Halcyon Fall Days

It’s become a struggle, almost, trying to make the most of the seemingly endless string of beautiful fall days we’ve been having. There have been excursions to the Landscape Arboretum, the river banks of downtown St. Paul and Mounds Park, Bud’s Landing at Spring Lake Regional Park, and even an overnight down in Forestville. The coup de grâce was a leisurely three-day trip under clear blue skies up to Itasca State Park.

We were in no great hurry to arrive at the park, and took a few secondary roads east of Rice to visit the Crane Meadows Wildlife Refuge. We spent a half-hour strolling along the Platte River through an oak savannah and were rewarded with a sighting of a bittern in the reeds on the opposite bank. They’re not exactly rare, but bitterns are hard to spot; I hadn’t seen one in five years. I also caught sight of a small bird moving through the underbrush and managed to get a good look with my binoculars. “I think that’s a Harris sparrow!” I all but exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Hilary replied. She’d pulled out her phone and identified the short, wheezy call on her Merlin app.

Our next stop, a half-hour up the highway, was Morey’s Fish House in Motley. We’re fond of their herring in horseradish sauce, and also picked up two nice walleye fillets for dinner, along with a pint of seaweed salad. “We eat quite a bit of that in California,” I told the woman behind the counter, by way of idle conversation.

“Do you harvest it yourself?” she replied, with a straight face.

That night we cooked up a fish dinner at our cabin rental, and later took a walk in the dark down to the Douglas Lodge parking lot in hopes of seeing a few shooting stars. Zilch. The Draconid meteor shower is almost invariably disappointing, and this year was no exception.

The next morning we hiked an unnamed two-rut road just west of the north entrance in cool fresh air and glancing sunlight, flushing a grouse and a pileated woodpecker, and noting the many young pines that had been capped with slips of white paper to protect them from browsing deer. 

On the Bohall Trail, where many of the pines are more than 200 years, the seedlings and saplings had also been capped. 

The dogwood shrubs had lost most of their leaves and the trails we took seemed pleasantly open. We came upon bittersweet, highbush cranberries, and even some grapes. In the six miles we walked we met up with only a single group of hikers.

Late in the afternoon, a sheet of gray clouds arrived, and we decided to take a short trip up to LaSalle Recreation Area, a few miles north of the park. We took the trail from the picnic area down through the woods to the dock and looked out on the deepest lake in Minnesota--225 feet, so they say. We circled down a few gravel roads on the return trip, passing prosperous cattle ranches and hardscrabble homesteads that looked like something out of a Knut Hamsun novel, startling a few magpies in the process. No corn in sight. Hurray!

I had brought up a fine selection of reading materials: Death by Black Hole (Neil deGrasse Tyson); The Works and Days (Hesiod); The Limits of the Known (David Roberts); Silk Dragon II (Chinese poems translated by Arthur Sze); and Last Night’s Fun (Ciaran Carson). A book for every mood.

Did I do any reading? Nothing to speak of.

We left the next morning, but not before hiking the Roberts Trail, where the air was crisp and the ground moss was frosty. Or simply dead. Not a loon in sight on the lake.