Here’s a special message from Congressman Loomis Beechly, who represents Minnesota’s 9th District – all the water surface area in the state.
Greetings 9th Districters
There have been several phone calls to my office asking if I voted to repeal the Health Care Bill yesterday. This is disturbing because I thought my office number was unlisted – if people keep calling, how will we get any work done?
Besides, my position on Health Care Reform has been crystal clear all along – I’m ambivalent.
We have no health care facilities located in the 9th district, and until someone decides to build a floating hospital or set up a clinic at the end of their dock, I see no reason to get excited. For the most part, the health care industry is a huge money game anyway, and the players are all on land. If people who live in the 9th district need to see a doctor, it stops being my concern as soon as they cross the shoreline.
Congressman Beechly Addressing Constituents
Interestingly, during the summer months when many people in other districts want medical attention, they discover the doctor is here in the 9th district, drinking beer on a pontoon and water skiing after dark – things he said they should never ever do when he was in finger wagging mode, back at the office.
So basically I’m for Health Care Reform if it puts more money into the hands of the doctors who like boats. If it enriches the doctors who like to go hiking in the woods or the doctors who are into flying their own airplanes or alpine skiing from helicopters, I’m not interested.
I’m also for Health Care Reform that promotes things like intensive Ice Fishing Treatments, Inner Tube Massage and Jet Ski Therapy. I haven’t seen any of those things in the health care bill that was passed, so I don’t care if it gets repealed or not.
In my opinion, we need a REAL health care measure – something that skips over all this nonsense about co-pays and deductibles and simply requires every American to spend at least one day at the lake every year. Whether they’re calming their stressed out nerves by relaxing or taking part in some kind of beneficial physical activity doesn’t really matter, as long as they’re spending money.
That’s the kind of reform I’m after, and I’ll keep fighting for it here in Washington D.C. until I get it. But don’t hold your breath.
Unless you happen to be trapped under the ice.
Your Faithful Congressman,
The Hon. Loomis Beechly
I know it’s impossibly cold today, so let’s mentally transport to vacation time. What’s your favorite thing to do at the lake?
a gracious good morning to You All –
we’re not big in or on the water folks. NEAR the water is fine and my favorite thing is to watch for water birds – all kinds of ducks, geese, swans, terns, herons, egrets, loons, – whatever happens to show up on the little pond near our house. we’ve got a nice bench under a big red pine, up above the pond a little, where there’s plenty of browse for the goats and there’s always a cool breeze.
Rep. Beechley, I like your attitude. A day at the lake is a fine prescription for almost anything. I hope you mean a warm, summer lake, not a cold, frozen lake.
My favorite thing at this age is sitting in a boat fishing, something
i love doing but something I have not done for years now. I particularly love to fish for pan fish which are small enough for me to handle independently. This is opposed to wrestling a big Northern into the boat, then getting the hook that it swallowed out of the beast. The second favorite thing at a lake or any body of water is to walk on the beach picking up rocks.
It relaxes my cold, hunched shoulders just to think of it.
Morning all. While I love the idea of the lake, I often feel like the only Minnesotan who doesn’t have “a place up north”. The teenager and I have an annual camping weekend in Hayward every summer that involves tent camping on Lake Nelson, but we don’t do much on the actual lake. But I’d have to say that sitting on the dock right now, my feet dangling in the water, with a good book in hand, sounds rather grand to me.
We don’t have one either – and didn’t have one growing up. I do have an aunt and uncle in Brainerd, so we go visit them (near the Mississippi, not a lake). Almost as relaxing as a cabin, and no worries about upkeep (unless you count bringing wine or other food bribes/offerings as “upkeep”).
Over the years, our favorite activity at our Lake Superior cabin might have been hiking. I spent five years trying to find “Lost Creek Falls,” a pretty little waterfall deep in the woods near my cabin. Finally found it. There is a long beach where you can shuck off your shoes and hike along the wet sands through loose schools of shorebirds. A friend now makes jewelry from beach glass, bird feathers and driftwood, so I have a new reason to saunter the beaches, eyes peeled for treasures the lake has spread out on the sands for my pleasure.
Sometimes we prefer to hang out at the cabin. My queer little cabin has astonishingly good acoustics, which makes it a joy to listen to public radio while cooking a meal: perhaps a bit of grilled chicken served with a fresh salad, rice pilaf and locally baked mulitgrain bread. A little white wine sweating in a glass. Out beyond our windows the great vault of sky over Bark Bay will begin turning into improbably colors: tangerine, indigo, cerise and rose. And then darkness.
Someone breaks out the board game called “Ghost.” One of the game markers has a crack in it, and if you get stuck being the one playing “Crackie” you have no chance to win. But you play anyway. Outside you hear spring peepers trilling in their high way, begging for sex. Waves slosh on the rocks. Somewhere up the path in the deep darkness a fox barks.
I knew about the falls for years, but kept getting conflicting and frustratingly vague directions. Every now and then I’d strike out looking for them. Then one day, following a new tip, I found myself walking with two women who were on their way to them.
I have a very pretty picture of them now. The walk is only about half an hour off a gravel road, so it isn’t too bad . . . if you know where to look!
Cynthia Yes, yes, yes! I was just writing Anna. I’m starting to think in terms of a summer Baboons-on-the-beach party up there. The last book club meeting was so much fun I think we now know that Baboons will have a good time wherever they go. I can sleep several people in my cabin. There is a motel in town for those so prudish they want a daily shower (there’s no running water at the cabin). One way or another, I think this is going to happen!
Meanwhile, yes, you are welcome to the cabin. Write me.
Despite all of the ice in Pratt, I did not fall on mine.
History of owning a cabin, which everyone else but us did:
1. Buy it one spring and so spend every free minute there, be gone from town every weekend, lose contact with friends and church. Talk about nothing else at lunch and coffee.
2. At first go there just to relax and enjoy nature. Then decide it could use a little modernizing and start making improvements for the next 3-4 years. So all you do when you are there is work. This is all you talk about at lunch and coffee because your cabin is your life.
3. Start inviting friends up to see the work in progress, when it is good enough, and have relatives dropping in, so now you work and entertain when you are there.
4. Realize you now own two homes to take care of and are now rather distant from the nature you went there to enjoy. So put more money into, this time in boats, docks, water skis, snowmobiles, etc.
5. Find it is getting tiresome, especially for your children who are now early teens, think the cabin is stupid and do not want to spend that much time with you ever anywhere.
5. Go there less and less until you find it is a burden and a waste of money. Sell it so some one else can go through the same steps.
Over a period of time every lake is surrounded by big modern homes with high taxes and all the problems of congested living intensified because they are in the woods on a lake. So all the owners have become right-wing anti-tax and anti-government people.
Gosh, Clyde. This is exactly how I imagined it would be to own a cabin, but it’s kind of depressing to think it might be true. Would any cabin owners like to say it isn’t so?
Dale and Clyde: I wrote a book in which one of the main arguments was that this is not necessarily “the” pattern of cabin ownership. I’ve personally witnessed many, many different patterns over the years. I would agree with Clyde that there is a romantic period of cabin ownership when you tend to go a lot and that is often followed by a period of beaver-ish fix-it-up activity. But some folks own cabins and never pick up a hammer, and many folks go on loving their lake place decades after finding it.
An overstatement of a pattern I watched fro 40 years. The last part is the current truth. Al the lakes nearest to TH are now year-round homes and the owners are pretty much as I described. I knew a few who bought a cabin and kept it that way, a few in the family for years and years.
We have seen almost exactly that progression in southern Minnesota. Most lake shore properties that once had quaint seasonal cabins have now been developed into year-round homes. Most of these homes are exceptionally large with manicured lawns that go down to the lake and add their nutrient load to the already impaired water quality. Many of those owners decry the public water access and want to have it removed so that other people can’t access “their” lake. They call us or the county sheriff when anglers fish too close to their dock and try to pass legislation about ownership of the water.
I grew up on a lake. Our family originally had a large old cabin there (I’ve already described it here) that we removed in the 1970s and built a large year-round home in its place. We were one of the first families to do that on Cannon Lake. Most lake places were summer cabins then. Part of the change came with the state mandate that lake property could not be sold unless the septic system was updated/created/legal. If you’re going to put in a new septic system, you might as well build a new house to go with it… This also made lake shore property a lot more valuable than it previously was.
Krista There are a great many processes that tend to make lakeshore property valuable, not all of them under public control. It is true of all lands, in fact, that they are often developed with really primitive structures at first. Over the years, subsequent homes or cabins are increasingly fancy. True of places in the woods as well as places on water. People like me romanticize the early stages of the process when average people can own a recreational home or cabin, but if you mean to make this a standard you would have to pass a lot of unusual legislation.
Still, I share your sense that it hurts to see so many lakes becoming more like fat suburbs with fancy all-season homes that are haughtier and less funky than the old cabins that preceded them. And I totally agree with you that we have failed to protect our lakes with legislation that favors water quality. We are loving our lakes to death with lawns that leach chemicals and topsoil into the shallows.
My concern is for the lakes themselves and for the quality experience all people have with their lakes. Current attitudes favor property owners and those property owners would very much like to have “their” lake all to themselves. Having grown up on a lake, I understand this sentiment. But now that I am too poor to ever hope to have such a place, I understand the value of our public heritage. We’re a state rich in lakes and I strongly believe we need to guard against the privatization of our heritage – lakes, rivers, prairies, woods. Much of our lake shore property in Minnesota is already in private ownership and the value of that lake shore property has made owning a place at the lake impossible for the average Minnesotan. The lakes are our natural heritage – they belong to all of us, not just the wealthy.
Krista One example of what you are talking about is the trend to extend docks WAY out into the lake, with all kinds of structure, so that the dock itself makes a dramatic claim on a lot of lake property. The DNR is gong to have to say, at some point, that 100-foot-long docks are not reasonable.
Agreed. That’s a really good example of one of the many issues. After a series of public input meetings in 2007, General Permit 2008-0401 was issued in 2008. It allows dock platforms and defines the overall size and shape. This link: http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/waters/watermgmt_section/pwpermits/docks.html
provides the permit and answers questions about the current rules. Further attempts to regulate structures in or on public water were returned by former Governor Pawlenty in 2010. He recommended that DNR take it up with Legislature in the 2011 session.
Where our lakes are concerned, legislators have to have really strong spines to go against the interests of lake shore property owners. Perhaps only Rep. Beechly has the required integrity and fortitude…
Growing up my father’s business partner and his family had a cabin about a half hour from our home. My mother loved going to the lake, my father hated it because…yes, he was enlisted to help fix, build, maintain the cabin which was a work in progress. I can’t keep up with my house, I can’t even imagine adding to that a second place to fix, clean, renovate, mow, weed…of course, growing up I loved going to someone’s cabin to swim, boat, goof around.
Wading. On a warm summer day, toes in the warm sand just below the surface. Water about halfway up my calves – above the ankles, but not up to my knees. Squish squish squish. Look out over the lake at the water sparkling in the sunshine, listen to the kids splashing and giggling. If I have my swimsuit on, I could sit down in the shallows, but best not to if I’m in shorts….
I think canoeing, especially in the boundry waters wilderness, is my favorite water activity. I haven’t found the time to go canoeing recently and I need to change that.
I enjoyed fishing with my grandfather when I was young. My Dad took me fishing a few times. Fishing wasn’t his favorite activity becase he spent too many long hours on lakes when he was young waiting for his father to get done fishing. I did have a good time fishing with my Dad when he was retired and we were on vacation at a resort. I don’t have my grandfather’s skill for catching fish and I don’t go fishing very often.
I like riding on boats out on the Great Lakes. When I was young I enjoyed riding on the car ferry that connected the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan. I also like the boat ride out to and back from Isle Royal.
Find “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” somewhere – or have a co-worker hum a few bars. This has been my go-to song for many years to get rid of ear worms. It’s good at pushing out the other tune, but won’t stay in your brain pan for too long.
Totally OT – just heard someone in the office talk about “utilizing Grandma” for babysitting. Seriously? Utilizing? I hate folks who say “utilize” when “use” would do (or be a more precise choice) – but utilizing Grandma? What is she – another piece of equipment in your garage? Is she of no practical use otherwise? You going to harness her to something to create something new?…sheesh. If I were Grandma I might be offended. (And might swat the baby’s dad on the nose for such poor use of his native language…)
Okay – I don’t hate the people who do this…I just hate that they do it. As I tell daughter – “I like you, but I don’t like your behavior sometimes.” Some days I wish I had a red Sharpie that I could magically use on speech and the spoken word…
I agree about “utilize” in place of “use”. However, I do find some appeal in the word in this context if the person intended it as a sort of euphemism for “conscripted”. But I wasn’t there.
AND I-I-I (stretch out the I, kids) dislike individual roaches when they encroach on my space on my personal sofa when I’m eating eggs poach -ed. (Make sure you say ed as in Jim Ed or you won’t feel the goosebumps!)
Kayaking at dawn. Once you slip out on the lake, the only sound is the one end of the paddle going into the water as the other lets loose a few drops – plip plip plip. You skim along the surface and notice a loon in the distance, then you don’t, then a minute later you see it clear the hell over the other direction. If you’re lucky s/he will do that eerie dawn call.
A pristeen little lake called Sweet Lake, NW Wisc. part of Upper Eau Claire chain of lakes — a friends’ cabin. Or on L. Minnetonka somewhere, and our son used to do Minnehaha Creek. First we had a “lake kayak”, a 2-seater, but more like a low-lying canoe that was pretty hard to turn. Now we have 2 little river ones, tippy but can turn on a dime.
Linda The bay in front of my cabin is world-class kayak country. Off to the west is a ghostly, misty, romantic slough that looks like nowhere else you have been. Off to the east is a set of sea caves that draws kayak fans from all over the world. Think of a rocky shoreline that has been eaten away like a big piece of Swiss cheese, with some holes big enough you can kayak into them. Try looking for this on YouTube: it might be Spirit Point or Squaw Point sea caves.
Krista If you flip over, you have a choice. Most people choose to flip back, and I understand it isn’t that hard to do. Or you release from the boat and bob to the surface. Both alternatives beat sitting there upside down breathing the lake. People who rent kayaks give lessons in flipping back right side up. One great source of kayak rentals is Bayfield, WI.
Krista, I’ve never flipped over. Your legs/feet are up against the sides, and are part of the steering – you sort of become “one with the boat”, and have quite a lot of control, but you do need to keep your hips and torso flexible and able to “gyrate” a bit. Not sure if I’m saying it right, but it’s fun.
my computer being down is raising hell with me. it turns out it is the power source not the computer so i am not looking at dealing with lost information but the inability to get up and go is frustrating. my iphone sucks for staying on the blog so i’m working it out. thanks for the concern.
ot sad news.
read this morning liberty custard is closing in january
new owners will be there sometime and they did buy the custard machines so there is hope but another one bites the dust.
back on topic, sitting next to it is my favorite thing, it is calming inspiring theraputic dream causing mesomorizing enchanted time that is like no other. ,ountain climbing is cool but i don’t do the same drifting off sweating and grunting as i do lounging next to the lake. the raft in the lake with a beveragea and a book is the way life was meant to be.
clyde, enjoy the trip. looks like you are making good progress. i like lawrence kansas. has a nice feel to it. pratt kansas doesn’t ring a bell. i was up near salina and loved it that the memorable thing there was that everyone on the road in there car raised two fingers on the steering wheel to say hello to you as you drove by. nmad eye contact and said hello, kind of like the motorcycle creedo of ackknowledging every motorcycle on the road. love that stuff. do they do that on the good red roads of pratt? (before freeways the good red roads were the ones you’d shoot for acording to the departed grandmother of my wife in central illinois. dales home country where the land is flat as a pancake and the roads are all pretty much the same with a variation of a curve or a gulley or a stretch of gravel.
linda i see you are interested in kayaking. brule wisconsin is all i have to say. outfitter next to the cro bar in city of brule will drop the kayaks and pick up you and your friends and tell you when you will get there. right mix of rolling and rapids. very nice.
see yall later. batteries ho
Linda tim is right about the joys of kayaking the Brule. I lived two summers along the Brule. It is one of the most exotically beautiful places in the Midwest. River kayaking is quite different from lake kayaking. Both can be delightful. There are stretches of the Brule that have virtually no rapids and stretches where the water would be rougher than a beginner should do if you hit the river at a time of high water levels. I’d be happy to chat with anyone who wants to know more.
A note to tim about everyone waving or giving the two finger greeting: Actually there is a lot of that in Southern MN. It seems to be an almost expected thing to do around smaller towns and rural areas in this part of the state. I’m not completely fond of this habit. I would rather just wave at people I know and I’m not sure if I know some of the people that wave because I can’t see them very well driving by in their trucks or cars, but I can see that they are waving.
Thanks for the cool video, Steve. Really makes you wish you were there.
YouTube also kindly offered to show me a video tutorial called Fish Hook Removal. I didn’t click on it, so I’m still not sure if it pertains to extricating hooks from fish, or doctoring yourself if you’re too embarrassed to go to an ER.
I haven’t tried kayaking. I think it would be fun. I think taveling around in a kayak or a conoe is much better than zooming around in a motor boat. I know motor boats are very useful for some things.
Walking along any beach on Lake Superior. One of my favorites is near Cornucopia (Steve’s neck of the woods) and another one is north of Grand Marais. I could just walk and walk and walk, looking at rocks, driftwood and beach glass, imagining the depths of the lake, listening to the immense water, watching the changing light.
I’m a fan of the little outcropping of rocks right in Grand Marais (some folks call it “The Point”) – small little spit of land, mostly dark grey/black rocks. But a great place to sit like a reptile on the warm rocks and watch the lake.
There are very few lakes in North Dakota, and the biggest lake in the state, Lake Sakakawea, has no trees around it since it is a man-made lake set in the middle of a mixed grass prairie. People have places “up at the lake” which are primarily old trailer homes they have moved there. I believe that most docks are public, and there is a pretty complicated arragement for land ownership since most of the lake is in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The lake is made from a dam on the Missouri River and is managed by the Corps of Engineers. Lake levels vary wildly depending on the snow pack in the Rockies in any given year, so that sometimes the docks have to be extended for hundreds yards to provide boat access. The lake provides water for many communities in western Norht Dakota. Beaches, of which there are few, are of poor quality since it is a lake set on a prairie, so people mainly fish and mess around in boats. The lake has only been there since the 1950’s, so there isn’t much of a history of places being passed down in the family. I am curious to see what is going to happen to the lake in the next few years since the prairie it covers is smack in the middle of the Bakken Oil Formation. I imagine there will be off shore oil rigs in the lake soon and multitudes of rigs on the bluffs surrounding the lake. Picturesque, don’t you think? As a native Minnesotan, I don’t consider the lake a “real” lake. People here swarm to the lake in any event. Gosh I sound cynical today. I had better snap out of it.
That lake is a real dilemma. The water quality is pretty poor, so no one wants any runoff from it and there is lots of wrangling about where and how to drain off some of it.
i wrote a reply that i thought would be good and it evidently didn’t get sent. i ll check it on the computre i wrote it on and see if i just need to hit the send button or what. otherwise it was nothing worth going back over , just frustrating to have your life flow hiccup yaknow??
Liberty Custard is selling 4 pints of their various flavors for $9.99 until they close. I was there yesterday and they have LOTS. I’m stocking my downstairs freezer!
Swimming, fishing, paddle-boating, laying out, laying in the hammock, Texas Caviar, Summer Shandy, watching 4th of July fireworks from the end of the dock, playing 500 and listening to MPR. These things we did last summer and summers before that and before that. The little cabin was built in the 60’s for $900. Built by my father in law and his 11 year old son. The land was leased – buying was out of the question. When our marriage ended, I continued going to the lake. My children insisted, and my ex said, “Of course you can still go. It belongs to everyone.”
His parents are gone and now so is he. Our fingers are crossed that we won’t suffer this loss too … please let the land owner let us keep leasing.
time to arrange a long lease for a story of the relationship to be published in the local paper to make the landlord sound benevolent. steve can help. you deserve to go there until you are returned to dust what could another 50 years really matter to him
clyde i looked up pratt kansas and see it is off the beaten track. i was wondering if th locals have that kansas habit from up north around salinas where they raise two fingers from the steering wheel when they go by to say hello and make eye contact with you. it is like the motorcycle tradition to wave and acknowledge each motorcycle that passes in the opposite direction and proclaims an unspoken brotherhood. i loved that about that part of the world.
good luck with that last two inches of your trip (on the map) i hope it warms up soon for you
I was driving roads very heavy with trucks and few locals. Did not really look either. But we ate in Meade at a local Cafe, almost exactly like one in Bowman ND. Nobody really stared and had several polite conversations.
Beautiful drive today. Miles and miles of prairie, of which I never tire. First 100 miles were through rime covered land and trees, drooping prairie trees, heavy with ice. Varying sorts of prairie land. Then miles through barren high NE NM desert. Must have seen 200 of more hawks on the hunt. Then a climb up into the the mountains but before that a 45 mile torturous detour to replace 25 miles but what a ride that was.
Hope you get the power back in the computer.
And what is is with motel rooms with no light in them?
By far, my favorite thing to do at the lake is take a really hot sauna (pronounced sow-na, not saw-na) and jump off the dock into a cold lake…many times! You never feel so alive as when you hit that cold water 🙂 My grandparents used to have a cabin in Northern Minnesota but had to sell it because they couldn’t keep it up any longer. I would always go to my cousins’ grandparents’ cabin with them. We would get the sauna so hot (woodstove, not electric, as any really good sauna has 😉 haha) that you really couldn’t see until you jumped into the water. Now I go to my friend’s family’s camp (in Michigan, they’re camps, not cabins) in Iron River, MI. It’s so much fun! When her entire family is there, we get into contests to see who can stay in the sauna the longest, while putting more and more steam on. Ah, I love to sauna 🙂 Thanks for warming me up on this chilly Friday morning!
Trail Baboon 
a gracious good morning to You All –
we’re not big in or on the water folks. NEAR the water is fine and my favorite thing is to watch for water birds – all kinds of ducks, geese, swans, terns, herons, egrets, loons, – whatever happens to show up on the little pond near our house. we’ve got a nice bench under a big red pine, up above the pond a little, where there’s plenty of browse for the goats and there’s always a cool breeze.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
Rep. Beechley, I like your attitude. A day at the lake is a fine prescription for almost anything. I hope you mean a warm, summer lake, not a cold, frozen lake.
My favorite thing at this age is sitting in a boat fishing, something
i love doing but something I have not done for years now. I particularly love to fish for pan fish which are small enough for me to handle independently. This is opposed to wrestling a big Northern into the boat, then getting the hook that it swallowed out of the beast. The second favorite thing at a lake or any body of water is to walk on the beach picking up rocks.
It relaxes my cold, hunched shoulders just to think of it.
Sigh.
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Morning all. While I love the idea of the lake, I often feel like the only Minnesotan who doesn’t have “a place up north”. The teenager and I have an annual camping weekend in Hayward every summer that involves tent camping on Lake Nelson, but we don’t do much on the actual lake. But I’d have to say that sitting on the dock right now, my feet dangling in the water, with a good book in hand, sounds rather grand to me.
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We don’t have one either – and didn’t have one growing up. I do have an aunt and uncle in Brainerd, so we go visit them (near the Mississippi, not a lake). Almost as relaxing as a cabin, and no worries about upkeep (unless you count bringing wine or other food bribes/offerings as “upkeep”).
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Nor I. Same reasons.
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Over the years, our favorite activity at our Lake Superior cabin might have been hiking. I spent five years trying to find “Lost Creek Falls,” a pretty little waterfall deep in the woods near my cabin. Finally found it. There is a long beach where you can shuck off your shoes and hike along the wet sands through loose schools of shorebirds. A friend now makes jewelry from beach glass, bird feathers and driftwood, so I have a new reason to saunter the beaches, eyes peeled for treasures the lake has spread out on the sands for my pleasure.
Sometimes we prefer to hang out at the cabin. My queer little cabin has astonishingly good acoustics, which makes it a joy to listen to public radio while cooking a meal: perhaps a bit of grilled chicken served with a fresh salad, rice pilaf and locally baked mulitgrain bread. A little white wine sweating in a glass. Out beyond our windows the great vault of sky over Bark Bay will begin turning into improbably colors: tangerine, indigo, cerise and rose. And then darkness.
Someone breaks out the board game called “Ghost.” One of the game markers has a crack in it, and if you get stuck being the one playing “Crackie” you have no chance to win. But you play anyway. Outside you hear spring peepers trilling in their high way, begging for sex. Waves slosh on the rocks. Somewhere up the path in the deep darkness a fox barks.
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You describe it so well that I can see it and hear it and feel it…
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nice steve. how long did it take to find the falls. find anything worthwhile while you were searching for it?
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I knew about the falls for years, but kept getting conflicting and frustratingly vague directions. Every now and then I’d strike out looking for them. Then one day, following a new tip, I found myself walking with two women who were on their way to them.
I have a very pretty picture of them now. The walk is only about half an hour off a gravel road, so it isn’t too bad . . . if you know where to look!
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Can I come to your cabin? Sounds delightful.
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Cynthia Yes, yes, yes! I was just writing Anna. I’m starting to think in terms of a summer Baboons-on-the-beach party up there. The last book club meeting was so much fun I think we now know that Baboons will have a good time wherever they go. I can sleep several people in my cabin. There is a motel in town for those so prudish they want a daily shower (there’s no running water at the cabin). One way or another, I think this is going to happen!
Meanwhile, yes, you are welcome to the cabin. Write me.
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Despite all of the ice in Pratt, I did not fall on mine.
History of owning a cabin, which everyone else but us did:
1. Buy it one spring and so spend every free minute there, be gone from town every weekend, lose contact with friends and church. Talk about nothing else at lunch and coffee.
2. At first go there just to relax and enjoy nature. Then decide it could use a little modernizing and start making improvements for the next 3-4 years. So all you do when you are there is work. This is all you talk about at lunch and coffee because your cabin is your life.
3. Start inviting friends up to see the work in progress, when it is good enough, and have relatives dropping in, so now you work and entertain when you are there.
4. Realize you now own two homes to take care of and are now rather distant from the nature you went there to enjoy. So put more money into, this time in boats, docks, water skis, snowmobiles, etc.
5. Find it is getting tiresome, especially for your children who are now early teens, think the cabin is stupid and do not want to spend that much time with you ever anywhere.
5. Go there less and less until you find it is a burden and a waste of money. Sell it so some one else can go through the same steps.
Over a period of time every lake is surrounded by big modern homes with high taxes and all the problems of congested living intensified because they are in the woods on a lake. So all the owners have become right-wing anti-tax and anti-government people.
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Gosh, Clyde. This is exactly how I imagined it would be to own a cabin, but it’s kind of depressing to think it might be true. Would any cabin owners like to say it isn’t so?
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Dale and Clyde: I wrote a book in which one of the main arguments was that this is not necessarily “the” pattern of cabin ownership. I’ve personally witnessed many, many different patterns over the years. I would agree with Clyde that there is a romantic period of cabin ownership when you tend to go a lot and that is often followed by a period of beaver-ish fix-it-up activity. But some folks own cabins and never pick up a hammer, and many folks go on loving their lake place decades after finding it.
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An overstatement of a pattern I watched fro 40 years. The last part is the current truth. Al the lakes nearest to TH are now year-round homes and the owners are pretty much as I described. I knew a few who bought a cabin and kept it that way, a few in the family for years and years.
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We have seen almost exactly that progression in southern Minnesota. Most lake shore properties that once had quaint seasonal cabins have now been developed into year-round homes. Most of these homes are exceptionally large with manicured lawns that go down to the lake and add their nutrient load to the already impaired water quality. Many of those owners decry the public water access and want to have it removed so that other people can’t access “their” lake. They call us or the county sheriff when anglers fish too close to their dock and try to pass legislation about ownership of the water.
I grew up on a lake. Our family originally had a large old cabin there (I’ve already described it here) that we removed in the 1970s and built a large year-round home in its place. We were one of the first families to do that on Cannon Lake. Most lake places were summer cabins then. Part of the change came with the state mandate that lake property could not be sold unless the septic system was updated/created/legal. If you’re going to put in a new septic system, you might as well build a new house to go with it… This also made lake shore property a lot more valuable than it previously was.
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Krista There are a great many processes that tend to make lakeshore property valuable, not all of them under public control. It is true of all lands, in fact, that they are often developed with really primitive structures at first. Over the years, subsequent homes or cabins are increasingly fancy. True of places in the woods as well as places on water. People like me romanticize the early stages of the process when average people can own a recreational home or cabin, but if you mean to make this a standard you would have to pass a lot of unusual legislation.
Still, I share your sense that it hurts to see so many lakes becoming more like fat suburbs with fancy all-season homes that are haughtier and less funky than the old cabins that preceded them. And I totally agree with you that we have failed to protect our lakes with legislation that favors water quality. We are loving our lakes to death with lawns that leach chemicals and topsoil into the shallows.
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My concern is for the lakes themselves and for the quality experience all people have with their lakes. Current attitudes favor property owners and those property owners would very much like to have “their” lake all to themselves. Having grown up on a lake, I understand this sentiment. But now that I am too poor to ever hope to have such a place, I understand the value of our public heritage. We’re a state rich in lakes and I strongly believe we need to guard against the privatization of our heritage – lakes, rivers, prairies, woods. Much of our lake shore property in Minnesota is already in private ownership and the value of that lake shore property has made owning a place at the lake impossible for the average Minnesotan. The lakes are our natural heritage – they belong to all of us, not just the wealthy.
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Krista One example of what you are talking about is the trend to extend docks WAY out into the lake, with all kinds of structure, so that the dock itself makes a dramatic claim on a lot of lake property. The DNR is gong to have to say, at some point, that 100-foot-long docks are not reasonable.
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Agreed. That’s a really good example of one of the many issues. After a series of public input meetings in 2007, General Permit 2008-0401 was issued in 2008. It allows dock platforms and defines the overall size and shape. This link: http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/waters/watermgmt_section/pwpermits/docks.html
provides the permit and answers questions about the current rules. Further attempts to regulate structures in or on public water were returned by former Governor Pawlenty in 2010. He recommended that DNR take it up with Legislature in the 2011 session.
Where our lakes are concerned, legislators have to have really strong spines to go against the interests of lake shore property owners. Perhaps only Rep. Beechly has the required integrity and fortitude…
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Growing up my father’s business partner and his family had a cabin about a half hour from our home. My mother loved going to the lake, my father hated it because…yes, he was enlisted to help fix, build, maintain the cabin which was a work in progress. I can’t keep up with my house, I can’t even imagine adding to that a second place to fix, clean, renovate, mow, weed…of course, growing up I loved going to someone’s cabin to swim, boat, goof around.
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Wading. On a warm summer day, toes in the warm sand just below the surface. Water about halfway up my calves – above the ankles, but not up to my knees. Squish squish squish. Look out over the lake at the water sparkling in the sunshine, listen to the kids splashing and giggling. If I have my swimsuit on, I could sit down in the shallows, but best not to if I’m in shorts….
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Just sent you a picture.
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Love it! Beautiful, Steve.
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Good morning to all,
I think canoeing, especially in the boundry waters wilderness, is my favorite water activity. I haven’t found the time to go canoeing recently and I need to change that.
I enjoyed fishing with my grandfather when I was young. My Dad took me fishing a few times. Fishing wasn’t his favorite activity becase he spent too many long hours on lakes when he was young waiting for his father to get done fishing. I did have a good time fishing with my Dad when he was retired and we were on vacation at a resort. I don’t have my grandfather’s skill for catching fish and I don’t go fishing very often.
I like riding on boats out on the Great Lakes. When I was young I enjoyed riding on the car ferry that connected the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan. I also like the boat ride out to and back from Isle Royal.
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OT – I have a serious ear-worm problem this morning. Cannot get the song “C’est Moi” from Camelot out of my brain. What does this say about me?
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Spring is coming early . . .
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Romance…
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You’ve got the hots for Robert Goulet?
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Franco Nero is the one singing in my head (or whoever did his singing). I had pictures of him in my room when I was in 6th/7th grade!
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Find “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” somewhere – or have a co-worker hum a few bars. This has been my go-to song for many years to get rid of ear worms. It’s good at pushing out the other tune, but won’t stay in your brain pan for too long.
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A chorus of “Rootin Tootin Cowboy Joe” usually works at our house
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love it beth ann
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So how do I get with the program today? Thinking about lakes and cabins is not making my toes any warmer right now!
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Prop your toes on a radiator and pretend they’re being warmed by sand and sun?
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Rent On Golden Pond?
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while in Duluth we stopped at Energy Plus and looked (and looked) at wood stoves. very nice by those hot fires. didn’t buy, just stood by the heat 🙂
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Love my woodstove, Barb…and how it saves me heat when the furnace and/or the electricity go down…go for it!
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Totally OT – just heard someone in the office talk about “utilizing Grandma” for babysitting. Seriously? Utilizing? I hate folks who say “utilize” when “use” would do (or be a more precise choice) – but utilizing Grandma? What is she – another piece of equipment in your garage? Is she of no practical use otherwise? You going to harness her to something to create something new?…sheesh. If I were Grandma I might be offended. (And might swat the baby’s dad on the nose for such poor use of his native language…)
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Okay – I don’t hate the people who do this…I just hate that they do it. As I tell daughter – “I like you, but I don’t like your behavior sometimes.” Some days I wish I had a red Sharpie that I could magically use on speech and the spoken word…
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“Gifting”
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“Orientating” and “incentivizing”. Ick.
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“Impactful” and “operationalize.”
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I’m with you, VS…goes right up my spine and a loud protest out my mouth at the sound of those two words.
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I agree about “utilize” in place of “use”. However, I do find some appeal in the word in this context if the person intended it as a sort of euphemism for “conscripted”. But I wasn’t there.
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Kinda sounded less like conscription than thinking of Grandma like farm equipment…
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I dislike people who say “individual” when all they mean is “person.”
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I dislike individuals who encroach on my person.
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I dislike roaches who encroach on my person. Or my personal space.
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AND I-I-I (stretch out the I, kids) dislike individual roaches when they encroach on my space on my personal sofa when I’m eating eggs poach -ed. (Make sure you say ed as in Jim Ed or you won’t feel the goosebumps!)
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Kayaking at dawn. Once you slip out on the lake, the only sound is the one end of the paddle going into the water as the other lets loose a few drops – plip plip plip. You skim along the surface and notice a loon in the distance, then you don’t, then a minute later you see it clear the hell over the other direction. If you’re lucky s/he will do that eerie dawn call.
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Where do you kayak? What kind of kayak? That’s something I’d like to learn to do.
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A pristeen little lake called Sweet Lake, NW Wisc. part of Upper Eau Claire chain of lakes — a friends’ cabin. Or on L. Minnetonka somewhere, and our son used to do Minnehaha Creek. First we had a “lake kayak”, a 2-seater, but more like a low-lying canoe that was pretty hard to turn. Now we have 2 little river ones, tippy but can turn on a dime.
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Do you flip over? I want to learn too but I’m afraid of flipping over.
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Linda The bay in front of my cabin is world-class kayak country. Off to the west is a ghostly, misty, romantic slough that looks like nowhere else you have been. Off to the east is a set of sea caves that draws kayak fans from all over the world. Think of a rocky shoreline that has been eaten away like a big piece of Swiss cheese, with some holes big enough you can kayak into them. Try looking for this on YouTube: it might be Spirit Point or Squaw Point sea caves.
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Krista If you flip over, you have a choice. Most people choose to flip back, and I understand it isn’t that hard to do. Or you release from the boat and bob to the surface. Both alternatives beat sitting there upside down breathing the lake. People who rent kayaks give lessons in flipping back right side up. One great source of kayak rentals is Bayfield, WI.
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Linda Here you go! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMgwS5LAF3c
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Krista, I’ve never flipped over. Your legs/feet are up against the sides, and are part of the steering – you sort of become “one with the boat”, and have quite a lot of control, but you do need to keep your hips and torso flexible and able to “gyrate” a bit. Not sure if I’m saying it right, but it’s fun.
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my computer being down is raising hell with me. it turns out it is the power source not the computer so i am not looking at dealing with lost information but the inability to get up and go is frustrating. my iphone sucks for staying on the blog so i’m working it out. thanks for the concern.
ot sad news.
read this morning liberty custard is closing in january
new owners will be there sometime and they did buy the custard machines so there is hope but another one bites the dust.
back on topic, sitting next to it is my favorite thing, it is calming inspiring theraputic dream causing mesomorizing enchanted time that is like no other. ,ountain climbing is cool but i don’t do the same drifting off sweating and grunting as i do lounging next to the lake. the raft in the lake with a beveragea and a book is the way life was meant to be.
clyde, enjoy the trip. looks like you are making good progress. i like lawrence kansas. has a nice feel to it. pratt kansas doesn’t ring a bell. i was up near salina and loved it that the memorable thing there was that everyone on the road in there car raised two fingers on the steering wheel to say hello to you as you drove by. nmad eye contact and said hello, kind of like the motorcycle creedo of ackknowledging every motorcycle on the road. love that stuff. do they do that on the good red roads of pratt? (before freeways the good red roads were the ones you’d shoot for acording to the departed grandmother of my wife in central illinois. dales home country where the land is flat as a pancake and the roads are all pretty much the same with a variation of a curve or a gulley or a stretch of gravel.
linda i see you are interested in kayaking. brule wisconsin is all i have to say. outfitter next to the cro bar in city of brule will drop the kayaks and pick up you and your friends and tell you when you will get there. right mix of rolling and rapids. very nice.
see yall later. batteries ho
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Linda tim is right about the joys of kayaking the Brule. I lived two summers along the Brule. It is one of the most exotically beautiful places in the Midwest. River kayaking is quite different from lake kayaking. Both can be delightful. There are stretches of the Brule that have virtually no rapids and stretches where the water would be rougher than a beginner should do if you hit the river at a time of high water levels. I’d be happy to chat with anyone who wants to know more.
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Brule is also excellent for tubing!
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A note to tim about everyone waving or giving the two finger greeting: Actually there is a lot of that in Southern MN. It seems to be an almost expected thing to do around smaller towns and rural areas in this part of the state. I’m not completely fond of this habit. I would rather just wave at people I know and I’m not sure if I know some of the people that wave because I can’t see them very well driving by in their trucks or cars, but I can see that they are waving.
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Thanks for the cool video, Steve. Really makes you wish you were there.
YouTube also kindly offered to show me a video tutorial called Fish Hook Removal. I didn’t click on it, so I’m still not sure if it pertains to extricating hooks from fish, or doctoring yourself if you’re too embarrassed to go to an ER.
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Linda, the fish hook removal would be from people. It is a pretty good trick that mostly works.
Been there, done that.
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Ow.
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I haven’t tried kayaking. I think it would be fun. I think taveling around in a kayak or a conoe is much better than zooming around in a motor boat. I know motor boats are very useful for some things.
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Walking along any beach on Lake Superior. One of my favorites is near Cornucopia (Steve’s neck of the woods) and another one is north of Grand Marais. I could just walk and walk and walk, looking at rocks, driftwood and beach glass, imagining the depths of the lake, listening to the immense water, watching the changing light.
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I’m a fan of the little outcropping of rocks right in Grand Marais (some folks call it “The Point”) – small little spit of land, mostly dark grey/black rocks. But a great place to sit like a reptile on the warm rocks and watch the lake.
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Artist Point
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Grilling chicken kebobs with chunks of onion and bell pepper.
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There are very few lakes in North Dakota, and the biggest lake in the state, Lake Sakakawea, has no trees around it since it is a man-made lake set in the middle of a mixed grass prairie. People have places “up at the lake” which are primarily old trailer homes they have moved there. I believe that most docks are public, and there is a pretty complicated arragement for land ownership since most of the lake is in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The lake is made from a dam on the Missouri River and is managed by the Corps of Engineers. Lake levels vary wildly depending on the snow pack in the Rockies in any given year, so that sometimes the docks have to be extended for hundreds yards to provide boat access. The lake provides water for many communities in western Norht Dakota. Beaches, of which there are few, are of poor quality since it is a lake set on a prairie, so people mainly fish and mess around in boats. The lake has only been there since the 1950’s, so there isn’t much of a history of places being passed down in the family. I am curious to see what is going to happen to the lake in the next few years since the prairie it covers is smack in the middle of the Bakken Oil Formation. I imagine there will be off shore oil rigs in the lake soon and multitudes of rigs on the bluffs surrounding the lake. Picturesque, don’t you think? As a native Minnesotan, I don’t consider the lake a “real” lake. People here swarm to the lake in any event. Gosh I sound cynical today. I had better snap out of it.
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It’s true that people will swarm to anything even remotely like a lake. 🙂
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Devil’s Lake is in North Dakota, if I’m not mistaken. You don’t have to go to the lake….if you wait long enough, it will come to you.
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That lake is a real dilemma. The water quality is pretty poor, so no one wants any runoff from it and there is lots of wrangling about where and how to drain off some of it.
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Good one, Linda!
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Hey,where’s tim?
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i wrote a reply that i thought would be good and it evidently didn’t get sent. i ll check it on the computre i wrote it on and see if i just need to hit the send button or what. otherwise it was nothing worth going back over , just frustrating to have your life flow hiccup yaknow??
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OK, tim, I seem to remember now your computer giving you fits of some kind…
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Liberty Custard is selling 4 pints of their various flavors for $9.99 until they close. I was there yesterday and they have LOTS. I’m stocking my downstairs freezer!
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carol burnett and liberty custard perfect combination
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Swimming, fishing, paddle-boating, laying out, laying in the hammock, Texas Caviar, Summer Shandy, watching 4th of July fireworks from the end of the dock, playing 500 and listening to MPR. These things we did last summer and summers before that and before that. The little cabin was built in the 60’s for $900. Built by my father in law and his 11 year old son. The land was leased – buying was out of the question. When our marriage ended, I continued going to the lake. My children insisted, and my ex said, “Of course you can still go. It belongs to everyone.”
His parents are gone and now so is he. Our fingers are crossed that we won’t suffer this loss too … please let the land owner let us keep leasing.
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time to arrange a long lease for a story of the relationship to be published in the local paper to make the landlord sound benevolent. steve can help. you deserve to go there until you are returned to dust what could another 50 years really matter to him
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clyde i looked up pratt kansas and see it is off the beaten track. i was wondering if th locals have that kansas habit from up north around salinas where they raise two fingers from the steering wheel when they go by to say hello and make eye contact with you. it is like the motorcycle tradition to wave and acknowledge each motorcycle that passes in the opposite direction and proclaims an unspoken brotherhood. i loved that about that part of the world.
good luck with that last two inches of your trip (on the map) i hope it warms up soon for you
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I was driving roads very heavy with trucks and few locals. Did not really look either. But we ate in Meade at a local Cafe, almost exactly like one in Bowman ND. Nobody really stared and had several polite conversations.
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Beautiful drive today. Miles and miles of prairie, of which I never tire. First 100 miles were through rime covered land and trees, drooping prairie trees, heavy with ice. Varying sorts of prairie land. Then miles through barren high NE NM desert. Must have seen 200 of more hawks on the hunt. Then a climb up into the the mountains but before that a 45 mile torturous detour to replace 25 miles but what a ride that was.
Hope you get the power back in the computer.
And what is is with motel rooms with no light in them?
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By far, my favorite thing to do at the lake is take a really hot sauna (pronounced sow-na, not saw-na) and jump off the dock into a cold lake…many times! You never feel so alive as when you hit that cold water 🙂 My grandparents used to have a cabin in Northern Minnesota but had to sell it because they couldn’t keep it up any longer. I would always go to my cousins’ grandparents’ cabin with them. We would get the sauna so hot (woodstove, not electric, as any really good sauna has 😉 haha) that you really couldn’t see until you jumped into the water. Now I go to my friend’s family’s camp (in Michigan, they’re camps, not cabins) in Iron River, MI. It’s so much fun! When her entire family is there, we get into contests to see who can stay in the sauna the longest, while putting more and more steam on. Ah, I love to sauna 🙂 Thanks for warming me up on this chilly Friday morning!
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