A PASS AND A PARDON

JULY 20, 2025 – “Our lake” is unusually quiet, despite its being in the middle of lacustrine cabin country[1] in northwest Wisconsin. Wide open with dimensions described in miles, Grindstone Lake has remarkably little boat traffic, even on the Fourth of July and Labor Day. This phenomenon is especially surprising given the number of serious boats parked on serious boatlifts that one sees when cruising along the shoreline. Today, for example, which blessed us with sunny skies and a high of 75F, things were so quiet, I felt compelled to look away from my project now and again just to make sure there was still plenty of water in what amounts to a gigantic glacier pit.

Except . . .

Some guy on a wave-runner (as distinct from a “Jet Ski”; a wave-runner is operated sitting astride, whereas a Jet Ski (brand name) is run standing up) insisted on breaching conditions that were otherwise reminiscent of “Morning Mood” from Edvard Grieg’s familiar Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. He was out yesterday too making repetitive water donuts about 500 feet from the western shore and a quarter-mile out from our dock.

After half an hour of the guy’s inane routine today, Beth remarked charitably, “I hope he has to go home soon.”

I said, “I wish he’d get an imagination.”

What I meant was . . . Go explore, for heaven’s sake! Donuts schmonuts! Get a life! Expand your horizons and see the world. Gas up your toy to the brim, and go on a voyage of discovery around the entire circumference of the lake, in and out of every nook, every cranny; between the islands, into Williams Bay, past the three eagle nests, and if you’re really adventuresome, find the channel to Little Grindstone all the way to Lac Courte Oreilles, where you’ll discover a whole new universe. There you can spend the next 90 minutes doing the same thing there—exploring. Next you can squeeze through the passageway into Little Lac Courte Oreilles and visit the place that time forgot—the St. Francis of Solanus Indian Mission. When you tire of that, you can hop back on your speedy wave-runner and follow the flow to Whitefish Lake and beyond. Who knows, but in all your travels, you just might see something more interesting than your own water donuts.

I was being half sarcastic, of course. Eventually, I lapsed into full curmudgeon mode. Adding to his carbon footprint, I thought; burning fossil fuel—for what? Water donuts, that’s what. Mindless revving round and round, not only burdening an already over-taxed environment but disturbing the peace while he’s at it. When are people gonna see the miraculous gift of the glaciers as something more than a splash pool in which they can horse around on a $15,000 noise-maker, makin’ weekend waves in front of the family cabin before heading back to the urban rat race?

But just then I caught myself. In the first place, maybe it’s a good thing that the guy has no curiosity about the water world beyond his immediate shoreline. If he were Vasco de Gama on a PWC cruising all over the lakes downstream, who knows what sprig of AIS (“aquatic invasive species”) he might be introducing to the pristine waters of Grindstone?

Moreover, maybe the guy is someone I know on the northwest side of the lake (there are several candidates), who is neither a nut nor a nobody. Maybe whoever it is has “had it up to here” with all manners of problems back in the rat race of economic prosperity and is just letting off steam . . . er . . . gas fumes. Granted, my peace is being disturbed, but for crying out loud, most of the time around here it’s so quiet you can hear a monarch flap its wings as it dances over my wife’s garden bee balm.

Besides, this isn’t the Boundary Waters Canoe Area 150 miles farther north—as the eagle flies. Grindstone Lake is an easy three-hour drive from the Twin Cities, a major metropolitan area. Sure, the loons, the red-eyes, the mallards and the mergansers don’t like their fishing waters roughed up by a human on a wave-runner, nor do the eagles appreciate some dude scaring all the fish away from their favorite corner of the lake, but hey, birds can fly. If you don’t like this corner of the lake, then leave it, you bird-brains!

But then I dove a bit deeper and into a state of introspection. I analogized the wave-runner guy’s donut-making to my own long history of outdoor recreation without much regard to nature’s delicate balance and that I might be disturbing it. No, I’m not referring to snowmobiling, which would be winter’s mirror image of clowning around on a wave-runner. I refer instead to . . . downhill skiing.

From the time I was a kid until recent years when one of my MM docs said, “No more downhill skiing for you,” I’ve been an avid alpine skier. I never gave any thought to my carbon footprint—from jet fuel on the flight to ski country to gasoline on the drive to the ski area to the energy required to power the lifts (or food and supplies to the base of the mountain)—or my participation in the wholesale desecration of mountainside forests. And all for what? To explore nature? Not exactly; more to see how fast I could wedele,[2] turning slopeside trees into one long blur. But it sure was one helluva lot of fun, and the bigger the mountain, the bigger the fun, if you catch my (snow)drift—you who’ve skied “Big Mountain”—renamed “Whitefish”—in northwest Montana.

So rather than go rad-enviro on myself—which, given the rate of climate collapse, might soon become a universal (well, within the confines of earth, anyway) imperative—I decided to give myself a pardon and cut the water-donut-maker a pass.

As I hammer out this post, dusk here at the lake will soon yield to nightfall. As daylight fades, absolute quiet returns to our environs. Even the loons have nothing to call or signal about. Beth and I are seated across from each other on the screen porch. While she reads and intermittently cracks open a pistachio from the bowl, I savor the peace of this place—and of the moment.

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson

[1] For reasons I haven’t explored, whereas a traditional humble lakeside summer vacation dwelling was called “a cabin” in Minnesota, its Wisconsin counterpart was always called “a cottage.” Since my grandparents were from Minnesota, they—and their descendants—have always called our place a “cabin.” Our friends and neighbors on the lake who hail from Minnesota also say “cabin.” (This holds true today, even though most of the old rustic little abodes of yore have been replaced with multi-level showcase homes more suitably designed for an urban setting where the owners can impress people they don’t know.) Of course, original naming rights go to folks in the Northeast, particularly Upstate New York and northern New England where a “cabin” or a “cottage” is called, a “camp.”

[2] The verb form of “wedeln,” German for “wag,” a skiing technique consisting of “wagging the skis” back and forth in quick, smooth succession down the slope, feet so close together they operate as a single unit. By the time I’d perfected the wedeln, it had become out of fashion. I persisted, however, to the point where on more than one occasion, strangers on the slopes would ask, “How did you learn to ski like that?” Rather than answer, “By my long-participation in an environmentally unfriendly snow sport,” I explained that my uncle, “the man who invented skiing,” and displayed textbook-perfect technique but never mastered the wedeln, had arranged private lessons for me with one Erik Hammerlund of Brattleboro, Vermont, who had definitely mastered the technique. At Sterling School in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, where I attended high school my freshman year, there were a number of kids who could wedeln exceptionally well. I had plenty of good examples to emulate.