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September of 2003
If
you turn the globe to North America and locate northeastern Minnesota,
you will make a discovery that I admit won’t shake the cornerstones of
world geography.Northeastern Minnesota is roughly equidistant from the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Pause to do the calculations. It means that for thousand miles, in every direction, northeastern Minnesota is completely separated from all seawater, barking seals, ocean breezes and Bermuda triangles. You could call that serious isolation. For a boy growing up in northeastern Minnesota as I did, being marooned so far from the established trade routes and legends of the deep might have produced disruptive personality kinks and actual neurosis. Intuitively I looked for compensations. I found them on the first day my father drove the family car down the hair-raising swerves and drop-offs of Highway 1 to Lake Superior from my home town of Ely in the mining country. Lake Superior is not formally described as an ocean. That is a technicality. When I first saw it at the age of six I was electrified. It spread to the horizon, filled with a million sequins dancing in the morning sun. For me it was an ocean. I grew up surrounded by lakes but this was a sight for Balboa. I lobbied my father to hurry down the woodsy headland above Lake Superior to the shore line so I could touch the water and feel the spray. I could see it whirling off the rock cliffs below us where the surf sent its impatient combers vaulting high above the beach. In those years, it wasn’t easy to get there. Highway 1 was built and paved in the tracks of an old logging road, before technology arrived in the northern Minnesota woods. Most of its right-angle turns and seemingly bottomless dips were never straightened out or seriously reformed by the pavers. Highway 1 was one of the last of the navigable roads in America for which the motorists’ standard preparation included Dramamine tablets and empty stomachs before departure. But we did finally arrive on what was and is called the North Shore Drive, and I touched the waters of Silver Bay and heard the roar of the surf, and Lake Superior became my ocean. I have returned to it scores of times then, driven its shore, boated in it, flown over it, bicycled around it, skied beside it and once actually swam in it. My wife and I drove along its coastline north of Duluth to Grand Marais a few days ago on our way to and from the historic Gunflint Trail near the Canadian border. My wife has explored the North Shore of Lake Superior several times since we met. While we're riding along the waters and peering out into the bays, I sense my wife rather heroically trying to purge her brain of the nearly 10 years she lived in San Francisco. When this happens I drift into the role of a Lake Superior’s biographer. "This is a huge and amazing body of water." I said near Castle Danger. "It’s a sea. It actually has a six-inch tide. That is documented and it’s undeniable." "You don’t say," she said. "I do." "I know. It’s the sixth time you’ve said it in the last three years." I was going to argue that this was rank revisionism and unworthy of a cultured woman. But she was probably right. Moreover, she batted her lashes waggishly as she spoke in what was intended to be a clear gesture of tolerance braided with affection. Which was a mood—affection--I felt more than any other revisiting this watery vastness that was otherwise almost totally devoid of the sea’s romance. It is too cold for sunbathing, for surfing, for swimming, for dawdling, almost too cold for fishing or for boating and certainly for erotic grappling under the stars. But every life has scenes and places and textures that identify our passages and our rites in how we have come to live and what we have come to treasure. Those sensations recur without the dimming of time or infirmity. The woods and waters of northern Minnesota are those scenes and markers for me. The sights of Lake Superior, austere as it might be but still with the power to arouse wonder and humility, are part of that. The pine forests and waterways and the stunning grace and marvel of the aurora borealis in the northern sky in midwinter—all of these lifted me into my adulthood and into the wider world. Not far from here was a lake where we canoed as boys. We imagined ourselves as the reincarnated Magellans and the islands out there were the islands of Cape Horn. The waves were a little smaller, which was good, because nobody wore life jackets in those years. Sifting through those images in our ripening years and returning to those lands and waters does not have to be an exercise in soupy nostalgia, although there’s no special reason to knock soupy nostalgia. They are places of restoration and thanksgiving. A few miles beyond the town of Two Harbors we rode past a little clump of cottages and motel units. There was a sign: "Closed." It was Anna Mae Peterson’s Cliff and Surf, where I’d stayed a dozen times to hear the surf thrashing and thundering, on the verge of piling into the bedroom. Anna Mae was the aging princess of the North Shore for hundreds of guests over the years. Her guest rooms were immaculate. The sea was at hand. The little lounge was open and available all night for insomniacs or dreamers, with its doughnuts and popcorn, but mostly for people who wanted to sit by the hour with a hot chocolate in hand or a book, treasuring an interlude of unity with wild nature. Anna Mae battled the reality of expenses and maintenance and mounting years, and finally had to relinquish what, after the death of her husband, she loved most in life. I tried the door to her nearby home. It was locked by the real estate company. I looked into the sitting room where we’d talked so many times. The furniture was gone. The house was empty. Without words I thanked Anna Mae for all she and her northern sea had brought into my life. We rode up the Gunflint Trail 50 miles to the lakeside cabin owned by a friend in Minneapolis who had invited us to spend the weekend and had given us the key. We stopped at Johnson’s little super in Grand Marais and nearly bought out the store. "It’s a weekend," I reminded my wife. "It’s not an expedition to Baffin Island." She said we needed enough to fend off starvation in case we were snowbound. I said it was August. She said in Minnesota it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between August and January. I raised a white flag. We built a fire and read into the night. We looked out on the lake and felt embraced by the quiet and the starlight. A few waves lapped timorously against the dock and boulders. The next day was glorious, and we canoed Seagull, sloshing around in the breeze , cooked a steak for dinner, lit a fire, read while the flames cracked and Schuman’s A Minor piano concerto played on the family’s 78 rpm records. And finally on Sunday we hiked for two hours on the Kekakabic Trail. I thought I’d never set foot there again. It was something you did years ago if you knew the northwoods and had energy. The Kekakabic Trail was built 70 years ago by the kids of the CCC’s, the Civilian Conservation Corps created by FDR to give thousands of young men some work in the worst years of the Depression. It was built as a fire trail but was never intended for serious hiking. I remember hiking the 45 miles with two friends 35 years ago, through the woods and bush, around a dozen lakes, from the Gunflint Trail to the Fernberg Road near Ely. And I remembered trying to ski it a few years later, following the blazes hammered by the Forest Service into the trunks of the Norways above the snowdrifts. For a newspaper series I called it the "Trail of the Blue Diamonds," which is what the blazes resembled. It was a good try, but a nightmarish experience. The government weather station officially recorded 40 degrees below zero on the first two nights, and our sleeping bags degenerated into the consistency of cast iron. We called it off after four days. The slush just below the snow pack on the frozen lakes built up snow chunks eight inches deep on the bottoms of our skis. We had to clean them every 30 minutes in brutal cold. But in the last week of August in 2004, this was the Kekakabic Trail once more. There wasn’t another soul on it. We walked in from the road, through the aspen and pine and trailside patches of wild blueberries and raspberries. The odd jay or seagull flew overhead and far below us in the marsh, three ducks made a V in the water. There wasn’t a sound. I looked for plastic blue diamonds on the Norways, eight feet off the ground. There were none. This was another time, a slower walk, an older woods, and a visitor full of thanks. ---- Jim Klobuchar 763-258-1371 e-mail: jim@jimklobuchar.com www.jimklobuchar.com www.jimklobucharwrites.com Cordially, Jim Klobuchar |