SEPTEMBER 3, 2021 – Late yesterday afternoon, after a day of business and busy-ness, I took to the woods to do some trail work.
As the light faded behind an overcast sky, I repaired to the dock and peered at the windswept lake. Not a single boat—underway or stationary—appeared on the water. I scanned the opposite shore and recalled the previous evening’s pontoon cruise with my sister Elsa and her husband, Chuck. Taking advantage of pleasant conditions—but mindful of the havoc Ida was then wreaking upon kin and friends in the Northeast—we powered across the lake, then steamed slowly along the “Barbary Coast” and ventured close to what I call the “worm hole,” or channel, that leads to Lac Courte d’Oreilles, an even bigger lake than “our” lake, Grindstone. I then piloted us over the long haul back to port.
A day later—yesterday—as I again sat on the dock, eyeing the reaches we’d seen up close the day before, I thought about how as a kid I’d viewed the lake. Upon each arrival at our grandparents’ old cabin at the east end of Björnholm, my first view of the water was as I alighted from the backseat. Dad would always pull into the opening between the purple martin house, high on a pole, and the friendly, robust, adolescent white pine that now towers over the yard. Ahead, between the trees, I looked with excitement at the broad, blue expanse of Grindstone Lake and far off in the distance—the opposite shore, a thin, dark green strip a world away.
The view gave me an immediate feeling of being in the Northwoods, far from the small, tame, populated lakes that were just a few minutes out of town at home.
We seldomly got to the other side of the lake. On rare occasions Dad lugged the Blue Ribbon Champion outboard out of the boat box above the dock area, then haul the four-horse down the steps to the Alumacraft, where he risked life and limb transferring the heavy motor from the dock to the boat’s transom. After much tampering with the old engine, Dad would finally get it to turn over, and out to sea we went. Once a year he’d take us through the worm hole, and if we were lucky, he’d put his projects aside to take us on a voyage along the perimeter of the lake. I’d call that a “round-the-world” trip.
Those odysseys seemed exotic to me, and I rendered them ever more so by peering at the opposite shore backwards through the binoculars. That simple maneuver turned the lake into a large sea and made the other side as distant as the moon.
For Dad, those boat trips were more of a chore than I fully appreciated, but they led me to dream about traveling to distant lands—and one day . . . to follow my dreams.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
