunted houses, but the Duluth Haunted Ship is by far the scariest due entirely to the disturbingly good efforts of the talent and crew at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was through their nightmarish environs that my priorities shifted from sightseeing to survival.
Visit Two
The Engine Room
I had to wait until spring for the museum to reopen, when the ice had thawed and my nerves were no longer wracked. Boarding the Irvin the second time around, we came into the engine room but might as well have stepping inside a computer with its advanced circuitboard of interconnected yet entangled mass of lines, levers, and switches. The tour guide only went on to extend the metaphor as he spoke at length about how the engine room had been prone to overheating, often baking the room at a sweltering 120 degrees.
The Aftcabins
Arguably my favorite thing about touring the Irvin was that visitors had the option to take the tour at their own pace. I know that when my girlfriend and I came across the cabins of the unlicensed, “non-officer” members of the crew, we very much wanted to take in what had appeared to be a rather spartan existence resembling an uninhabited college dorm awash in the retro mint green of a 1950s kitchen. Though it appeared as frigid as the interior of a walk-in freezer, we later learned that due to its novelty of including private bathrooms, many sailors would have considered themselves lucky at the time.
The Main Deck
Eventually, the tour brought us outside onto the main deck, where row upon row of covered cargo holds extended out before us like yard lines on a football field. After a brisk walk to midship, I spoke with a young man who knew not only the Irvin’s extensive history, but that of much of the regions. Had I been traveling alone, I would have surely have talked his ear off.
An aside about a recurring thought: it might just be that most of my furniture has always been the cheap, self-assembled sort, but one of the things that I kept remarking upon was just how solid everything felt; every footfall or knock on the wall was met by rigid steel. Is this what people mean when they refer to something as being “industrial strength?”
The Forecabins
All this to say: that comfort had not been felt until entering into the fore (front) cabins. Right away, it felt as though being transported to another world, one that seemed reminiscent of James Cameron’s Titanic. Indeed, we had gone from a third class ticket to the walnut-paneled, carpeted first. In speaking with a tour guide, she informed us that the Irvin had been built with the explicit intention of being the flagship of the fleet, meaning that it was always meant to impress, whether that was the occasional voyage of the company’s president or one of his many well-connected guests. I know that I was certainly impressed.
The Pilothouse
The highlight of the tour—before you are led into the gift shop and made to amble around and paw through the vast assortment of lakeboat-themed memorabilia—is the pilothouse, where all things navigation occur. At first, it all seemed very casual; there was an older tour guide stationed off to the side who, admittedly, I paid little attention to as I was too busy checking out all the shiny brass apparatuses. It was while I was peering into the vessel’s gyroscope that the tour guide finally broke his silence, where I would soon learn that he had spent much of his life sailing vessels very much like the Irvin. Happy to hear more, the tour guide seemed to indulge my questions ranging from technical to the merely curious, such as the vague question of what it was like to be sailing “out there” during a storm. It was scary at times, the old sailor said, going on to explain that the pilothouse, high as it was, often would tick like a metronome whenever the seas turned rough.
One thing you quickly learn when diving into this world is that there’s a lot of interest from everyday people who simply want to know more about something that seems entirely foreign to their own lives. Perhaps nothing has fostered this curiosity more than the mystery behind the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, taking its entire crew into the frozen depths of Lake Superior. It was no surprise then when another person in our loosely-formed group asked the inevitable: where were you when the Fitzgerald went under?
Conclusion
I left that day entirely elated, walking back to my car with a little replica Irvin that my girlfriend had purchased for me. But, as I sit here writing, what really still resides with me is what the tour guide said in reply to the visitor’s question of where he had been when he had heard about the Fitzgerald. He seemed to look inward when he explained that it had been an otherwise ordinary night, that he had been watching Monday Night Football at the time. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” the old sailor said with a withdrawn tone. “Nobody could.”
