There is an art to packing. Dad can fit a lifetime of stuff into a weekend's worth of bags, something that has always amazed me. I did learn how to pack the trunk of a car for a trip to the cabin for the weekend, with all the suitcases for a family of six, the cooler, and the worms for fishing.
Trips to the cabin. That's slowly becoming something of the past in Minnesota. Many lakes have been over-developed with "lake homes," monster homes that crowd in too close to the shore and create more problems then they are truely worth. The lake I summer on, for instance, has four miles of undeveloped shoreline, and I heard not too long ago, some people in that area would love to buy it from the camp system so they could develop it as well. Oy.
Our cabin was on a small lake in central Minnesota, northeast of Brainard about 30 miles. We were on the edge of the Whitefish chain, a group of lakes that were connected by a river, allowing you to go a helluva a long way on the interwater routes. I know people that got lost more than once because they didn't know how to read their maps and find their way home. Our lake didn't directly connect into that chain, but, we use to go out on it quite often. Unlike the bigger lakes in Minnesota, most of the Whitefish chain are fairly narrow and deep , meaning that even when the winds are heavy, the lakes don't roll and roil.
Leech and Mille Lacs, on the other hand, are big shallow basins. In the summers, when the breeze builds to a gust, you soon see breakers, long, long breakers working their way across the lake, often breaking at an angle against the shore, spilling across sand and rocks.
I've walked the shore of both of those lakes, hunting lake polished agates. On our lake, and even the Whitefish chain, you didn't often find agates. Even on Mille Lacs and Leech you don't find a lot of agates. But, it's still to hunt for them. When we were kids, living on the shores of the lakes over the weekends of the summers, gypsies going north and south on Fridays and Sundays, treasures packed in the trunk of the car.
Monday, January 23, 2006
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