Lake Erie

Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes and the one that behaves least like an ocean: an average depth of about 62 feet, a maximum of 210, and a bottom that drops in three distinct steps — the broad western basin off Toledo, the central plain, and the deep eastern basin that runs toward Buffalo. Because it is shallow it warms fast, freezes hard, and throws up short, steep waves that sailors respect more than anything on Superior.

The lake has been a highway for as long as people have lived beside it. The Erie people gave it their name; the French mapped it; in September 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry's squadron met the British off Put-in-Bay and sent back the six words every Ohio schoolchild learns: "We have met the enemy and they are ours." A century later the shore was steel, shipping and summer cottages, from Presque Isle's sand spit at Erie to the vineyards of the Lake Erie Concord belt.

It is also the most productive freshwater fishery in North America — the walleye capital of the world by its own reckoning — and the lake that came back. Written off in the 1960s, it is the reason the Clean Water Act exists, and today its islands, ferries and lighthouses are a summer circuit unto themselves.