Where has the summer gone?

The pandemic summer theme has been "do things outdoors," which many people hereabouts take to mean "go north." The campgrounds on the North Shore have been overcrowded, as usual, and also (so I'm told) graced with newcomers who know nothing about how to treat the woods or their neighbors with respect.

Hilary and I avoided that scene entirely, though we've gone on several overnights closer to home, where the campgrounds are half-vacant and the landscapes offer fewer lakes and pines but more wildflowers, grasses, and open horizons. I've already described our visits to Sibley, Glacial Lakes, and Lake Louise state parks in previous blogs. Here are some impressions of four other state parks we visited recently: Savanna Portage, St. Croix, Minneopa, and Myre-Big Island.

Savanna Portage is a few miles north of McGregor, tucked into some folds of the St. Louis Moraine, I think, just beyond the vast boggy stretches that make this one of the least-known parts of the state.

The park boasts a number of lakes, and we hiked around several of them.  It has some history, especially if you think it's worth commemorating where the voyageurs portaged their furs and trade goods from the watershed of the St. Louis River to that of the Mississippi back in the eighteenth century. It has a lovely spring-fed lake for swimming. And it has some marvelous white pine woods.

We have camped at site #45 quite a few times over the years. We snagged it again this summer.  It opens out to a grassy sward extending downhill to the fishing dock. The crumbling towns of the Iron Range are forty miles away to the north, and when the sun goes down it gets very dark. Standing on that dock at midnight, we saw the best and brightest stars of the summer. They had that shimmering intensity against the ultra-black backdrop of nothingness that one always looks for but seldom meet up with these days.

We chatted with a ranger the next morning. He told us the staff at the park is down from twelve to five. When the pandemic hit parks were closed, of course, and later it because difficult to find people who wanted to come back for a few months of seasonal work. That explains why roughly half the campsites in the park were closed. Still, plenty of others were open and still available.

The Kettle River

St. Croix State Park is Minnesota's biggest, and among its least well known. This may simply be because people like lakes better than rivers.  Rivers tend to be narrow rather than expansive, and they always move in the same direction.  Boring. Inconvenient. Also, the countryside in the vicinity of Nemadji State Forest has a reputation for being buggy, scrubby, and flat.   

It doesn't help that St. Croix State Park in 2011 suffered one of those derechos that flattened large sections of the park.

All the same, we camped there recently on a Monday night and found it to be quiet, pleasant, open, and woodsy. We drove nine miles through the park on gravel roads (slow going) to the Kettle River, Minnesota's premier kayaking river. There's a beautiful overlook from the bluff (see photo above) and a one-mile hike along the ridge to a rocky beach. Highly recommended.

The next morning I came upon a red-shouldered hawk keening under a tree near the toilet building. Other hawks soon responded. We located four of them in all, perched in nearby trees. No doubt a family getting trained in the hunt. It was quite an experience.

We drove home the next morning by way of Danbury, Wisconsin, and Crex Meadows NWR. It's interesting country but it isn't glamorous country. Oak savanna? Pine barrens? These are not the terms that inspire family vacations.

Crex Meadows, north of Grantsburg, WI

A week or two later we headed south to Minneapa State Park, a few miles west of Mankato. The overnight was worthwhile, but this park has a problem with traffic.

The park's most famous feature is a waterfall, and it's a nice one. Too bad it's separated from the rest of the park by a couple of busy highways. Also of interest is the buffalo herd they've introduced. But here, too, the interest is fleeting. The animals have been brought in from Blue Mound State Park, out near the South Dakota border, and they're being managed by personnel from the Minnesota Zoo. The theory is that they'll browse the three-mile stretch of native prairie in the center of the park and keep it in shape.

We even walked the extra mile and explored the Red Jacket Bike Trail south of Mankato, which is famous for its trestle. It's a nice trestle. But you have to negotiate several highways to get to the trailhead, and once you've worked your way up the bike trail through the cool river-valley woods to flat, open country, you've got many miles of monotonous cornfields ahead. The nearby town of Rapidan was reputed to have an outstanding pie shop, but we didn't make it that far. We drove by later and were not surprised to find that it was closed for the season.

The Minnesota River

Even the rivers near the park are a little perverse. You may think you're crossing the Blue Earth, but it turns out to be the Le Sueur. And let's not forget Minneopa Creek itself, which produces the magnificent waterfall and is far more robust than a "creek" in its lower reaches. One watercourse flows into the other, and they all flow into the "mighty" Minnesota River eventually. But the Minnesota River has always been a scaggy, dismal affair, wide but sandy, riddled with deadheads, shifting, unattractive, and unreliable. (Thoreau didn't think much of it either.)

The park is situated on a bluff alongside the river, but you seldom see the river from the park. All the same, there's a nice trail through the woods from the group camp down to the river that follows along the banks of Minneopa Creek. And the trail that runs along the fence just outside the buffalo compound is heavenly on a cool summer morning.

Driving down the gravel road through the buffalo pen on a hot, dusty afternoon isn't much fun, but we got lucky and came upon the herd feeding just inside the fence near the campground in evening light. Buffalo are generally sluggish and unattractive, but they are also impressive in their own strange way.

Note: Individuals of a certain temper like to point out that the animal we sometimes refer to as a buffalo is actually a bison. This is sheer pedantry. The American bison has been commonly referred to as a buffalo since the eighteenth century. No one would mistake it for a water buffalo, a different animal entirely with a very different name. The water buffalo is indigenous to India, where it's called  जल भैंस.

The water buffalo has been introduced to many other parts of the world, of course. When we eat buffalo milk mozzarella from Italy, we're probably eating water buffalo cheese.   

 During our exploration of the countryside, I thought from time to time of Pierre-Charles Le Sueur. The first European known to have explored the Minnesota River, Le Sueur excavated some bluish clay in the vicinity in 1683 and sent it to Paris, where it was determined to contain copper ore. After trading some furs and spending a few years in prison, he was finally granted permission from Louis XIV to return, almost twenty years later, and in 1700 he built a fort at the juncture of the Le Sueur and the Blue Earth Rivers, ostensibly  determined to mine the ore. Le Sueur soon left the fort with additional samples, heading downstream for New Orleans, and he never came back.

 No one knows precisely where the fort was located, nor what happened to the thirty-odd men Le Sueur abandoned there. The plot to a low-budget wilderness disaster film is lurking in the interstices between those facts, I think, along the lines of Cabeza de Vaca (Mexico 1991) or Zama (Argentina 2017). For a post-modern, time-travel twist, the film-maker might consider including the two young women in bikinis whom we met just as they were finishing their kayak run down the Le Sueur River.

Myre-Big Island State Park lies south and east of Albert Lea, right on the Iowa border. It's a park of several moods and habitats. The Big Island referred to in the title is heavily wooded with mature oaks and other species. The lowlands to the southwest, which jut out into Albert Lea Lake, are marshy. The rest of the park consists of grassy rolling hills interspersed with aspen, sumac, and hardwood species.

 There are hiking trails everywhere, and in late summer the landscape is rich with wildflowers and fruiting shrubs and trees. 

We snagged the best campsite, #99, which is private, has plenty of shade, but also opens out toward the nearby fields.

It's a perfect setting from which to read the daily newspaper or jot a few notes in your journal.

Birdlife is scarse, other than the scores of pelicans out on the lake. A few redstarts. Goldfinches. An indigo bunting or two. Unidentifiable swallows passing overhead. Catbird. Great-crested flycatcher. I believe I saw a mama wren feeding her babies. Lots of chattering in the underbrush. And just now a solitary field sparrow. Singing.

A young couple strolled by a few minutes ago, dangling their waterbottles, holding hands. Then they turned around and headed back the other way, giggling. Looking for kindling, maybe? 

The Burden (and promise) of Pesto

It isn't a ritual. I wouldn't even call it a tradition. But at a certain point in the progress of summer the thought rises as ineluctably as the water temperature in the nearby lakes: we've got to make some pesto.

I'm referring here not to a small summery daub fed from the herb garden that runs alongside the driveway. No. This is the supply that we make in large batches and freeze in small quantities, to be thawed and consumed on those cold evenings when the sky is gray, the sun sets at five, and snowdrifts block the glass doors leading out onto the deck.

And so, on yet another cool and beautiful mid-summer morning, I make my way downtown to the farmers market. Seven-thirty. It's quiet enough that I can park right next to the stalls. My mission: to pick up a bunch of basil sufficient for the task at hand.

That "bunch" will have to be a fairly large bunch, of course, and I'm pleased to see, after looking at a few modest bouquets of basil on the tables of the Hmong truck farmers here and there, that Dehn's Garden Herbs is occupying its usual place halfway down the central aisle. Let's get it over with. A bag of fresh basil about the size and weight of a coast guard cushion for five dollars. I'll take it.

The fridge back home is bulging with produce, but I find it impossible to resist a few other vegetables sitting on the table of the elderly Hmong couple in the next stall: some potatoes, and a cardboard tray containing three fairly large eggplants. Why eggplant, of all things? Maybe as a nod to the Bastille Day celebration we never quite got going this year. Or maybe, to borrow a phrase from the mountain climber Sir Edmund Hilary, "Because it was there."

The ad hoc nature of the enterprise may be suggested by the fact that year after year, we find ourselves wondering which pesto recipe to use. The proportions vary quite a bit from one to the next. I have a dim recollection of someone's advice not to put the cheese in if you're going to freeze it. And a friend insists it's best to omit the pine nuts; they taste much better when you heat them in a dry pan and sprinkle them over the pasta just before you eat it. That's certainly true. But it often happens that you don't have any pine nuts on hand in the middle of winter, so we always put them into the pesto before freezing. (There's nothing to stop you from adding more later, too.)

The aromas of anise, basil, and garlic soon fill the kitchen. Plucking the leaves from the stems is a pleasant task, but transferring the pesto from the food processor to the zip-lock bags is a fine art. There's a lot of olive oil involved, and things can get messy.

Four scoops per bag, or five? Well, they don't have to be identical. Finally those beautiful green envelopes of summer stuff have been tucked away in the freezer.

Now, what are we going to do with that eggplant?