The abandoned boat is making us think about what’s going on in Lake Michigan.
Geo Rutherford describes herself as a “morbid pessimist.” She gets excited when she finds evidence of things that have gone wrong and spends her time finding evidence of how the Great Lakes are being decimated. To Rutherford, the abandoned boat between McKinley and Bradford beaches is just another funny episode in this epoch.
Today she’s best known for her “Spooky Lakes” pop science series on TikTok, but for her master’s thesis at UW-Milwaukee, Rutherford went to Bradford Beach every day for 90 days, ruminating on the Great Lakes, scavenging for overlooked things and ruminating some more. She found countless shells of invasive, destructive species like quagga and zebra mussels that kill native wildlife and damage infrastructure while also poisoning bird populations and reducing the amount of oxygen in the water. There’s also thousands of chips of cream brick, plastic barrettes and Legos to collect. “Nurdles” – or miniature plastic spheres used in manufacturing that now pollute every major body of water across the globe – are ubiquitous. Clumps of dune grass at the water’s edge are a sign of significant shoreline erosion. Rutherford’s favorite finds: shattered remains of clay pigeons, evidence of bygone skeet shoots.
Milwaukee’s beached celebrity would have been an interesting addition to the academic literature.
“The material you find on the shore is evidence of what’s happening in the water,” Rutherford says. “The pessimist in me sees the boat as another inevitable piece of human detritus, part of this collection of trash and articles of the Anthropocene that show our impact on the Great Lakes.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
The boat – locally dubbed Milwaukee’s S.S. Minnow but actually named Deep Thought – is owned by a Mississippi couple, Richard and Sherry Wells. They told local reporters that they were on their way home from buying the boat when they ran out of gas and got lost in a storm while trying to pilot the boat to a rented slip in McKinley Marina.
Embedded about 15 feet from the shore since Oct. 13, Deep Thought will likely remain immobilized by lake ice until later this spring.
Jerry Guyer, owner of Jerry’s Salvage, says his firm has spent around $20,000 trying to get it dislodged throughout the fall, though he’s also said he’s not too worried about recouping those costs. Deep Thought is stuck by the hydraulic suction of the wet sand surrounding its keep and propeller – moving it even an inch only allows more sand to collapse around its erstwhile anchors. Another factor, Guyer says, is that the water is so shallow that there would be significant risks in bringing a more powerful tugboat near enough to wrench the vessel free.
The final straw may come to enlisting a crane to yank the boat out of the water, at which point she would have to be broken down for scrap. “We’d like to save the boat,” Guyer says, but “the only way to do that is to pull it out by the water.”
U.S. Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Santiago Tamburini says the Wellses have gone “radio silent” in winter as salvage costs climbed. For now, the vessel is the responsibility of the couple and Jerry’s Salvage. The Coast Guard says it steps in with abandoned boats only if there’s a “search and rescue element,” a pollution risk – Deep Thought was drained of its oil back in October – or maritime navigation is being impeded.
Deep Thought has become a landmark of sorts. An oddity. One of its two Google Maps listings designates it as a “religious destination.” The other has more than 60 5-star reviews.
Humans are intensely interested in things that wash up on beaches, from messages in bottles to shipwrecked protagonists. Shorelines are both liminal and impenetrable places, places of departures and arrivals, of the beginnings and often ends of great journeys.
Perhaps that mystery is why, at around 3 p.m. on a windy 15-degree Saturday afternoon in January, 30-or-so Milwaukeeans had gathered on the rocks just to look at it, snap photos and wonder. Families took the risk to climb aboard and explore. Others sniggered from the bike path. It’s a daily ritual of visitors, an agnostic Mecca.
People don’t congregate to look at a vacant home or a broken-down car by the side of the road. But they stare at a boat, because it’s odd and nearby. Those are the two crucial factors that made Deep Thought noteworthy – it is unique AND close to the beaten path.
Some 150 miles upshore in Door County, there’s a 500-ton, 143-foot tugboat that’s been stuck in shallow water for four years. An engineless hull, it was sold for scrap in 2021. Once the ship became stuck, its new owner just abandoned the whole venture. Guyer says a representative from the town of Baileys Harbor asked for his help dislodging the vessel. Guyer said he couldn’t help. Not only is it bigger than anything Guyer could feasibly tow, but “the cost to remove it exceeds its scrap value.”
Boats running out of gas or facing another emergency leaving it at the mercy of the waves isn’t uncommon, either. Tamburini says that, across all of Lake Michigan, there are approximately normally five to 10 emergency calls each week for boats in distress during the summer. The same week Deep Thought got stuck, there had been another call for a different stranded boat along Milwaukee’s shoreline; that one was towed without incident, according to the Coast Guard.
Today, Deep Thought remains. She slowly rusts, has begun to smell worse, and is decorated with more graffiti and at least one I Closed Wolski’s sticker.
In the first three months after it got stuck, there were at least 19 news stories from Milwaukee’s three primary TV news stations and the Journal Sentinel that mentioned the abandoned boat – a curiosity that’s drawn more attention than critical issues like shoreline erosion, the danger of invasive species and a water supply at risk.
Guyer surmises that people seem to care so much about Deep Thought not only because “it’s unique” but also because “it’s a human story, too.” Its tale is something that’s easy to understand. The complex ecosystems that make up the Great Lakes are a lot more important, but also a lot more to wrap your head around.
Rutherford ruminated in her thesis: “Eventually, the water levels will fall and the walk to the edge of the lake could be a mile of broken and crusty shells underfoot. I imagine a future where it doesn’t matter that the native fish are extinct. I imagine a future where the most important thing is how to monetize the remaining liquid. … In my mind, this is the beginning of an apocalyptic book, the prologue to a story that has only just begun.”
