Schoolhouse on the Ice: Tales from Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands with Sally Bergerud

In this heartfelt and wide-ranging conversation, Dubside sits down with retired teacher and Madeline Island local Sally Bergerud to explore life on the edge of Lake Superior. From teaching in a two-room schoolhouse to crossing ice roads, dodging black bears, and paddling the Apostle Islands with a group of fearless women, Sally paints a vivid portrait of community, resilience, and deep connection to place. The episode ends with a moving story of the Ojibwe people and their sacred ties to Madeline Island—Mooningwanekaaning. This is an episode full of history, humor, and heart.

Transcript

DUBSIDE:
Welcome to the Dubcast, with Dubside. This is a special guest edition of the Dubcast. I'm going to talk to Sally Bergerud, a retired school teacher on Lake Superior.

I realize in the past I have gotten into some rather esoteric parts of Greenland rolling or the Greenlandic language, but this interview should be of interest to just about anyone. I talked to Sally about the winter weather on Lake Superior and the island that she would go out to on a regular basis, the ferry that would go out there, what they did when the ferry channel froze over with ice. She talked about the flora and fauna of the area, has a couple good bear stories, and she did talk about kayaking by the end, and she concludes with a remarkable story about the Ojibwe people who have a long history in that area.

We were talking at the campsite of a group of kayakers, so you can hear some of the background noises. This goes for roughly half an hour.

SALLY:
You aren't going to give me a shock if I say the wrong thing. Behavior mod.
 
DUBSIDE:
All right, so here we are in the Apostle Islands. This is like the tip of Wisconsin, right?

SALLY:
Yes.

DUBSIDE:
And it is September, and it is 2024. September 1st, and you are Sally? 

SALLY:
Bergerud. 

DUBSIDE:
Bergerud.

SALLY:
Yes. 

DUBSIDE:
Okay, and I've met you here last year and found you to be a very interesting person, and you lived on Madison Island?

SALLY:
Madeline.

DUBSIDE:
Madeline.

SALLY:
I taught school in a two-room class, school on Madeline, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
So the Apostle Islands are a bunch of islands off the tip of Wisconsin.

SALLY:
Yes, and Madeline Island is the only one that can have houses on it, and the other ones, it's a national seashore.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, it's very popular with kayaking to go out there and camp on the islands and things, but Madeline is a much bigger one.

SALLY:
Madeline is seven miles long. It's a skinny one, and they do have a school that's got kindergarten through fifth graders.

DUBSIDE:
Okay, and you taught?

SALLY:
And I taught there for five years, and I took a ferry boat over and back every day because I lived on the mainland, but I did have a cabin there later so that if I got stuck over there in the winter, I had somewhere to live.

DUBSIDE:
So there were other teachers in the school?

SALLY:
There's one other teacher, and they would have anywhere between like 18 to 25 students. Every once in a while, it was less, but I would typically have like about 12 students, sometimes a little more.

DUBSIDE:
But like in different grades at the same time?

SALLY:
Yeah, I'd have kindergarten first and second, and my colleague would have third, fourth, and fifth, and she was a great help when I got the job because she could train me in and kind of clue me in to cultural things.

DUBSIDE:
So you came from where originally?

SALLY:
I moved up from the Minneapolis area when I went up there. I had come up to Bayfield to go sailing with my parents for many years, so I sailed between Bayfield and Madeline. That's how I knew.

And so I had applied. I was teaching down in Minneapolis, but I had applied up to Bayfield because I thought it would be cool if I could get a job up there. And then I didn't even think of working on Madeline.

I was just wanting to get into the Bayfield school district, but I was pleasantly surprised that they needed a four-day teacher, which was great because I also had weekends off my first year, too, so I had three days off and four days on. And it was a lot of fun to learn how to teach three different grades at the same time. And then we didn't, because we had such a funny age group span, they gave us a lot more freedom than the other school.

We still had to have the same objectives, but because the kids would hear the same stuff that happened the year before, then what I did was I had a different theme every year.

DUBSIDE:
So if you had a second grade, first grade, kindergarten, you're teaching the second grader and the kindergarten is listening to what's going on and sort of hearing it ahead of time.

SALLY:
Yeah, and actually you could teach them so many things that had nothing to do with decoding, reading. That's what a lot of the schools are like now, you know, so much energy is that you can teach them about a lot of things in nature, you can teach them a foreign language, you can teach them so many things that don't necessarily fall into what you would do with when you have a whole lot of students. We had a small classroom, too.

DUBSIDE:
In my experience of living in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle, there's a Guemes Island is the one I lived on. There's a ferry that goes to that one. And you can be geographically close to a bigger city, but as soon as you put that ferry there, it just changes the whole picture.

SALLY:
The whole community depends on, people would call me at the school and say, "Did you see if Harrison's mom got off the four o'clock ferry? Because he's riding his bike around and we don't think anybody's home.” 

Stuff like that, they'd call you and ask that.

Or sometimes they would call and say, “Have so-and-so ready at two o'clock, I'm picking him up to catch the ferry in five minutes”, because everything revolved around the ferry schedule.

DUBSIDE:
When I started with a folding kayak, being very aware of public transportation sorts of things, it made me think about that, but when people have their car, they just go where they want to go. When you got a ferry involved, then they can't just go where they want to go, even if they have a car.

SALLY:
Well, even more complicated, they had three types of transportation depending on the time of year. There was a ferry boat when the lake wasn't frozen. When the lake started to freeze, they would have the windsled as soon as there was enough ice to hold up the windsled, which was a flat boat. It wasn't a hover boat. The first one had a tower that held an airplane propeller, which in the top of the tower could turn right or left. There was no way to turn the boat other than to turn the propeller.

DUBSIDE:
And this functioned as the ferry?

SALLY:
That was the ferry.

DUBSIDE:
So how big was this thing?

SALLY:
Well, the first one was probably about eight feet wide to about, I'm just guessing, about 12 to 14 feet long.

DUBSIDE:
How many people would get on this at once?

SALLY:
Well, when it wasn't the summertime, it would be about 20 people. And then later, they got a great big one that the Department of Transportation invented. And when they first got that, they had to work out the problems because the only way to turn the boat or stop the boat is when it got to the other side.

They had to get enough speed up that they could turn the propeller a different direction and make the boat do a 180 to stop. So it was really scary when you would have a tailwind and the boat had to go faster than the wind to be able to make that 180 turn. But because it had so much drag since it was on the ice, it never got going too fast.

DUBSIDE:
So when the ice got really thick, then what would happen?

SALLY:
Then you had the ice road and you could drive your car over 150 feet of water. And the Department of Transportation paid someone to come out twice a day and make sure there was at least seven inches of ice the whole way across. They'd have to do that every day.

And because in the spring, especially when the sun got higher and the days were longer, when it went out, it would go out fast. So it would candle and all at once it worked in the morning. But then one time I was at a restaurant in Bayfield with some people from the island.

They got a phone call at the restaurant and they said, tell everybody that the ice is going.

DUBSIDE:
And Bayfield is on the mainland.

SALLY:
Yeah. So they were on the mainland, some friends from the island, and the waitress just said, get out of here. The ice is candling.

You need to get back if you want to. This is your last chance to get a ride back on the ice road. And so they just got up.

They said, don't worry about paying anything. Just get out of here. And they just took off.

DUBSIDE:
That urgent.

SALLY:
Yeah. They just got up, left all their stuff on the table and ran off to get their last ride.

DUBSIDE:
When the ice is candling, you said.

SALLY:
Yeah, that when it melts, it turns into this little honeycomb stuff that floats and it goes up and down and it makes the sound of tinkling bells really loud, beautiful. It's just beautiful. And then the pieces of ice all bang into each other and makes the tinkling noise.

DUBSIDE:
So I remember you telling me last time that teaching there was a part of that job. You know, they had people who would just inspect you, like monitor the class and make sure you're teaching.

SALLY:
Yeah. The principal had to ride over once a week only.

DUBSIDE:
So the principal wasn't at the school.

SALLY:
We always knew he was coming because it took a half an hour to come. And then he was stuck there for two hours, but he had to get back. So he couldn't stay all day.

DUBSIDE:
So he couldn't pull surprise visits and he couldn't pull extended longer visits because…

SALLY: 
We knew when… I always knew when the principal was going to be there.

Another thing that happened was it was a challenge to get the lunches to them because that came from the mainland. And since the kids at the mainland got choices, if they wanted to take lunch, they didn't have to sign up for each week. Then the people on the island wanted that same privilege so they could decide in the morning if they wanted it or not.

Well you can imagine what a challenge that was for the school to make sure to have enough lunches. And so since I was coming over on the ferry with my — I could take my car once a week to carry them over — but people somewhere, it only takes a few people worrying about taxpayer money and they want to know how come they're paying for me to take a car over instead of just come by myself.

And so, so then they had to, and then of course it then it turned into the union had to get involved too because were they, what were they paying me to do that? And that was at a job description. So then they ended up just not having me do that anymore.

And they had to drop it out to a restaurant that was on the island. And the restaurant did a good job of creating a good tasting meal that pretty much everybody wanted to sign up for. So there were all sorts of little challenges just because of the road, not being a regular road.

DUBSIDE:
So how many, at that time, what was the population on the island?

SALLY:
I think it was about 250 people that lived there year round and about 2,500 that came that probably had cabins or something that were seasonal.

DUBSIDE:
So in the, in the wintertime, it would get cold, like what kind of temperatures?

SALLY:
It was about the same as on the mainland. It just, it would be like a cold day would be, really cold day would be like five below and a normal day would be like somewhere, you know, from maybe 10 degrees to 32 degrees.

DUBSIDE:
Fahrenheit, we're talking about.

SALLY:
Right, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, yeah. All right.

SALLY:
But the interesting thing was that, of course, the top of the ice, there was a lot of snow and on a windy day, you could get whiteout. So when they had- Whiteout is where you can't see anything? Yeah, if you got kind of like a blizzardy condition, so everything was white, it was snow going sideways.

And so the ice road only lasted between the mainland and the island. When it was bigger water, it didn't form a nice strong ice thing because the island was so close to the mainland, it could keep that ice road. And so that was always being tested to make sure it was strong enough because there were a lot of cars that would drive over there.

You wouldn't think so, but people like to visit.

DUBSIDE:
Were they tested enough there weren't any disasters where a car fell in?

SALLY:
Well, when people followed the instructions, like it said, drive at your own risk, but people still were allowed for a while on both ends to drive. And if they did something too heavy, they could fall through on that. And there was only one that I know where somebody actually died and that person was on a snowmobile and he was a guide for fishing.

So I was surprised that…

DUBSIDE: 
Once the ice breaks and the thing goes down, there's no time to like jump out and swim. Your gone, right?

SALLY:
No, and so on the side, well, no, because it usually happens only in the shallow part.

DUBSIDE:
Oh, okay.

SALLY:
So Bayfield has a big hill and they salt their roads. And so that water that comes to that side has salt in it. So it's not as stable, just right on shore.

That's where you'd fall through is if you, if somebody, and I heard a long time ago, somebody was, I don't know if they were moving a house or just lumber for it, but that one, that nobody got killed, but that one, that was many, many years ago that that one went. 

But while I was teaching, there was somebody that came across on the Bayfield side and they had a crack and they always said, drive at your own risk. Well, this one went, went too far into the season and his truck went down.

And there was, I remember there was a deer in the back. It was a pickup and the deer, deer's feet were sticking out of the ice.

It was bad.

And then if your car goes in, you're in your, you have to pay the DNR a huge amount of money for every day it's in there. They give you three days to get it out. Well, no tow truck wants to go on the ice with all the weight of this.

So you have a hard time and you pay a big, big bill to get your car pulled up. And that happened on both sides, once on the Bayfield and once on the other. And everybody goes, Oh yeah, good luck getting out.

They're like, they come, you know, who, who do you know that'll tow us out? You know, people on that one. And they just laugh at you.

But every day you get a fine because you're letting out your oil.

DUBSIDE:
So like the, the, the, the people that live there all through the winter, they don't make dumb mistakes like that.

SALLY:
No, but there was one guy. I actually went once when too late in the season that always went on it after it was posted, drive at your own risk. And I saw him going one time.

And so I decided, well, I'll follow him because I knew he always did it for another couple of weeks. And I followed him. And then I noticed behind me, there were a few cars.

They got the idea. Oh, she must know where she's going to. 

And when I went to school the next morning, not on my own transportation, they were like, “Bergerud, what are you doing? The lake was making, the ice was making waves behind you. You gotta stop that”, so I didn't do that anymore, but yeah.

It's a funny feeling when the ice, the snow and stuff melts on the top. You have water so you can see through because it melts the snow, so you have a clear glass. You're driving on a clear glass floor and you can look down 150 feet in the Lake Superior while you're driving.

DUBSIDE:
While you're driving.

SALLY:
So you think, oh, what would happen if for some reason.

DUBSIDE:
So what kind of wildlife, animals and things have you got?

SALLY:
Over there. Well, one thing about the island is I think it has five different biomes, so one of the spots on the island has real old hemlock. A little stand of that and then they have some swamps and they have some bogs and they have a big conifer area.

So they have really interesting, just on that small island, they have really interesting places. So like when I was teaching in the school, as long as I made objectives of what I had to do in science and math and reading, I could take them out for a two hour walk at Capser Trail and we could use that as long as I made the objectives for all, you look in the back of a textbook and they tell you what you're supposed to accomplish by using their book and then you do that on a nature walk. They have a lot of nature trails, public ones.

The island has a group of people that are very environmental and so they do a lot to conserve that and make really nice nature areas.

DUBSIDE:
How about animals?

SALLY:
Oh, animals, let's see. They have coyotes and of course they have eagles and, no, not too many loons, they might pass through. They have bear, that's the big thing. Bears go through screens and snatch imported cheese off of tables of tourists in the summer.

DUBSIDE:
So all these different islands up here, the bears are swimming between the islands all the time?

SALLY:
Yes, and the DNR will get calls to get them off and same thing in Bayfield, they drive them all the way down to Brewer, which is a long, long way away and then they let them go and then the poor mama bears have to walk all the way back along the highway and some of them get hit, of course, and swim all the way back to the island. It just happens over and over. That's what they do as soon as they let them go in a big wildlife area, they walk back home.

DUBSIDE:
So did you have any of your own personal encounters with bears?

SALLY:
Yeah, if anybody puts out bird feed or has ever put out bird feed on a deck, and it wasn't me, but a friend of mine had to always feed black sunflower seeds to the birds all winter long. They would come up, so first the big, heavy bear would come up and then her kids that she had a year ago would come up behind her and then another one and they'd all look around, check everything to see if there were any new sunflower seeds put out. And anybody that happened to put out a bird feeder and didn't take it down by about two o'clock or earlier, they'd have visits.

Same bear could go through and visit everybody.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, so to put out your trash, you have to cover it up and secure it so they don't dig in the trash?

SALLY:
You have it in your garage in a container with wheels on the bottom and you roll it out the morning that you'd get it picked up or you keep it in your own garage and then you drive it on Saturday to the transfer station here in Russell all the way over.

DUBSIDE:
So the bears are pretty much in the nocturnal, in the nighttime activity?

SALLY:
Well, they will come earlier, like if you were somebody that put out bird seed and you don't have it, they'll try coming a bunch earlier and they know when all the garbage trucks, because people roll things out there. But we actually would get in the spring, we'd get a bear at the school playground down in Bayfield and you could put out a brand new aluminum garbage can with nothing in it and they already understood that the smell of a garbage can, even with no food ever being in it, they associate it. Well, they better go check because I guess they put out the garbage can.

They're very smart. They also would keep track of when people drove to the ferry and so if a bunch of cars go down the road, you'd have nobody on the road and then all at once you'd have 40 cars, then they'd go check people's cabin to see if they were gone and had left cheese on the table or something.

DUBSIDE:
They would break into cabins?

SALLY:
Yeah, they'd come through a screen. I had a cabin there with a screen porch and I wasn't there every day and it came through my screen porch, burst right through one end and it opened a cupboard, that wooden cupboard, and I had only canned goods in there because of bears and when I came back a week later, there were 60 cans on the lawn. They had great big round holes from their claws, like giant holes that they had punctured and all the ones that had had vegetarian soup, they had only drank a little bit and they dropped them with a bunch of stuff but that sweetened canned milk, they had lots of holes. You could hardly tell there was a can there because that was their favorite so they definitely were discerning about what they spent their time eating.

DUBSIDE:
So how did you start kayaking?

SALLY:
Well, I came up to, I had always sailed and I knew the area and I came up and I met somebody that he really liked kayaking and he introduced me to it, taught me how to get back in my boat with a paddle float and then just that little one time, I just fell in love with it and then there was a women's kayak group that it's been going over 30 years now and they met every Wednesday night and everybody worked at that time so after work, everyone would rush out and try to meet somewhere at five o'clock and we went to a different site on Lake Superior every week on Wednesday, as long as there wasn't ice on it and they were a really fun group. They were very into, besides paddling hard, they liked to have a social aspect to it and so we'd go about every, it was shorter near the winter and longer in the summer so we'd figure out halfway to wherever we went, it was a different place every week.

We'd get out of our kayaks and we'd have a funny potluck and you never knew, a lot of the people had some great craft beer and people had stuff from their garden by the end of the summer. Sometimes it was all dessert.

DUBSIDE:
So you would paddle to somewhere like a beach or somewhere and land there.

SALLY:
Get out of our kayak, eat, and then get back in and paddle back and it was always on a Wednesday night.

DUBSIDE:
Have you been to all of the Apostle Islands?

SALLY:
I have not been to, when I did it with that group, we did a couple crossings a summer but we mostly just went all different directions from different points on the peninsula and we went close to shore.

DUBSIDE:
What's your favorite place to go?

SALLY:
Oh, I don't know. I like going to Stockton on the side of that for a crossing in York.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, York Island.

SALLY:
Yeah, but I liked going to, when it was windy, we went to the Slough, Park Bay Slough because that has orchids out in the early spring that you can only see on those little teeny tiny islands. 

DUBSIDE:
Has what? 

SALLY:
Orchids, little tiny orchids.

Beautiful little orchids on these miniature little islands and they're endangered. I forget what the name of them was but then you can count on being able to find those at the same time as the Sandhill Cranes come to that area. So kind of a special.

A lot of people that are tourists like to go across to see the caves but that wasn't a big thing for us. We just like to go into a lot of different wind conditions and a little, you know, just see different places.

DUBSIDE:
Well, you must have been seeing people kayaking before you started kayaking in this area, right?

SALLY:
Yeah, but you know, when I first started sailing it wasn't that big of a thing. I think Trek and Trail started, what was that? About 30 years ago, something, that's where they had the kayak.

That's kind of what introduced it to the area and that was really what, maybe ’91, ’92, when sea kayaking kind of was introduced to the area and it took off right away because they sold kayaks and rented them.

DUBSIDE:
Because people would still take motorboats or sailboats out to these islands, right?

SALLY:
Oh yes, yes. In fact, before the islands became wilderness protected there were more places where people could have a cabin on them and stuff. So when they protected and turned it into whatever the national protection is called with the Apostle Islands, then the only island that people could have houses and roads on was Madeline Island.

And Madeline Island has a real old history of French traders and two different, and the Native Americans took their seven generations to travel all the way to find the place where rice grows on water and a place where there were lots of herbs, medicinal herbs. So for seven generations they ended up, they decided that Madeline Island was that place that the women had had dreams about for that many years. And there was this really, and then of course the Native Americans were pushed out of there.

There were two groups.

DUBSIDE:
Now this, the names of those groups are what?

SALLY:
Well, there's the Ojibwe and now some of them are at the Red Cliff and some of them are at Bad River. So they were, there was a group of Protestants and a group of Catholic missionaries. And so the Native Americans kind of fell into one of those communities.

And there was an elderly Native American woman that came and did classes over on the island. And she was so sweet and she never told the kids that they got kicked off. She said, she was telling them about how beautiful the island was and she wanted them to know that they were responsible for protecting the herbs and all this beautiful stuff here.

She told them about the seventh generation. She said, because we were invited off the island, she told them, wasn't that sweet? She didn't want them to feel guilty or any kind of a heavy duty.

We were invited off the island now, so it's your kid's duty to protect because we can't be here protecting all those herbs. So after we're invited now, you guys are in charge of making sure that you keep, you know, you protect all that. I just thought that was so sweet.

There was no guilt or terrible…he way she said that was just so…

DUBSIDE:
Besides the Ojibwe, there's another tribe?

SALLY:
Well, I just, it's two different groups. The one that, they're both Ojibwe.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

SALLY:
Yeah, and the one that had the more, I think the more Catholic group went to Red Cliff. But Red Cliff, the interesting about them was they were the group that their chief went all the way to Washington, D.C. and begged for them to not get moved to a different reservation. He said, we depend on that for our fishing.

And so he was able to talk the president into keeping Red Cliff for them, whereas everybody else got moved somewhere different.

DUBSIDE:
So the descendants are still there at Red Cliff? Yes.

SALLY:
So I thought that was so cool. Making it, think about it, the four cars and you make your whole way all the way to Washington, D.C. to speak one-to-one to somebody to ask for that.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. So.

SALLY:
So yep, to this day.

DUBSIDE:
All right, that's a good place to end, I think.

SALLY:
So let's hope that Madeline Island continues being, having some good caretakers there, no matter who it ends up being. Yeah. Because it's such a special place.

DUBSIDE: 
Yes, indeed. All right. Well, thank you. 

Well, if I can summarize that. So some Native Americans have a very special island and they get kicked off their own very special island.

Many years later, some of them have the opportunity to speak to the schoolchildren who live on that island. And the Native Americans had the wisdom to know that venting their frustration at the school kids would not have much of a positive outcome. So they told them, we got invited off of this island and you're here now.

So it is your responsibility to take care of this special island. For the future. That's profound.

The Ojibwe people are still living in the US and in Canada. There are five times more Ojibwe than there are people from Greenland. And the Ojibwe have their language still.

And so the real name of what's been referred to as Madeline Island is Mooningwanekaaning. 

Thank you for listening to the Dubcast with Dubside.