Save the SS Badger from the Climate Change Wackos!

Friends, plans are afoot to study whether the SS Badger, the last coal-powered car ferry in the world, should be converted to diesell or (don’t laugh) a lithium battery.

This plan really bothers me and it comes on the heels of concerns of over-eager climate change wackos. It’s insane that people think an old steamship that only operates during the summer months in one lake affects the temperature of the planet.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the Badger. It occasionally visited Navy Pie in Chicago. I’ve been on it twice. Once as a kid in the 1970s with my family. We have a pic of me and my older brother Paul looking at Lake Michigan from the main deck, me in my white bucket hat trimmed with a patriotic ribbon. More recently, I boarded a shoreline cruise for research related to a car ferry novel.

What’s most distinctive about the ship are those billows of black smoke from the stacks. Big, fierce, just like out of the movies. But there’s also that sweet smell of the burning coal along with engine oil, similar but different from the satisfying scent of freshly cut grass and burnt lawnmower gas. Perfumers should bottle that scent. Given what’s afoot, I’d call it “SOS Badger."

So the climate change activists want to take the smoke and the smell away, and the owners are game! Remove the old steamship fragrance, and they’ll be taking away an experience that you can’t get anywhere in the world. Children board the Badger with little models of ships in their hands; they’re fascinated.

Sure, children will still be able to sail the rejiggered SS Badger powered by a battery or diesel, but the experience will be different.

Frankly, a coal-burner like the Badger is less of a danger to the lake and skies overhead than the diesel vessels that ply the sweet waters. Why doesn’t any one write about the dangers they pose? A major oil in the Great Lakes would a catastrophe to the Midwest, it would imperil the drinking water for millions.

I’ve written about old wind mills, grand hotels, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I’ve yet to save a building with my written words.

The SS Badger may be the most important project I write about. This travesty — changing the Badger from coal to some other fuel — has to be stopped in its Manitowoc to Luddigton tracks.

Friends, I'll be typing a monthly letter on my refurbished Selectric typewriter about my quest to save the SS Badger from the climate-change activists. I'll illustrate with wood engravings of the Badger and classic cars, made at the local Makerspace.

Come along on my journey to save this national historic landmark as it is and tell the Badger to leave the ship alone.