Visiting Minnesota

On July 9 I flew to Minneapolis, Minnesota from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (nonstop NW airlines, only 3 1/2 hours) for a three week trip to the States. I was really looking forward to some time in the North Woods to start out the trip. I do miss my homeland in that respect, being on a beautiful peaceful remote lake and listening to birch trees blow in the wind. Dear friend Don lent me his 79 Oldsmobile and I headed north to Detroit Lakes to begin my long weekend getaway. First night I spent with Linda my old high school buddy at her home 7 miles NW of D.L. (over 200 miles north of Minneapolis). In the morning we hooked up a trailer to pull her lawn mower and drove 45 minutes north to her lovely cabin on Long Lost Lake (west of Itasca State Park). The cabin is now 6 miles down some windy dirt roads after leaving paved roads and I really feel like I am getting away now.

We take a walk to say hello to the neighbors on the dead end road her cabin is on. One lady is a super gardener and even had the Minnesota State Flower "Showy Lady Slipper" growing.
Linda has some yard work to do and I enjoy just relaxing on the deck off the upper bedroom, which overlooks the lake. Long Lost Lake is a protected lake with 15 mph boat engine limit, no jet skis (thank God), limits to building near shore, and the lake is very very clean. Too bad the temps, high low 60's, are not high enough for swimming this weekend plus the winds really picked up. But we did a little paddle boating and on Sunday a pontoon ride to see the flood level effects on the lake(waters have risen 13 feet over the past few years, and Linda's last cabin was flooded and destroyed).

In the late afternoon we relaxed with a bottle of wine and I taught Linda a more challenging game of dominoes (besides the simple matching game). It is called Muggins or Five Up and is based on multiples of 5, and is good for using your math brain. A point is scored for each multiple of 5 when you add up all ends of the dominoes laid down on the board. Linda loves her lake life at the cabin, and from spring to fall, she lives at her cabin every weekend. To share this with my dear old high school friend, is a special time, for she lost her husband a year and a half ago to cancer at age 60 and I am so happy I could spend these precious days with Linda in the North woods on a lake. We reminisced about our youth and fun times growing up in the Lake Country. Her father owned "Clem's Big Dock" and had various types of boats to rent for tourists. During the week on summer vacation, we girls would take out all kinds of boats to play on: pontoon small and large (double decker too), fishing boats, rowboats, waterski, canoe, sunfish (small sailboat) and paddleboats during the week when there were less tourists. We literally "lived on the water" summers, for if we were not in a boat, then we were either swimming, or on a air mattress floating around somewhere on the lake, letting the waves take us to shore (and suffering terrible blistering sunburns for it), or biking the 12 miles around the lake and stopping for a picnic at Sucker Creek.

Sunday Linda took me for the pontoon ride on the lake to see the flooding effects of the lake having risen 13 feet. One island her son used to camp on as a young boy, was nearly submerged with merely the tree tops showing. Cabins were standing in water and would have to be torn down. We saw some loons and I was happy for that, to be able to hear their calls and see them dive and reappear. All these sights and sounds made me feel at home and cherish my few days Up North in the land that I love, and hope that some day I can return for a while maybe each summer and get away from the hot Mexico rainy season, and cool off in Minnesota.

Linda's cabin is full of handmade crafts depicting Northern Minnesota and the love of the North woods and lakes. Their cabin is a labor of love, for Jack, her husband loved to make things by hand out of wood: the lawn furniture, the indoor furniture, the big bears.

There is the decorating with all the little signs of loving the cabin and Minnesota. I loved the art depicting the Ojibwa Native Americans of Minnesota, the love of Loons and it all brought me back to my childhood and my youth and growing up in Northern Minnesota and how I will never lose that part of me and long to return to experience this love of the forests, lakes and rivers.

One memory we had is of attempting to do "wild ricing" like the Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) Native Americans do. (The White Earth Reservation lies near where we grew up.) We tried this when we were 20 in the summer before returning to college. We took a canoe and got a pole with a duckbill put on the end of it. Ricing is only permitted certain days and hours during the season, being highly restricted, and closed to white people on certain lakes. We found a lake open to non-Natives and set out to get as much wild rice (manoomin) as we could in the 4 hours permitted. I sat on the floor of the metal canoe using the wooden 'knockers' to pull the reeds of rice with one hand over the floor of the boat, and with the other hand knock the ripened rice grains off . Linda maneuvered the canoe through the shallow water into the rice field, by standing, yes standing , in the back of the canoe and leaned on the tall pole while she pushed it into the mucky bottom. The duck bill served to prevent the pole from getting stuck in the muddy bottom. We proceeded to make our way through the rice and keep the bugs and flies off us as we sweated at our work. After 4 hours we returned to shore and compared our amount of rice to the others, and it was embarassing, for they had so much more rice! Then we took our rice to a processor (we were not planning to hand harvest it ourselves, the old way, done by the Ojibwa over the centuries: stand on it and move our feet to get the outer chaff off, take the rice in a basket and throw it up in the air to let the wind blow off more outer chaff, and so on). After the processing was done, we went back to pick up our finished rice produce,,which likely amounted to a few pounds. Now you know why natural lake grown wild rice is such a precious gift, for it is not commercially grown paddy rice like in California, with fungicides and herbicides applied. It is labor intensive to harvest this sacred grain (in the oat family). There is much to learn about "wild rice" by reading how the Anishinaabe people are trying to protect it from genetic engineering, so please read Save Wild Rice. Keep It Wild!
Also please watch this YouTube video The Sacred Food with a plea for preventing genetic engineering of wild rice.

On sunday afternoon we played more dominoes and sipped wine and enjoyed more reminiscing on growing up in the Lake Country. In 2010 there will be another high school class reunion (45 years!) to attend. I guess I am lucky to still have such a good friend living up there, someone to return to and feel at home with and enjoy the pleasures of nature and living on water. We didn't get out in the Poke Boat (a tiny one person kayak) which is great fun on quiet waters, when the lake is like glass, and the loons are calling to one another. The winds were so strong, it would have been difficult. Next time.