My weathered Minnetonka moccasin hammers my car’s throttle, leaving Tulsa, Oklahoma, rolling north in August 2008. I am precisely fifty-nine-years-old. The summer heat shimmers off the Highway 75 asphalt as I steer towards the colder Scandinavian region of my youth and my parent’s cabin on Lake Blanche in West Central Minnesota. I relish this annual vacation that takes me eight hundred miles over two-lane ribbons of familiar roads. As the stress of Tulsa fades, lake memories flood my consciousness. When Dad drove us to the cabin from northwest Iowa, we always stopped at the Dairy Queen in Pipestone, Minnesota; we always got gas at the same station in Madison; we always called out sentimental landmarks. I have an integral touchstone in Yates Center, Kansas, three hours north of Tulsa, the Broaster Chicken Café. Hungry for lunch and a piece of nostalgia, I pull into the gravel parking lot.

            Looking through my bug-splattered windshield, through the grease-smudged cafe window, I see Betty, a farmer’s wife in her 70s, I’d guess, tending the place/., a    by herself, as usual. I walk through the weather-beaten door into the cafe and look around; the same faded black and white family photos are thumbed-tacked on the wall, the same old-time cash register. I feel comfortable, reassured, and settle in for roadside delights, “Give me a broaster basket, please.” Dropping chicken parts into the fryer, she lifted her hand in acknowledgment. Hesitating for a moment, I try my hand at casual conversation.

“The crops look good,” I offer. Betty wants to talk about something else. “We are closing down for good. I just can’t do it anymore. The high school kids won’t work for what I can pay, my husband isn’t doing too hot,” Betty sadly announces to me and no one else—sagging wrinkles on the forehead of the weary septuagenarian show the reason why.

Betty moves slowly toward the shiny, metal hot drawer, extracting six pieces of chicken and the remaining doughy roll, its bottom hardened and browned from hours of resting in the stainless container. Placing a few pats of butter in the green plastic basket lined with wax paper, Betty slides my meal along the faded Formica surface. It skids to a stop just short of its mark. I slump on the chrome-base barstool as quiet continues in the diner. Other vinyl-topped stools next to me show their worn and cracked surfaces. They stand at attention along the pink countertop, waiting for diners who are not coming. My thoughts turn to the older woman’s resignation, her upcoming challenges, the disappointment of closing a decades-old family business, and what it might be like to end a significant chapter of one’s life.

            “It’s all good,” I suggested. Betty laughed, “Yeah, it’s mostly good. Gonna miss this place, but I ain’t gonna miss it for too long.”

Pulling a worn five spot from my jeans, I slipped it under the basket. She stopped clanging the blackened pans in the sink and joined me at the cash register. Her eyes briefly sparkled, and she nodded her head at me. I gave her a limp, military salute, and slipped out the glass and wood frame door, passing the faded paint of Broaster House script stenciled on the driveway sign. Sated but sad, I climbed into the car, looked out the windshield, and took a mental snapshot of the eatery.

Without words, I digested Betty’s sadness while pulling back onto the roadway to join the light stream of vehicles heading toward Omaha and a slew of small towns. I punched on the radio. Bob Wills crooned, “Will you miss me when I’m gone? Will the past be just today,” a tune so fitting for the goodbye to Broaster Betty. The words and sentiment of the song resonated for miles; in the quiet glow of the fading sun, I hummed, “Maybe you’ll think of me; will you miss me when I’m gone.” My thoughts turned nostalgic about the memories and importance of my destination, about the saga of fifty summers at the summer cabin. Mom and Dad made noises, from time to time, to put it all in the rearview mirror.

The Byrd’s hit song of the late 60s – Eight Miles High – blasted from the dashboard speaker. When the nostalgic tune ended, I turned off the radio to return to the silence of my remembrances. I thought about seeing the Byrds in the summer of ’64 or ’65 on a Friday night at Balmoral Roller Skating Rink several miles from Blanche up 78, across from Ottertail Lake and next to a fledgling golf course, also called Balmoral. Bobby Rizk was the only one of our lake crew with a driver’s license. On those Fridays, a small group of neighboring teenagers often piled into Bobby’s ’56 Ford and headed for unknown pleasures, or so we fantasized. Where I convinced unfamiliar teenage girls to dance, worked on my lines, and stole innocent kisses on the golf course’s greens during breaks. We loved the music, the dancing, and the excitement of watching bands manipulate their instruments into music. The lake, across the road from the rink, is full of fish and memories.

**

As the midnight hour approached, I was five miles from my destination. Cruising past Ben’s Bait Shop opposite the liquor store and a dentist’s office into Battle Lake, Minnesota, 56515, a sign declared the town was platted in 1881 and named for a nearby lake that commemorates an 18th-century battle between the Ojibwe and Sioux Indians. The approaching outline of Main Street and its familiar buildings stir my soul.

This stretch of the busiest street in town is two blocks of red-brick buildings. These iconic structures used to house a bakery and grocery store, bait shop and summer playhouse, lumber yard and hardware store, the Twins gas station, and Ollie’s five-and-dime, where I bought out the place with the quarter mom gave me on Saturdays, while she used the laundromat next door to get all the sand out of our clothes. The innards of these familiar buildings house “improvements” – a trendy restaurant, a new post office, and modern storefronts covering century-old brick beauties lost forever. Easing up the hill into the heart of Battle Lake, I mentally place myself back in time, walking the sidewalks of Main Street. It is like putting myself into a scene of an old-time movie, where little kids at the soda fountain reach up to the counter with their nickel for an ice cream soda. One of those little kids was me fifty years ago. No doubt, the many summers in this quaint setting have much to do with who I am today.

After a cursory greeting to my folks, I collapse on the bed in the front bedroom. The open lakeside window reveals the gentle lapping of the waves, beating out a hypnotic rhythm. I sleep deeply, soothed by the familiar lake breezes easing through the screen windows. I feel at home, at peace. Childhood memories of summers at the lake usher me into a deep sleep.

**

The early morning light and the chatter of birds awaken me. Opening the knotty pine closet door, I choose a pair of jeans and a baggy gray sweatshirt, and I smell the aroma of coffee. Mom sets the timer of the coffee maker before going to bed, an everyday ritual. The pot perks at 6AM. Pouring fresh coffee into a handmade cup with a walleye painted on it, I head out the screen door. I walk down the narrow sidewalk and onto the creaky, wooden dock like a thousand times before. At the end of the forty-foot wooden dock is a ten-foot section that faces the lake. It holds a sacred feature, a long, backed bench, next to the staff of an oversized American Flag, which flew from the moment they arrived in the spring to the last moment before leaving in late September.

This lake, Lake Blanche, has been our respite for fifty years. I was ten years old in 1958 when we first summered here between school years in a rental cabin three doors to the east. The sparsely furnished cabin had several empty lots for sale next to it. If the month-long stay proved satisfactory, we planned to build our cabin on a patch of ground three hundred miles from our Sioux City, Iowa home.

The rental had no TV or phone, for that matter. The closest phone was at Madsen’s Store, a mile away, down a sandy road adjacent to the lake shore. Without a car, we walked to Madsen’s at an appointed time for a conversation. Mom talked with Dad. My sister and I ate ice cream bars. At the time, I didn’t know why we were there. Perhaps Mom and Dad decided that summers on the lake created a wholesome environment for my sister and me to spend our formative years. It was never discussed. Without fanfare, they chose to build a small cabin on Blanche. Until graduating high school eight years later, this place was where I grew up, where so many firsts happened. Some firsts that my parents were better not knowing, but firsts that had to happen sometime.

**

The dock bench was the place I always went to soon after arriving and putting my bags in the bedroom closet. Mom and Dad knew I would return to the cabin when I satisfied my need to reacquaint myself with the lake and playback memories of the previous years.

This bench and I watched July 4^th boat parades idle by year after year, patriotic music blaring, boats of older adults wearing red, white, and blue bathing suits they shouldn’t. From that vantage point, I used the binoculars to see who was fishing and where and wrote a nostalgic piece about Blanche for the Battle Lake Review, a weekly newspaper that specialized in informing the surrounding communities about livestock futures and bits about visitors from out of town staying with relatives, and who played bridge at the Sunday Smorgasbord at Club 78 outside of Battle Lake.

Years ago, while I munched a noontime sandwich on the bench, my transistor radio sat beside me. A country & western radio station in Fergus Falls, twenty-five miles away, came through, spouting news in a Scandinavian accent. From this bench, I observed the world. I was in control. I was at peace. Nestled on the bench, I entered my center of the universe. The end of the dock was more than just my safe place.

For many summers, the dock in front of the bench became the launching pad for water skiing. Sitting on the edge, I held the ski rope handle and watched the ski rope uncurl as Dad slowly trolled the ski boat away until the slack was nearly gone. I’d yell, “Hit it” or “Make it happen, captain,” and Dad jammed the hand throttle forward. Off the dock and flying over the water after a modest tug on the arms, hardly wet from the dock-start, I recalled the exhilaration of the water spray from the ski as I cut back and forth, jumping the wake back and forth, smiling big as hell. Those moments can never be taken from me.

My eyes closed for a few minutes. I completed my dawn hello to the environment and my musings and returned to bed.

**

Lake Blanche is an idyllic setting. According to local legend, our glacier-made lake is one of a thousand in Ottertail County. Its blue water changes color with the weather of the day. Calm, sunny days make the surface look shiny like a blue diamond facet, reflecting the cumulus clouds that pass overhead. Its beauty is lost forever, except to me. Windy, stormy days whip the water into a fury, changing the hue to a menacing, dark gray. Physically a mile and a half wide and two and a half miles long, a channel courses along the lake bottom from an inlet to an outlet, where the water cascades over a low-water dam. Once spilled from Blanche, the outflow of water creates another pastoral stream, continuing its relentless journey to link as many lakes as possible. It was also a spot of memories where we played among the cottonwoods or sparked with dates in the teen years.

Countless times, I steered a canoe two miles down the clear-water stream that formed Blanche’s inlet. From my perch, the current rushed me past tall birch trees, past red-winged blackbirds singing from reeds that bent from their weight, past a beaver hut with its domed architecture of limbs and sticks that showed above the waterline, past occasional calm spots where the water widens to form ponds with reeds sticking three-feet above the surface and floating lily pads with yellow or white flowers, pads so large that frogs sun on them. Schools of fish glide downstream above lime-green strands of seaweed, streaming near the sandy bottom six feet below the watercraft. Nature’s south-to-north current provides a lazy, winding voyage. My paddle is used only as a rudder. The inlet punches through a sandy, twenty-foot isthmus to join the waters of Blanche.

**

Before anyone stirred in the cabin the second day, rested and happy, I headed for the front porch with a book and a steaming cup of Joe. I looked to the right, up four docks, where our former sailboat sits in Bill Miller’s boat lift. The nameless craft stretches nineteen feet. It is classified as an X-class sailboat with a triangular jib or forward sail, a mainsail with its original racing number, P-8, sewn into the cloth near the top. It was a fine boat made in Bear Lake, Minnesota, in the 1950s and passed down from Grandpa Gerkin. Dad and I loved to sail. Often, I cruised by myself, loving the splashing sound against the hull as it knifed through the water.

During the summer of 1968, after my sophomore year at Oklahoma State, I took a physics course at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. For a reason I never understood, Mom and my sister stayed in Sioux City that summer with Dad. Every Friday, I headed for Blanche by late morning. Three hours later, I sat on the bench that hovered over a group of sunfish hiding in the shade of the dock. On most summer days, the lake was calm. Other days were cloudy and windy – windy enough to create significant whitecaps of water that crashed onto the sandy beach. It definitely was not the kind of day Dad and I sailed. We were fair-weather sailors.

In contrast, treacherous conditions beckoned his brother, my Uncle Tom. On a stormy day of that solo summer, Uncle Tom, likely in his early 40s,  beached his fishing boat on our sand beach, bounded up the sidewalk, and opened the door, grinning, “Hey, Steve, let’s go sailing.” Besides my dad, this man was my hero. He wanted to do something with me, and I was raring to go. Bad decision. Clearly, there were no adults in the cabin to discourage such foolishness. Uncle Tom did not count. Where was my practical mother to nix this excursion?

We swam out to the bobbing sailboat and hauled ourselves over the side, removed the canvas cover off the cockpit, stowed it under the deck. We rigged the boat with its sails that flapped loudly, dying to be full of wind. Timing the boat’s bobbing in the turbulence, I unsnapped the clasp at the buoy. Uncle Tom pulled the steering tiller handle hard to one side and manhandled it against the natural forces. The sails snapped to attention, and the X was immediately up on its side. The power of the speeding water against the metal tiller caused the rudder to make the metal hum. We flew across the lake, turning around or “coming about” to change direction: he loved it; me, not so much. I hooked my legs back under the deck and leaned back over the boat’s edge as far as possible, providing ballast to keep the boat upright. Water raced across the downwind deck of the boat, some spilling into the cockpit. Without warning, the bolt that secured the bow wire—one of three stays that held the mast upright—snapped, and the smaller front sail flailed wildly. The oak mast rocked on the deck’s six-inch metal tongue that fits into the bottom of the looming, 20-foot mast. Uncle Tom turned into the wind. The sails swung back and forth. He reached into a small drawer by his knees, passed a screwdriver to me, and told me to grab the eyelet at the bottom of the front stay that whipped in the gale and secure it to a deck eyelet by inserting the screwdriver through them both. Quickly done and danger averted, Uncle Tom turned the crippled craft downwind, and we surfed atop the white-capped waves across the lake and home. I am sure I never told him of my fright. It was Uncle Tom, after all.

The movie-in-my-mind ends with the sound of a two-seater Piper Cub airplane passing several hundred feet over the lake. Shielding my eyes, I watch it, wondering who might be in the plane and who might be expecting them at their destination. It is a reminder of Dad buzzing our cabin twice on Friday afternoons, wagging his wings as he flew over as if to say, “Hello, down there.” It is a reminder that we rushed to pick him up at the airstrip five miles away in our lake car – a ’51, two-door, faded green Chevy – a musty relic in which I used to sit behind the wheel at night listening to the radio, pretending that I was driving without moving from under the backyard tree. My mom, sister, and I were mostly alone while dad worked during the week at his business in Sioux City. He often brought a friend to stay the week, returning to Iowa with Dad the following Sunday. It is a reminder that the small town of Battle Lake maintained the local runway nearby, a cow-less pasture with a landing area just long enough to accommodate small planes’ comings and goings, just barely. It reminds us of the landing hazard that required our aircraft to fly close to a string of power lines strung between wooden poles, then cut the engines to drop on the other side of the danger and land hard upon the stubbled grass. Glad that we were safely on the ground, maybe we said a prayer. I don’t recall.

**

The next morning, I take my position on the bench. The eerie call of a loon greets me somewhere beyond my vision. It stirs precious thoughts of Dad and me fishing, seeing a family of loons, led by the father, followed by a string of young, and managed by the mother at the end of the train, occasionally admonishing a loon-in-training with a short shriek for paddling out of line, or so it seemed. It was not unusual to see Loons and their young ones pop up near our boat after an underwater swim to harvest minnows for a meal. When they dove again, disappearing for several minutes, we scanned nearby patches of water, hoping to see them pop up like a submarine coming up for fresh air.

The afternoon is stormy, and the lake is rough. Anything related to lake activity is ill-advised. I pack Dad into the car for an adventure to fulfill a wish of mine. Several miles from Blanche, at the end of a gravel road, we find a backwoods artist, Jack Donelan, at his home and studio along Ottertail Creek. Jack whittles ducks from local wood. I buy a carving of a loon from the jovial, bearded man. Curiously, on the day he finishes a piece, he carves the bird’s name, his name, the date, and a graphic depicting the weather that day. My eight-inch loon carving says 7/23/83 and shows a bright sun with sun rays. Years later, it would rest on my study bookshelf. Now that Dad is gone, this flashback makes me pause, and I look at my right-hand ring finger to see his Masonic ring with Mom’s engagement diamond centerstage.

**

The following morning, I woke to my father yanking the starter rope of the fishing boat motor. His efforts deliver a grating, metallic sound from the over-the-hill engine. I ease to the window. Black smoke billows from the back of the engine. I pull on yesterday’s clothes, hanging on a hook in the knotty pine closet. Mom is watching an early afternoon Minnesota Twins baseball game with the cat nestled in her lap.

“Did you sleep alright, honey,” she asks, “I hope we didn’t make too much noise. I think your dad wants to go fishing for our dinner,” gesturing to the white-haired man in the boat slip, who watched the smoke clear from the idling Evinrude outboard motor. “Nope, mom. I slept great. It looks like I need to get going,” I say.

Scrambling down to the dock, I climb into the aluminum boat, provisioned with two rods and a carton of worms. My father and I head for the sure-thing hole across the calm waters to the weedy patch near the inlet and Uncle Tom’s place. After several hours of baiting hooks with nightcrawlers and chatting about old times on the lake, Dad and I have more than enough sunfish and bluegills for the traditional Fry Daddy happy hour. We head home and the confines of the fish house to filet our stringer of edibles.

“Man, I remember teaching you to clean fish,” Dad chuckles. “Looks like you could use another lesson. Is there any meat left on that one,” he jokes? “Only the best part,” I fire back, “Let’s get out of here. The flies have found us, and I’m thirsty for a cold one.”

Sitting on the lakeside deck surrounded by posters of regional lakes and carcasses of taxidermic fish on the wall, I savor my first Grain Belt beer of the season. A dusty cassette player from years gone by pumps out tired classical music. The Fry Daddy cooker spits hot oil as Dad ceremoniously lowers the first battered fish chunks. Mom joins us and eases into frayed lawn chairs facing the blue lake. Dad becomes quiet, surveying his boats, dock, and sandy beach; his facial expression turns serious. I sit up straight. Dad looks at me.

“Skipper, your mother and I have something important to tell you,” he started, calling me my childhood endearment. “You know we are getting older; both of us will turn 86 this July. Can you believe that?” he posits and wags his head as if amazed at the sound of this reality. He turns his gaze from me to the sizzling protein. Dad lifts the floating golden bits and sets them on a paper towel to cool and soak up some grease. He dips the remaining fileted fish in an egg wash, dusts them with a breadcrumb mixture, and drops them into the frying pot. Dad leans back into his cushioned, redwood chair beneath dusty fly rods tethered to the wall.

My mind considers the possible topic. I know my parents just returned from their annual trip for checkups at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He begins after a pull on his beer and a short gaze at the cherished waters of Lake Blanche. “ We have decided to sell the cabin. It has just become too much – mowing, worrying about the roof. Last week, I put a sign on the highway, and three couples knocked on the back door that day. Well, a nice couple from North Dakota has bought it, and we close in a month. I know this place has a lot of memories, and you will always have those.” Dad studied my face for a reaction. My ears ring louder than church bells; my mind spins like a dreidel. I knew this day would come. Yet, it seems so sudden. I gather my thoughts.

“Really? A month?”

“Yup, we will head back to our winter home in Hot Springs soon as the ink is dry,” reported my father.

“Well, I am proud of you guys for doing this yourself, and I know this is the best decision.”

Regrouping slightly, I smile awkwardly at my parents, a wave of emotions well up. We are leaving Lake Blanche. This spot was my summer refuge for years, the source of pleasant daydreams. It was a safe spot, an essential part of my sense of place. If  I were going through a rough patch in Tulsa, it was not unusual for me to call the owner of Madsen’s General Store. It soothed me to hear her voice tell me what fish were biting and complain about the 80-degree heatwave or the freezing temperatures. We sit quietly, letting our conversation soak in. There will be more talk later, I suppose. I look at my mother. She avoids eye contact, looks out at the lake. I need some private time to process the announcement.

“What time is dinner?” I asked.

Without changing her gaze, “Oh, about 45 minutes.”

“Super. Would you guys mind if I take a little stroll?”

I rise from my station on the front porch and walk down the sidewalk, like a thousand times before, taking a seat on the bench above the lake’s surface, tracing the groove in the sand bottom left by fresh-water clams, trekking wherever they go. I search the bottom between the bench and the next dock. Yards away, in eight feet of crystal-clear water, a concrete slab still rests on the sandy bottom of Blanche. It has a story.

Determined to have a lake mooring for the X, Dad and I toiled on the deck of our happy-hour pontoon boat with its chain-link fence around the perimeter. We mixed up a large batch of concrete and inserted a metal rod with a loop at the top. Several days later, we motored to a position near the bench and pushed the concrete monster off the side, hoping the anchor would land on its bottom with the loop facing up. It did. A white buoy was affixed with chains through the loop of the anchor on the bottom of the lake, and the bow line held the sailboat to the buoy. We didn’t know then that that anchor would stay in that position for decades.

A ski boat with its speakers blaring speeds by my position, reminding me of the hydroplane dad and I built as a thirteen-year-old in one of his manufacturing plant warehouses. In those days, the still afternoon water was a racecourse for my hydroplane and me. The red fiberglass cloth over the plywood and the black cockpit made me quite a sight. Kneeling on a life vest, I crouched behind the wheel, the throttle handle to the right. The fifteen-horse Johnson motor screamed as I skimmed over the water, cranked the wheel, throwing the skiff into bouncing, sliding turns, racing the world’s best racers in my imagination, beating them soundly, unexpectedly. “Who was this kid?” asked an unseen TV sportscaster. God, it was great.

Since the round front end was only one inch high, it could be dangerous to take it out if the water was the least bit rough. During one of Dad’s late afternoon happy hours with the boys, they put a heavier, 25-horse outboard engine on the 12-inch transom of my hydroplane. The surface of the lake was perfect, glass. I was off. Man, it screamed. According to friends on the beach, much of the boat was out of the water. With each pass at sixty miles per hour, my dad and his buddies saluted me with their martini glasses. Suddenly, a fishing boat appeared a short distance ahead of me, causing a small wake of water. My racer began a slow, arcing turn as I cranked the steering wheel away from the trouble. Too late. The boat collided with the lip of water, went slightly airborne, spun clockwise over the surface several times, and stopped. The spinning motion dislodged the big motor off its mooring, lying just within reach beneath the water and still attached to the steering cables. Anxious to save the motor, I grabbed the metal handle and held onto it for dear life. Dad and his crew raced the hundred yards or so in our fishing boat. They removed the engine from the straining cables and hauled it out of Lake Blanche into the boat. Although I knocked around a little bit, I was unscathed. The party continued. Mom was not too pleased with the adventure. But, I was the hero of the beach. A manly man at such a tender age. The vividness of the short drama is as clear as the sunny day it happened. Daydreaming about it only took a few seconds to play, and remembering it feels good.

**

I head down the dock, stepping down onto the beach to begin my final walk past memory-laden spots.

A new cabin replaced a cabin constructed of concrete blocks back in the sixties. It was more like a bunker than a cabin, painted a bright yellow, then a lighter yellow over the years until its demise by the current owners. Kelly—the man who built it— was a salesman for an ice cream company, was a heavy drinker. He and Dad fished together. They were trolling in front of our cabin when Dad reeled in a fourteen-pound Northern Pike that wound up a taxidermic trophy nailed to the knotty pine wall above the living room TV. Kelly was the first time I heard about suicide.

Next to Kelly’s cabin, I remember playing baseball games with the Arnold twins, Tim and Tom from Council Bluffs, Iowa, in a row of empty lots along the shoreline. I remember their older brother, maybe Arlo, stayed with a male friend, maybe Rick, in the garage across the dirt road behind their cabin. A hideaway in which they slept and combed their bad boy, greasy, slicked-back dark hair and, secretly, drank beer and smoked cigarettes. We weren’t welcome in their retreat. Our stays were short but thrilling, in an adolescent sort of way. They seemed so cool.

I walk past the larger cabin of a family from Omaha. The father made cast-metal sewer covers, and I romanced the two King sisters (not simultaneously), learning about puppy love and listening to the strains of the Beach Boys. A passing catamaran reminds me of taking late-night sailboat rides with our coed gang on the beach and strapping the transistor radio to the mast so we could dial in Wolfman Jack on WLS in Chicago.

I recall stormy afternoons when the lake churned white-capped waves and the rain drenched the black, sandy soil. During those turbulent days, lake kids congregated at Madsen’s. There, Emile Madsen—the 80-year-old proprietor with a thick Danish dialect —held court. He sold us ice cream bars and bottles of Orange Crush, while we played pool on his slate table with leather-laced pockets, selected Everly Brothers and Bobby Darin tunes on an old-time jukebox for free. The crusty Dane plied his Pabst, smoked his unfiltered Lucky Strikes most of his waking hours, and sprinkled his cusses amongst a constant monologue. Large still-life oil paintings encircled the knotty pine paneling above cereal shelves, canned vegetables, and souvenirs; masterpieces Emile painted during the cold, white winter days on the Minnesota plains. Yellowed and curled Polaroid pictures of youngsters proudly holding their “record” perch and bass were stapled to the wooden post by the cash register. Their length, weight, and the proud fisherman’s name scribbled on the white margin.

I walk down the lakeshore, passing the cabins so familiar in the ’60s, recently remodeled and foreign. Some dwellings hold relatives of former chums, yet most house aliens to my memories. Things don’t look or feel the same; I realize it is not.

At the end of the beach, I walk along the field of a neighboring farmer, a man who refuses to join the modern farming era with its air-polluting machinery and soil-damaging fertilizers. He grows the same soybean and corn crops as other farmers in the county. Still, he prefers to farm organically before it was cool and cultivate the soil as the pioneers did. As I move along the rolling hills of the land, a familiar sound stirs me. It is the snorting of draft horses plowing, unseen behind a rise. The sound of their exertion grows. I stop along the barbed wire fence at the first sight of the two horses’ heads. They struggle down the slope: the farmer sits on the metal tractor seat of the cultivator, reins in his hands as the implement turns over the soil. He may not have seen me as he worked the team into a turn to plow the next section of land. The magic of the moment takes me back to the first time I witnessed the natural grace of the old ways of doing things, how the farmer and his horses worked hard in unison, how they persevered. These experiences unconsciously shaped my psyche, influenced my soul, and grounded me. I integrate this experience and feel better, knowing that these memories will be with me, available at a moment’s notice. Walking along the fence row, listening to the fading sounds of vintage farming.

**

My time running short, I turn around to go back for dinner down the former, rutted, sandy road that runs behind all the cabins. New nostalgia washes over me.

The summer after my junior year in high school, I was the Iowa State Champ in the half-mile (800 meters). From our backdoor down the road towards the farmland to a cabin’s power pole measured precisely 220 yards. Every day during June and July, I sprinted that distance twenty times, timed it with my Hanhart stopwatch, wrote down my times, jogged back to the start line for my interval, and punched my stopwatch for the faster return trip. That August, I ran against all the state champions in the country and won, running faster than any Iowa high school half-miler ever. The experience of pounding down that sandy road, working hard without complaint to achieve a lofty goal, instilled in me a work ethic for a lifetime.

In the dense woods off the sandy lane, I stalked the acres of woods beyond the road with my Model 12 Winchester shotgun, which my dad gave me for my thirteenth birthday. I remembered my lifelong buddy Batch visiting for a week. We loaded the gun and went through the underbrush into the woods. We felt empowered to go hunting. Batch and I tromped through the dense, forested land behind all the cabins on our beach. We felt older than our age, though neither of us had ever shot anything. We came out of the woods, and a badger stuck his head out of his hole, likely annoyed by us shouting new swear words we had learned. Raising my gun and squeezing the trigger was just a reaction. The badger flopped lifelessly back into his hole. We looked at each other and looked back on the burrow, twenty yards away. No movement. We headed out of the trees, conflicted by the delight of a successful hunting adventure and the sick feeling in my stomach; revulsion won out. In retrospect, the experience changed my interest in killing nature’s beings.

**

Opening the screen door to the cabin, I feel a subtle tranquility. The house is filled with fantastic, home-cooked food.

“How was your walk?” Mom asked.

“Just fine.”

“That’s good. Let’s sit down; things are getting cold,” she reminded me, quickly adding, “The Twins won today, and I got fifty cents from your dad!”

“Good deal.”

Dinner passes unremarkably with small talk about nothing.

Mom makes some homemade fudge and popcorn. We sit down with her treats at the card table with all the photos that cataloged moments and people gone by, encased in a thick, now yellow resin covering. We play cards for hours until both the popcorn and fudge are gone. Typical for my parents, no word is spoken about the cabin sale. Discussion about sensitive issues, anything remotely negative, is always taboo. We are stoic Scandinavians, after all.

  The days quickly pass. I visit nearby places that provide special memories, special faces, special life experiences, and special tears. For the last time, I row on the calm waters of Lake Blanche. In town, I listen intently to the stern, northern accents I will miss.

I take many minutes of video of the trees blowing in a steady north wind. Just the trees, leaves, bird calls, and the wind. The sound of the leaves, the sound of the wind. I am aware I am capturing this as an auditory reminder of fifty years.

I realize the Blanche decades influenced much of my makeup.

**

Two days later, the family who bought our treasure on Lake Blanche paid a visit. I introduce myself and sit on the far side of the small living room, sizing them up like a father might look at his daughter’s first prom date. They are people from eastern North Dakota eighty miles to the west. They are nice enough. They are not fancy. The band of trespassers includes a young couple – the soon-to-be owners – and the son’s mother and father – the financial sponsors of the purchase. The father wears only a bathing suit. That’s all. His substantial belly with plenty of hair is all I can see. They trundle through the house. The son points out features he likes while the old man saunters to the open kitchen and turns on all four gas burners, where mom had cooked Swedish pancakes and mounds of bacon or fried up a mess of bass. The burners work. He seems pleased. The quartet walks out the front door, down the narrow, concrete sidewalk, and out to the bench. The father’s hairy back faces us. He nods and points like Ceasar to this and that around their new empire. The soon-to-be-sellers and their son watch without expression through the large, plate-glass window. I retreat into myself. I don’t say goodbye to them as they walk through the side yard to their car.

**

The last morning comes. I awake early, just before the sun rose, a dawn of soft light and the sound of small waves coming to their end place on the shore. Looking from the bedroom window, the wooden bench at the end of the dock catches my attention. I pack my bag, pour a cup of coffee, quietly open and close the front screen door, and walk down the sidewalk with my camera. A few fishermen cut through the sparkling water to their favorite early morning holes. Woodpeckers vigorously tap out their rhythms on the Lindenwood trees, and a yellow tabby prowls along the water’s edge, looking for washed-up fish. The bench at the end of the dock creaks as I sit myself down.

The sky…… the lake….., and the trees of Glendalough Nature Conservancy line the south half of the lake, moving gently in the breeze, looking like they did fifty years ago, as they will always look. My thoughts become quiet. For the moment, this is my world. Breathing in the lake air, a sense of renewal washes over me.

 

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