In late August of 2015, blogger Chairman Joe and I went sailing for a short jaunt of 150 miles, across the Gulf of Maine, with our friends Jerry & Marion (Hagen) Solom on their home-built, thirty-nine foot, steel sailboat Indian Summer, from Stonington, Maine to Hull, Massachusetts, just to say we did, as it's sort of like a badge of courage for otherwise long winter evenings, here in true-north Minnesota, when the talk has otherwise turned to hockey and fishing. We'll never tire of talking about sailing.
Of course, all Minnesota readers are well aware that the Soloms are northwest Minnesota’s legendary quintessential sailboat touring couple of the geriatric set, as Jerry has given lectures and slideshows, in almost all the Sons of Norway posts and library meeting rooms in Minnesota, about their nautical travels from Norway to Portugal from 2000-2008. For Iowans and other readers, this may be your first introduction.
The Soloms are of rugged Norwegian heritage. Jerry built his Bruce Roberts-designed sailboat to sail to Norway so they could meet their relatives. He chose to build it from steel, and not wood nor fiberglass, because he is a third generation blacksmith and likewise a weldor/fabricator, machinist/high craftsman. And the reason he built it entirely by himself over the course of seven years, was because he needed to know every cubic inch of his boat as though his life and his crew’s depended on it.
Educating himself in the skills of oceanic navigation from the land-locked middle of the continent, Solom pored through dozens of sailing skills and adventure books to prepare himself for a life at sea. Answering an ad for crew, he made a trip to Puerto Rico for a sea-going sailing experience before his boat was half finished. He also corresponded at length with sailors who sailed the angry waters of Lake Superior or had ocean-going experiences. He visited with other boat builders to compare notes and glean what problems they encountered.
He learned about the psychological effects of sailing solo and the possibility of hallucination during the doldrums, when the sea is becalmed and the air, windless, and the sky and sea become as one for eternity. He learned how daily routine is necessary and how important it is to keep his wits about him, so he practiced his seaman knots until he could do them blind, and he learned how to make bread in a pressure cooker, and probably the words and tunes to a thousand sea shanties including "Fifty Ways", "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted", "Go Your Own Way," "Don't Think Twice," "Crazy", and "Nothing Compares 2 U", other poignant sea faring love songs known the world over. Solom’s boat building left no stone unturned--and not just a few heads.
Jerry could sometimes be seen wandering about his farm taking sextant readings, thus worrying local passersby, that he had a divine eye on an impending weather phenomenon and that they should be prepared for extended disaster. As work on Indian Summer proceeded at a rapid rate in 1993, the extent of Solom’s round-the-clock obsession was unveiled when he demolished his huge makeshift boathouse built around it, just yards from the banks of Mickinock Creek. Flood insurance, big boat purchases and vast supplies of food were said to have soared to unprecedented volumes across the whole of extreme northwest Minnesota, later rivaling comparison with the Y2K scare.
The story of Jerry Solom and Indian Summer was published, at first, in The Raven: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History & Humor Journal, by Palmville Press & Publishing, Inc., of Wannaska, Minnesota, beginning in 1995. “The Status of Jerry’s Boat,” written by Joe McDonnell, of Wannaska, covered the progress of Indian Summer throughout its conception and infancy in 1986, through its pubescent period prior to its departure from Palmville Township via semi-truck in 1993, into its young adult period of 1994 down the Mississippi and into New Orleans, where the good times rolled into one adventure after another as Jerry learned to sail accompanied by crew often no more experienced than himself, “Make it stop Jerry! Make it stop!” The lucky horseshoe over the cabin door did little more than serve as just another projectile in rough seas.
By 2000, Indian Summer, as well as its captain, was ready to take on the North Atlantic and all that it would entail. Ignorance, he learned, is sometimes bliss, but most of the time is an experience he should avoid.
Archived issues of “The Status of Jerry’s Boat,” and later, “Update on Jerry’s Boat” in The Raven, are available in library and museum collections across Minnesota, including the Periodical collection of The Minnesota Historical Society. Past issues of The Raven may be available for sale through Palmville Press & Publishing, Inc. Inquiries can be made on Facebook or theravenjournal.com website.
During his sail trips, Jerry kept a waterproof logbook in which he extensively pencilled his navigational notes of the day, lest a search party or a crew of vacationing fishermen discover it floating on an Atlantic swell. Based on those years of notation, and but a small swig of literary license, Jerry has written, published and sold three books about Indian Summer, through Amazon, all of which he authored himself with editorial assistance by his wife, Marion, their eldest daughter, Sara Bouchard, and their granddaughter, Mallori.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Solom’s welding shop, as Jerry toiled on a couple trailer ramps he was making. A cast iron haybaler part laid to one side that he had earlier brazed for a customer. On his desk, amid welding supply catalogues, a pair of dirty suede leather welding gloves, and a tack hammer, laid, not surprisingly, a green thick, hard-covered sailing adventure book titled,
“Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Seven Seas.”
I looked through it while he finished his project, pausing on Page 147, and the black & white photograph there captioned, “Eskimo hunter,” depicting a man hurling a harpoon on a line attached to an air-filled bladder, positioned on his kayak. The bladder floats, preventing the walrus or seal the hunter has harpooned, from diving deep and getting away. When the animal comes up for air, the hunters spear it.
I had read several pages of the old book, published in 1957, just within the big overhead door of Jerry’s rural shop, when he invited me up to their house over the bridge, for a cup of coffee, an invitation I seldom decline as visits with him are never dull, given the propensity for storytelling and laughter, we both share. One never knows, a son-in-law may have recently visited and there may even be a beer or two left in the refrigerator. Jackpot!
In the little sitting room off the kitchen where Jerry often sits and reads, below a wall-mounted antique six cup and saucer collection of Marion’s, are comfortable old-fashioned wooden chairs and rockers across from Jerry’s lair of a well-worn couch with its own stack of books and miscellaneous nautical tomes including one or more about celestial navigation, which, not surprisingly, was just the subject Jerry started off discussing. I can follow some of what he’s talking about, but admit that most of navigation, especially the celestial bit, is frankly, ‘over my head.’
This site explains it rather simply and provokes me to spend some time on it to see what I can learn: http://www.southernfriedscience.com/sailing-by-starlight-the-lost-art-of-celestial-navigation/
Jerry offered to loan me another book by Freuchen, titled “I Sailed With Rasmussen.” The Vagrant Viking’s own story of his engrossing adventures in the Arctic with the Danish explorer. Illustrated with maps’, which I took, of course, because it’s the newer book, published in 1958.
I’m not an ardent reader of adventure books, but most I have enjoyed if they have a historical biographical basis, like an earlier book Jerry loaned me titled, “Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition.” A truly amazing feat of courage and resolve in which, beyond all reason, nobody dies--which I’ve thought forever, until just now, when I googled the accuracy of that statement and saw this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/1451419/Shackletons-disastrous-leadership-caused-the-deaths-of-three-explorers.html.
I prefer to remain ignorant of this new speculation and instead still embrace Shackleton’s extraordinary effort to save his men by sailing 800 miles from the Antarctic to South Georgia in the South Atlantic in a 23ft boat in 1915, after Endurance, his main ship, was crushed by pack ice and sank. The explorer and his crew survived an epic journey through some of the world's most treacherous seas with no loss of life.
C’mon, why not? People believe in less their whole lives with less documentation. It’s not so far ‘out there’ that it’s impossible. Some of the survivors lived to tell quite the tale and beyond: https://eshackleton.com/2016/09/06/the-fate-of-the-crew-2/
It’s raining in Palmville as forecasted. That’s not surprising. It often rains here, as all this lush green landscape indicates. Knowing when to stop, however, is another matter indeed. We’ll see what happens on Thor’s Day, June 14.
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| Jerry & Marion Solom's first book |
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| Their third book/new book |
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| Their second book |
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