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Ah, the fixers among us, not happy when there’s an image to gild or tarnish. What’s this? I’ll explain.

North Shore grandees have long fretted over marais meaning swampy wetland. Ick! Who wants to be known for soggy-boggy? 

A fix was born touting marais (Gran and Petit) indicating safe harbor. Bog gone. Improved image in. If you spent time paddling you’ll know canoes (including the big ones that eat miles) don’t need a harbor. A canoe is simply not the type vessel that does. Period. 

But harbor has more visitor sales appeal bog, so the notion couldn’t be put off, despite there being almost no evidence of fur traders creating or needing canoe harbors. Not to mention the supposed safe harbor was well off the trade route where it might have mattered. No matter, the Grand Marais of Michigan and Minnesota (Minnesota having a Petit as well) desired fresh makeup.

Fantasy, wishful thinking and mercantile appeal are as well rooted in huckstering, and resilient, too. So, happy t’ say, if marais couldn’t-didn’t stand test as harbor, then perhaps an otherwise unknown (and unknowable) form of Voyageur (Quebec) French used marais (a term with long association regarding a drained wetland near Paris) was used to offer up calm water. 

You know, you’re a voyageur driving forward with goods along the N Shore you want to know the calm water locations. Depending on wind, there’s calm (or lee) at every point or island, but for mysterious reasons you really care about certain, special calm waters well off your route. Voyageurs didn’t need calm waters, but modern marketers do to conjure up marketable images of relaxing spas. (Another reason I dislike marketing.)

Now really. The reason certain types of fixers don’t like swamp-bog-wetland comes from not appreciating how remarkable and useful a wetland would be. Very. Enough so to have a steady native population using wetland resources of food and material. 

In the trade era a wetland as opposed to ledge-rock shore would be a food-fiber beacon. Any major trade post (none very near the marais seeking image work) would deploy victualing crews. Fort William was busy at this with a fishery, but they’d take advantage of any source of food or trade, such as likely around a marais with a native population. 

Trying to comfort tourist sensibilities and soothe local egos on the squishy-swamp meaning of marasi, it looks-sounds oh-so good to paddle a supposed trade route toward an unidentified post to imagine a nicer thing than swamp. Instead, see a calm water harbor-port whatever. But for one thing. 

Travel done sitting behind-a-desk misses that when paddling west you’d pass (‘mong others) the calms of Cannonball then Horseshoe bays. If, I ask inquisitively, calm water was a goal why, then, weren’t those places given the delightful label of peaceful harborage? 

Two snug and well protected bays were not called marais because they lacked the wetland of the Big Marais. Go see for yourself, but keep in mind the current place of calming has been much filled in and breakwatered, whereas the other two are much as they were, snug protected bays.

If I snarked with a drum I could hardly make my view of name fixing clearer. Marais signified an onshore wetland, and believe me the Big Grand Marais was wet as a New Orleans flood zone. 

One day young Bill Bally cut from the family blacksmith shop (still there) to the bakery (also still there) s and w only to break through ice and return home soaking. Mind you, that happened after all manner of stuff (car bodies and trash) had been dumped to fill the wet as folk tried to make things drier and get rid of the boardwalks that dealt with the wet. It was swampy, and in earlier times that meant a resource useful and attractive to native people and victual crews. 

Yeah it’s prettier to be a happy harbor or calm therapeutic spa, the main drive, I believe, behind gussying up a swamp with toy boats and incense sticks.

Some quite nice people want to see things cast in a better light. I fully appreciate that and the inventive ways of doing so. Well done! But not good enough, not when a supposed voyageur dialect mixes marais-mare-ma’re-merri-Marie and falls short, by far. 

First, if we’re going to improve the past we need to have the voyageurs shuffle aside because they sound too close to voyeurs, packs of Toms Peeping, and who needs that ill notion? 

Forget the voyageur, but keep the French (Du Luth and etc. pretty much stuck with it anyway, for now). Spy loftier angles taking into account pesky history of the French driven out by the British (pre-U.S. and a division periodically battled anew in Canada with ongoing discord over language and a Province). A creative connection could turn the marais-mare dialect into Arcadian. Sounds better already, doesn’t it?

Let’s reinvigorate the Arcadians, you know the original cagey Cajun Cre-Ole now in Louisiana. What were they doing up here before decamping? 

I remind you of the prosperous trade in the Arctic Alagar, a furbearer overhunted then brought to extinct calamity by the arrival of the parasitic Sea-Were-Snake. The Alagar had problems. As a sightless diurnal animal it was easily hunted by listening for their calls, their sole way of connecting to mate and make wee Alagars. 

Ah the poor Acadians, defeated by the Brits and impoverished by Alagar extinction. 

Tragic. Gone are they, but not their delightful legacy lingering in untraceable linguistic echoes. Marais-mare-me’re-mire-mere-etc., all good, but pale before legend of Big (Grand) Marie, the Cajun-Creole-Arcadian love of Bunyan, Paul with Ox, blue. 

It was Big Marie guided fleeing Arcadians to the Mississippi, taking the pool of freshwater shrimp (traces visible at Deux Harbors (Two Marais) Bay Burlington. Departing Arcadians took the entire shrimp industry. Our loss. Their gain. 

But wee-we have excellently fabricated material in Grand Marie, mother-me’re of independent she-kind eschewing need of Bunyan for freedom elsewhere, namely Louisianan, inheritors of our jambalaya. Let it never be forgot when making his-story, make it good, make it big as Big Mary!