Crawford family. - Into the blue: family secrets and the search for a great lakes shipwreck

Praise for Into the Blue

An engrossing account that offers two fascinating stories in one volume. The strength of the book lies not only in the fascinating material, but also in the meticulous way that Curtis blends family history with fictionalized re-enactments to bring this multi-faceted story alive. Curtiss first book is a winner. Book club members wont regret adding Into the Blue to this summers reading list.

The Hamilton Spectator

Into the Blue is a mesmerizing account of life on board the small Georgian Bay steamships that once provided a vital trade and communications link between local ports. It evokes both the romance and harsh conditions of that bygone era and is a fascinating look into one familys history. Its a must-read for anyone who shares a love for the Georgian Bay, her history, her folklore, and her deep, blue, mysterious waters.

Meaford Express

Compelling Curtis manages to navigate her way around the kind of sentimentality that characterizes so many family memoirs. Ultimately the metamemoir is a balancing act, a creation of Curtiss insatiable curiosity.

Quill & Quire

Into the Blue is a love letter to Georgian Bay disguised as a haunting family memoir. Curtis is a solid journalist with a great imagination. The facts are sad enough but the fictionalized sections of the book are brilliantly realized.

National Post

Tantalizing. Alluring. Curtis combines the historical past, exposes selective memory and posthumously invades the privacy of her grandmother, Eleanor, to craft a perceptive and affectionate family chronicle Curtis proves to be a loving granddaughter who proves W. H. Auden right: it is possible for the living to break bread with the dead.

The Gazette (Montreal)

For my family

Adapted from The Wiarton Echo, November 29, 1906

In my familys storytelling, the tale of the wreck was only the beginning.

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I have been haunted by shipwrecks. Two in particular colour my fears with rust and slime. One of these boats is a prosaic wooden tug called the Metamora that was built in Cleveland in 1864 for service on the Great Lakes. It sank in 1907 about two hundred feet from the slippery pink rock that half a century later would become my fathers family island on the east shore of Georgian Bay in Lake Huron. The Wreck, as people in the area know it, sits in about six feet of water in the middle of a wide inlet strewn with treacherous shoals and glacier-rounded islands, smooth in places like a childs skin. On the islands, twisted white pine and dwarf cedar trees have found sustenance in the rocks. They lean and poke at awkward angles, frozen in movement.

The Metamora today is little more than a few rusting pieces of machinery that jut out of the waves, yet it has become an icon in the areaa channel marker and a marker of time. Were near The Wreck, we tell people when they ask for directions to our island, knowing theyll understand where we mean. The water certainly is low (or high) on The Wreck, we say to each other every summer, monitoring the spring thaw.

But even more, it has become a measure of our family lore. Remember when Dad dumped us in the dinghy near The Wreck? That friend of yours who wanted to go snorkelling there? Remember that summer when it was so windy you could barely see it rising out of the waves?

When I go swimming off the front dock, I rarely stay in for long because I imagine skeletal fingers tracing a line along the bottom of my foot. I think of the fish who swam near The Wreck and then brushed by me. I wont touch its rusty hull below the waterline and I give it a wide berth when I am forced to go by in a boat. On the rare occasions I am alone on the island I imagine I hear the silver whispers of drowning sailors calling for help.

The Metamora was a tug and coal carrier when she sank, but in her early days she had a more fearsome task. Fitted with armour-plating and a cannon, she was commissioned to patrol the waters of the Great Lakes for Fenian invaders. In the 1870s, the threat of an Irish invasion gone, her combat gear was removed and she was returned to freight and passenger service. By the day in late September 1907 when she steamed by our island in Shawanaga Inlet near the village of Pointe au Baril, the boat was a confirmed workhorse, plying the channel between Midland and Killarney, towing log booms and handling freight.

Coming up the bay beside Nadeau, one of the larger of the thirty thousand islands that are scattered along this rugged shore, the Metamora was towing a boom destined for the mill town of Byng Inlet. Just west of Turning Island, a nearly treeless rock now outfitted with a solar-powered light, the boat hit a shoal, listed and caught fire. Like many wooden boats of her vintage, she quickly burned and sank, coming to rest on the submerged reef that rises and dips from a point off our island.

The crew reportedly made an easy swim of it to the nearby shore. Some of them must have sat on the smooth, undulating rock at our pointthe place my family calls Pirates Covebreathing heavily, watching the flames gorge on the hull of their ship.