The Day the Stars Changed

Part Three

The Grand Salon of the steamer Seeandbee, courtesy of the Detroit Maritime Museum.

Micah crouches and tugs at my sleeve again, pointing toward the growing flotilla in Lake Michigan. "You see that big one with the white hull? That's the Republic’s sister ship," he says, his voice carrying that know-it-all tone he gets when talking about boats. But today I don't mind; he knows like most boys my age I love boats and trains, I don’t mind when he's going to tell the story of the Floating Assembly, as everyone calls it now.

His father, my Uncle Jonah, was one of the delegates at the assembly. He served as a wheelman on the Great Lakes for twenty years before the Declaration, and he says there was never any question about where they'd meet. "The Lakes themselves had to birth the document," he likes to say at family dinners, "just as they'd birthed our people."