Itasca from the north

Arriving at Itasca from the north can be a refreshing experience. The approach includes some dramatic roller-coaster hills as it traverses the Itasca Moraine, along with plenty of fields and wetlands. There are occasional signs directing canoeists to landings along the Mississippi, which at this point flows north and east unseen from the road, and is seldom more than ten feet across.

On our way in we stopped briefly at Coffeepot Landing (see above), which consists of a primitive campsite cut out of the alder shrubbery and a snowmobile bridge across the stream at the concrete-reinforced riverbank. There is nothing glamorous about the Mississippi at this point, and on a hot day in July it's hard to believe that anyone ever found it a convenient travel route. Then again, I suppose that simply underscores how difficult it must have been to travel overland during the fur trade era.

I entered the park with a vague and unpleasant sense of familiarity, as if we'd come here once too often. That feeling was short-lived, however; it was replaced by irritation, because when we pulled into the drive at Burt's Cabins, we discovered that the cabin I thought we'd rented, well isolated down in the woods—number 3, according to the map on the website—was really number 4. The cabin we had rented, which bore a big #3 above the door, was a small and seemingly charmless structure right next to the gravel road that circled through the resort.

 It did nothing to lighten my mood  when I stepped inside and noticed a quaint plaque above the refrigerator that read, "Welcome to cabin 5."

But it didn't take long for us to recognize that cabin #3 had a superb and utterly private deck looking out across a wooded valley containing more than a hundred mature red pines. 

Yes, I counted them. It was that kind of visit. We biked the 16-mile Wilderness Loop one morning and hiked both the Schoolcraft and sections of the Brower Trail, but we also spent most of both afternoons sitting leisurely on the deck. We listened to the plaintive calls of the eastern pewee and the muted tap-tap-tap of several yellow-bellied sapsuckers. 

A red squirrel stopped by from time to time to lecture us about something or other. I have no idea what he was upset about.

And of course we brought along some books.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of packing for a trip is selecting an array of books to match any mood that might arise. Among the books I brought along were The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke, The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, a thick paperback copy of Thoreau's Journals, F. M. Cornford's The Unwritten Philosophy, The Poet's Self and the Poem by Eric Heller, and the miniature Shambala edition of Cold Mountain's poems. I also tossed in On Becoming a Magical Mystical Bear by Matthew Fox. It's the kind of book you spot on the shelf right before you leave, not having thought about it for twenty years, and say, "A bit of New Age theology? Might be just the thing."  

On our second afternoon Hilary saw me reading it and said, "I never did like that cover. What's the copyright date?" I took a look. 1976. (I never liked the title either.)

"And what about that Handke book?" she asked. I took a look. Copyright 1977. I grabbed the Heller book from the pile that was sitting on the cooler between our chairs and took a look at the copyright page. 1976.

Eerie and amazing. But what does it MEAN?

Our bike trip took us past the visitors' center where we discovered they were celebrating Smokey Bear's birthday. We enjoyed chatting inside with a sharp, winsome intern from Crookson who's studying natural resource management at the "tech" there. Hilary's relatives are from Crookston, and we used to visit the campus often just to look at the landscaping. When I used the term "tech," however, the woman informed me politely that it had become a full-fledged branch of the U back in 1966. (How many people know the precise date, even in Crookston?)

She was working at Itasca over the summer to see if park management might be an interesting area of specialization.

"Do you know birds?" I asked.

"That's wildlife management," she shook her head. "And birds are too hard. I'm not that interested in Latin names."

"Well, maybe you could help us with this," I persisted. "We heard a thrush out on the wilderness trail, it sounded like this: one fairly long clear note, then a triple diddle at a higher note, but the entire song in a different key each time. Yet with that slightly ethereal, flutey, thrush-like trill. "

"Thrushes? Let's see. There are three or four.  Wood thrush. Swainson's. Hermit...."

"You do know your birds. We can add the gray-cheeked, and the veery."

"The veery's a thrush?"

After bending the poor woman's ear for quite a while with tales of Crookston and questions about her nascent career, we went outside to chat with the fire-fighters, foresters, and dispatchers, and to take a look at the equipment—everything from water-cans to bulldozers to life-saving space blankets—that was lined up along the curb. While we were out there a helicopter flew low overhead and landed in a parking lot nearby. 

One of the foresters knew quite a bit about the ongoing strike at the Blandin paper mill in Grand Rapids. We hadn't heard about it. "It's a Finnish company now," he said. "They pit their mills against one another. It will be a big blow to Grand Rapids and the entire region, really, if they close it down."

We thought it might be nice to have lunch at Douglas Lodge looking out toward the lake—maybe pan-fried walleye, broccoli, boiled potatoes, with a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley on the side—but the restaurant was closed, as usual. A half-hour's ride later, most of it downhill, we contented ourselves with a couple of pre-made sandwiches from the Mary Gibbs café at the other end of the lake.

I enjoy chatting with the locals. You learn stuff about the human ecology of the region, and are reminded that the metro area figures into the local world-view hardly at all.  

Back on the deck after our bike ride, I opened Thoreau's journal and by a strange coincidence hit upon a passage in which he looks out toward some distant hills:

"In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of earth and be reminded of the invisible towns and communities, for the most part unremembered, which lie in the further and deeper hollows between me and those hills. Towns of sturdy uplandish fame, where some of the morning and primal vigor still lingers, I trust. It is cheering to think that it is with such communities that we survive or perish."

A few pages on, in an entry dated August 6, he writes: "Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming, i.e. perhaps in the same proportion."

That got me to thinking of the flowers we'd been seeing—white yarrow, bladder campion, purple hyssop, harebells, black-eyed susans. A bit of vervain. Bindweed. Lots of fireweed. An aquatic spread of water-lilies on Oziwindib Lake. A few small, pale orchids on the bog walk in Bemidji. 

Dogbane

Just that afternoon we'd started seeing a few of those tiny, long-stemmed pink purses, but couldn't remember the name. False tick-seed trefoil? But the real start was dogbane, with its well-spaced opposite leaves and bright pink stems. A yellow primrose here and there. White and purple clover. Bee balm.

Thoreau again, from August 23, 1852: "Why have we slandered the outward? The perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense."

I heard some kids playing some sort of baseball game with a hollow plastic bat—you can tell by the sound—over in the grass between cabins 7 and 8. Shouting and laughing. I remember the over-heated fun of such games, and as I thought back on it, it occurred to me that the high-pitched shouts are as important to the event as the sweating bodies and the outcome of the game itself.  

_____________________

The next morning it was 54 degrees. Sun not yet up. Shadows on the deck. I put on my sweatshirt, hood up, with a fleece vest over it. As I came out of the cabin I saw our neighbors across the way, heading out to do some fishing with a camouflage canoe on top of their car and their boat in tow. 

It almost brought tears to my eyes as I watched how carefully they made sure they didn't slam the door as they departed.