She travelled in on her own steam but will be towed to her final demise
To the Expositor:
It was one of those token business transactions: in 1974 the township of Assiginack would “buy” the S.S. Norisle for the grand sum of $1 (Canadian). So they did. And the S.S. Norisle, already in need of aid and essentially crewless, was towed into Manitowaning Bay, much to the wonderment of the townspeople who made their way down to the bay to greet her arrival. She sailed from her home port of Owen Sound under her own power with a crew of retired Great Lakes professional mariners.
As the ship was carefully brought to shore, it was probably not in anybody’s mind that it wouldn’t move from that spot for nearly the next 50 years. Perhaps it sank a little, along with the hearts of the town’s residents when they began to realize how much labour and capital it would take to maintain a ship of that size, spring, summer, winter, fall. But from that day forward, it became the business of the township of Assiginack to figure out what in the world to do with a very large, very iron, and very retired passenger steam ship.
Nobody in the town had any particular expertise in looking after such a neutered nautical beast. But it wasn’t really nautical expertise that was needed in this case. The ship wasn’t going anywhere. What was needed was ingenuity and imagination. In all honesty, it wasn’t entirely certain that the town was even particularly blessed with people who excelled in those abstract areas. But if there is one thing that has been borne out over these last 50 years of wondering what in the world to do with the Norisle, it’s that the township of Assiginack has indeed been blessed with some ingenious and determined residents.
In the long relationship between the town of Manitowaning and the S.S. Norisle, the Norisle was the obstinate one, the stubborn, stuck-in-its-ways obstacle that couldn’t be budged, while the townspeople had no choice but to be made malleable and placating, throwing on coats of paint and rubbing on polish to keep up surface appearances (so the neighbors wouldn’t talk).
But after the first few years of treading water learning how to maintain such a large ship, a few ideas about what to do with it began to bubble to the surface. Unofficially, here are some of the ways the town managed to turn a hulking, decommissioned steamship into something beneficial without financially capsizing its coffers:
1) As a tourist attraction, replete with summer-student tour guides who politely and informatively took people not only through the entire Norisle, top to bottom, but also Burn’s Wharf and (if you didn’t mind the stairs) the Roller Mill.
2) A floating discotheque, back when going to a disco was something you only ever did in the city. It was on the lower car deck, giving it the sonic disadvantage that metal walls, floor and ceiling will lend to a space, and so sounded an unholy din, even from outside. But the place was packed with local teenagers desperate for any kind of event, deafening dance music be damned.
3) A restaurant with the staff living in the staterooms on the ship, of which there were many.
4) A haunted house(boat) on Halloween.
5) A residence for several theatre troupes that played at the adjacent Burn’s Wharf Theatre, turning the entire area into a bustling hive of activity and light.
It should be mentioned that the Norisle was still at this time a charming ship to be aboard, certainly worthy of a tour, and even lavish in areas for a ship its age. It was largely left intact the first half of its life in Manitowaning: it was kept clean in the summer and appeared entirely suitable for brief summer lodging; many teens in the town secured summer jobs there, and tourists from all over came to see it.
In the latter half of its stay in Manitowaning, the Norisle began to garner some outside attention. Bigger ideas were suddenly in the air, and there was talk of rehabilitating its engines to see if it could once again traverse the mighty water routes of yesteryear. For this to happen, though, the ship would need to be gutted and retrofitted. In short, the gut part was completed, but not the retrofit.
And so, the Norisle languished these last few years, unadorned, unused, uncared for and under a death watch (the final knell being sounded recently by the Canadian Coast Guard who deemed the ship a potential liability). At its best, the Norisle pulled the little town of Manitowaning together in ways nobody could have expected, but lately it seemed to be pulling it apart as differing opinions about what to do with it escalated.
I was there with my parents and brothers and all my other fellow townsfolk down at the bay when the Norisle was delivered to Manitowaning almost 50 years ago, and I spent the majority of my subsequent misspent youth jumping off it, dancing in it, working on it, breaking into it (shhh), standing by it, smoking around it and just staring at the damned thing for far too long because, well, there wasn’t much else to do in Manitowaning. There still ain’t much to do in Manitowaning, but I’ll sure as hell be down at the docks on September 25 to see our girl off.
D’Arcy Closs
Manitowaning
photo by Michael Erskine
