Itasca in Evening Light

Itasca State Park attracts half a million visitors a year, but it's also big—33 thousand acres—which makes it easy for visitors to “get away from it all” if they know where in the park to go, and when. Hilary and I spent a few days there recently and were richly rewarded.

A defining event of our last visit took place when we pulled out of the driveway, leaving the tent behind. This time, we snagged a last-minute room before we left in the four-season suites, a modern complex just up the hill from Douglas Lodge with a small kitchen, stripped-log furnishings, and faux-Northwoods decor. There isn’t much of a view out the window, but when you’ve been stomping through the woods all day, who cares?

The trip north through Little Falls and Wadena has become so routine (though Menagha and Sebeka are wonderfully droll) that we decided to add a small detour to our route. After the traditional stop at Morey’s Fish House in Motley for fresh walleye and herring in horseradish sauce, we continued west on Highway 10 past New York Mills to Frazee, where Wannigan Regional Park opened recently, directly adjacent to the high school football field?!?

It’s a small park—a few miles square—though the locals have big plans for extending and developing it. It consists of a river, a covered bridge, and a few short walking and biking trails across a harmonious arrangement of woods and open fields. We’d been fighting a strong headwind all the way north, and it took some effort just to assay the lovely scene while standing in the parking lot.

One added feature, and the likely reason there were five cars in the lot when we arrived, is the larger-than-life-sized wooden statue of a troll that’s been built in the woods down by the river by a Thomas Dambo,  a Danish sculptor and self-proclaimed garbage-artist. He and his team have crafted quite a few such figures in the region, and around the world, out of recycled materials. Many people enjoy hunting them out. I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of fairy tales. I have quite a few volumes from the Pantheon Folklore Library—French, Arab, Irish, Swedish, Japanese, Native American, Victorian, Provençal—not to mention the classic works by Grimm, Andersen, Perrault, Marguerite de Navarre, and the Neapolitan pioneer Basile.

Trolls have their place in some of these worlds, like genies, kitsune, memegwesiwag, and leprechauns. But trolls are usually small, malevolent, creatures, also elusive. A twenty-foot wooden statue of a troll, resting in broad daylight under a tree, doesn’t seem much like a troll to me.

We took a tour through the reserve on our bicycles, and made a detour on foot through the woods to pay obeisance to the wooden giant. A half-hour later we were eating lunch a few miles down the road at a lakeside café in Detroit Lakes called Hub 41.  It was voted “best new restaurant in Minnesota” by Lake Time Magazine (which I’ve never heard of.) The view of the big lake from the patio was nice; the food was satisfactory. The most notable thing about the place was the decor.

From there it was back east on Highway 34 to Itasca, where the angled afternoon sun streaked through the dappled woods and lakes along the south entrance to the park.

We stopped by the campground office to pick up our key. The woman in line in front of us had a license plate from New York. “I’ve been camping out for a month,” she said, “I need a room with a bathtub.” She held up her left arm; it was in a cast.

Once we’d hauled our stuff into our suite, we got some dinner fixing together and headed down to the lakeside picnic area. We had the place to ourselves. Evening had arrived, and we sat at a picnic table a few feet from shore eating a cold supper while we listened to U of MN biology students (I guess) far out on the lake chatting as they kayaked toward the headwaters. “Yes, but maybe the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Maybe we need to return to …”

It reminded me of my days as a camp counselor, of childhood evenings in Oklahoma playing kick the can, and also of something my mother told me one evening at the family cabin on Lake Vermilion about Carl Jung’s belief that the crepuscular hour was a “liminal threshold” where the ego's defenses dropped and the "unconscious" opened the soul. 

That may be true. But it’s the sound of distant, youthful voices in excited conversation that seals the uncanny emotional power of the moment.

The Schoolcraft Trail

We spent several hours the next morning in the vicinity of the headwaters, most of it on the Schoolcraft Trail, which follows the western shore of the lake. Small waves of warblers were working the woods along the trail. Most were juveniles or had lost their mating plumage and were hard to identify, but we did recognize a blackburnian, a black-and-white, a chestnut-sided, a Nashville, a golden-winged, a pine, a black-throated green, and a few other species.

On our way back to the car we ran into a couple heading out to the point. The man was wearing a floppy leather hat of the Buffalo Springfield variety and a tee shirt from the Winnipeg Folk Festival. “Are you from Canada?” I asked him. “

No, we’re from Cold Spring, just south of St. John’s. I sued to be an electrician at the university there.”

Hilary and I attended one of the first Winnipeg festivals, back in 1975. They last attend in 2018, just before Covid hit. “We couldn’t believe it! They had rap in the mix!”

Hilary mentioned St. John’s resident potter, Richard Bresnahan, and the woman piped up: “They’re going to light the wood kiln on October 14 at 4 p.m. It’s open to the public, and very ceremonial. You should come.”

“But I like to go a few days later, at night” the man added, “when the kiln is really hot and the flames are shooting up from the chimney toward the sky.”

Back at the parking lot, we ran into a ranger and we caught his attention.

“I’ve got a question for you,” I said.

“I’m not the guy to ask,” he said, “I’m in security.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. “The last section of the trail has been closed for years now. Why?”

“They made some archeological finds out there and they don’t want people disturbing the site before they get a chance to dig.”

“Well, we just want to go out and enjoy the view …”

“You’re not the kind of people they’re worried about,” he said.

So we went back down the trail, climbed through the brush alongside the barricade, and continued a quarter-mile to the point to enjoy the wonderful view across the lake toward Schoolcraft Island and the pristine wooded shoreline of the scientific and natural area beyond.  

State Fair Strategies

A day or two before visiting the fair, I copied the text from a Star Tribune article ranking the food into a Word document, then edited it down from six pages to two by removing all entries relating to cookies, desserts, ice cream, and alcoholic beverages, and every item that ranked lower than three stars. I also removed the cutesy narrative verbiage that accompanies such articles:  “We all liked the xxx but the yyy was bland and strangely salty at the same time.”

We forgot this document at home, but it’s just as well. Once you’ve had a pronto pup, an “about a foot long” hotdog with fried onions, a chocolate malt, and a bag of hot, greasy mini-donuts, you don’t have room, or funds, for much more.

We left home at 7:45—twenty minutes earlier than usual—and didn’t meet up with the line of cars west of the North Lot on Larpenteur Avenue until after we’d passed the Bell Museum. Halleluiah! Twenty minutes later, after repeatedly cursing the stream of cars entering the line from side-streets to the north, we turned the corner into the lot. It was going to be a good day.

We entered the fairgrounds proper at 8:45. There were still hints of coolness in the air, and the North Plaza was half-deserted. But there were plenty of people around, and when we spotted Giggles Campfire Grill down the way Hilary said, “Why not have some walleye cakes right now?”

So we did.

Year after year, we habitually begin the day in the Eco-building, but we decided on a whim to tackle the art building—the day’s piece de resistance—first. But we made a stop at an ATM because we couldn’t remember if credit cards were widely accepted on the fairgrounds. (Duh! I must have been thinking back to those days in junior high when you went to the fair with a friend and fifteen dollars in your pocket, which you’d been saving up all summer.)

The art exhibit was a mixed bag, as usual. The two qualities that were in short supply were freshness and expressiveness. Some works were laborious constructions using bottle caps or hand-made tiles. Some were nature paintings done from photographs that got all the details right but failed to bring things to life. The sculptural pottery was uniformly uninteresting.

But there were also quite a few pieces that made you look again, and again. Everything came together, for one reason or another. A casual confidence, a lack of evident effort. Also, perhaps, a sense of mystery.

Here, for example, is a piece by Kimberly Wetzel called "Hidden in the Marsh."

It isn't easy to see the delicacy of the lines, but I would simply say that it's pretty cool.

Or if that's a little messy for your taste, how about this wonderful image of a green heron that has been created entirely out of pieces of fabric stitched together.

Or how about this landscape by R. Baller called "Sharp Landscape."

The title hits the nail on the head. The painting has a sharpness in the edges, and also an intensity in the tints, without becoming overly detained or undermining the almost statuesque beauty of the landscape itself. 

On a different plane of exactitude in Ronda Dick's elegant and slight stylized "Who Doesn't Love a Birch."

You may accuse me of highlighting nature-oriented works while ignoring the portraits, scenes of human drama and whimsy. Maybe so. But here is a piece of whimsy that I could not pass by or ignore.

And here's a remarkable pencil sketch by Robert Lundgren with the portentous title "Portent" that captures the spirit of the scene without in any way clarify what it was all about.

In one of the first aisles I came upon this print by Josh Bindewald called "Discourse." I don't particularly like the colors but for some reason the ensemble works.

 As Hilary and I made our way through the building I heard one volunteer say to another, "The line at the crop art exhibit is already two-and-a-half hours long."

Yikes! But that's the thing about the fair. There are plenty of things to do. If you want to wait in line, you wait in line. If you don't, fine. You go do something else.

When we emerged from the Art Building, I noticed there was no line at the "about a foot long" hotdog stand, so I bought one. Hilary usually geta a Pronto Pup at the stand down the street, but the line there extended all the way down past the Education Building. A forty-five minute wait!

In the distance, the line at the Pronto Pup food truck.

So she went to get a malt at the Kiwanis booth and we sat in the shade of the park across the street listening to a performer called Duke Otherwise sing a song about a dog. The fiddler was very good!

In the 4-H Building we watched a large group of young people do a choreographed line dance while singing a cheerful song the exact import of which I no longer remember. I noticed that the kids in the front were much better at it that the ones in the back, and I tried to imagine what the rehearsals had been like, off in far away Pelican Rapids or Waubun or Thief River Falls. (After all, the fair is billed as the "great Minnesota get-together." Shouldn't we be trying to get to know the farm kids from outstate?)

We spent some time in the Handicraft Building admiring the knitting and the quilting and even the jewelry. 

The bagpiper had begun to play outside O'Gara's by the time we reemerged into the sunlight. The day was getting hot. (It had reached 91 by the time we left.) We headed for the Agriculture Building, where I chatted with a woman from the Minnesota Horticultural Society about old cottonwood trees and the best time to fertilize your garden. We crossed back to the Farmers Union, and along the way I stopped to tell a woman selling metal roofs about the rubber roof we recently had installed on our house. (These people are bored. They'll be happy to talk to anyone.) 

At the Framers' Union we bought a pork cutlet in a bun with cole slaw and a cup of iced coffee, which we consumed on a shady park bench nearby. As we passed Ye Olde Mill I suddenly realized I had always wanting to take a flume ride through a dark tunnel where you're sure to get soaking wet. But not today.

We learned some things from the woman at the Voyageur National Park booth outside the DNR Building, wandered into the bat cave and wandered back out again, looked briefly at the fish pond--always refreshing--some beautiful chickens, a man sheering a sheep ...

Our final destination was the West End Market ... a terrible, treeless place to be. Five dancers were twirling in a performance circle, only one or two grades higher in skill level than the 4-H teens, I would say, though their costumes were better, and it appeared they were having fun. (Maybe they were getting paid?)

We bought a $12 strawberry lemonade on our way back to the lot on Larpenteur Ave that was so sour we had a hard time finishing it. But we were in need of hydration, and the Culligan booth was three blocks away.