Across the bay, on a school bus wearing skis
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LA POINTE, Wisconsin: From a distance, the large red aluminum contraption parked on the frozen shore of Lake Superior here looks like a small houseboat perched on skis. Up closer, as schoolchildren pile in with their backpacks and iPods, it becomes clear that the mystery vehicle, with two large fans on the back, is something else entirely.
For residents of this remote village on an ice-locked island off the tip of mainland Wisconsin, the gliding boatmobile, known here as a windsled, is a kind of school bus.
That's right: in one of the more unorthodox modes of student travel anywhere in the country, the children of La Pointe, on Madeline Island (full-time population 250, triple that in the summer), actually windsled to class several weeks out of every year. It is the transportation a school district needs when students are separated from class by more than two miles of jigsaw ice blocks coming together to form something that approximates a floating road of shallow depth across a bay.
Everyone here knows the windsled as a homegrown solution to a tricky set of circumstances: Sometimes Lake Superior — the largest, coldest and deepest of the Great Lakes — is too chunky with ice for a ferry but not quite solid enough to make an ice bridge between La Pointe and the mainland town of Bayfield, the location of the upper school.
During those times, the Bayfield School District turns to its windsled, locally designed, built and operated to glide over thin ice.
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"I thought it was kind of strange at first," said Emma Dalzell, 14, who recently moved to La Pointe from Madison, Wisconsin, where she did not have to cross an icy bay to get to school. Now the commute has become routine.
Put aside all those romantic notions about surfing to school. Though the trip offers a breathtaking panorama in a winter-wonderland sort of way, with this part of Lake Superior taking on the look of the grandest, most pristine ice rink the imagination can conjure, the windsled is purely utilitarian.
The 9,000-pound vehicle, propelled by its twin fans and steered by a driver much the way a regular bus would be, is heated and has padded benches with room for about 20 students. Beyond that, there are no luxuries. Loud and bumping along at 18 miles an hour, it hardly qualifies as a thrill ride.
So while it is a novelty, students are no more enchanted by it than first-period math class.
"It's just an everyday thing," said Carrie Nelson, 14. "It's just our life."
The other day, Dylan Griggs, 13, sat toward the back of the sled's enclosed cab with his hands over his ears for most of the 10-minute ride to school. Asked if he liked windsledding to class, he said: "No. It's loud, annoying."
But nonetheless necessary.
This part of heavily forested northern Wisconsin, some 60 miles east of Duluth, Minnesota, the nearest city, is known for the severity of its winters. Wind chills often fail to rise above zero for days at a time. But rather than hibernating or canceling the routines of everyday life, people not only cope with the weather but also seem to relish it.
On a recent 5-degree morning, Judy Patterson, who works at a coffeehouse in La Pointe, said: "I love it. We look forward to the ice all year."
No surprise, then, that officials of the school district have worked to make sure weather does not stand in their way.
"When I was hired for the district, I heard immediately about the windsled," said Linda Kunelius, who became superintendent last year. It was summer, so she went to see the sled in its garage. "I thought it looked like a houseboat on pontoons," she recalled.
Beyond its unusual appearance, Kunelius learned something else: Given the small district's limited budget, operating the windsled was fast becoming a financial hardship.
Because of the pounding it takes on the ice, the windsled is a high-maintenance machine. It was built in 2000 with a grant of half a million dollars from the federal Department of Transportation. (Earlier models were smaller and less sophisticated.) But the cost of its operation fell on the district, which, in acknowledgment that running it entails some inherent risk, also carries extra liability insurance.
Last year's operating cost for the windsled, which serves 20 students who routinely need transportation across the bay, was $21,358. (In warmer weather, the district pays for a ferry, whose cost last year was $30,435.) Kunelius found that the district had not been receiving state financing for the ice commute because it did not qualify as an official school bus route. The district immediately sought to change that, turning to the local state senator, Robert Jauch.
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