Oh, the places we'll go

St. Paul to Bemidji, 245 miles.

Multi-modal vacation, scenes 1 to 7.

Scene #1: Minivan loaded with three men and a mom: 50-year-old husband, two teen boys, and me. Seriously, is there any reason we need to eat Gas-Station Lunch? Bean and cheese burritos warmed up in the microwave, cheese brat, teriyaki beef jerky, salted pistachios, orange soda, coffee. All in the Elvis-themed station in Leader, highway 64.

Best line of the drive, from Carlos, my son's friend whose family comes from El Salvador: "Who's Paul Bunyan?"

Scene #2: Teen son gets to drive the bumpy road to the grandparents' cabin, a family tradition. He pulls the front seat as far as it will go and sets hands at 10 and 2. Remember your first time behind a wheel?

I remember mine. My dad was trying to quit smoking so the shirt pocket he normally had filled with a hard pack of Winstons was empty, but every time I ground the gears he'd grab at his chest pocket, looking to calm his nerves and irritation at my bad driving.

My husband yammers at my son, "slow down, check your mirrors, don't get too close to the right, you could risk slipping off the dirt road, hover your foot over the brake on all the curves in case you have to stop." My son says "Dad, don't hound me." Hubbie says "I'm going to hound you and give you advice every time you get behind the wheel so get used to it."

Scene #3:


16-foot Lund with 25-horse Evinrude and trolling motor.








My dad lives with a woman, can you tell? What bachelor would go out in the fishing boat dressed in this get-up? My mom bought him the hat to save his neck, the glasses to save his eyes, and the bug juice and 45 spf sunscreen she's got rubbed all over him to save his skin.




Q: Do teen boys really like to fish?

A: Only if they catch some.




Scene #4: Canoeing in wet swimsuits without bug juice with a new batch of deerflies in the vicinity. If we connected the dots from the bites all over my son's body we'd have ourselves a new Escher print.


Scene #5: Nothing beats a good long walk in the woods. Max Perkins, editor extraordinaire, felt his greatest pleasure was in "losing himself on a long solitary stroll. A 'real walk' he used to call it. Alone, he would stride the same ground [in Vermont] his ancestors had before him" ("Max Perkins, Editor of Genius").




My vacation is not complete until I've had one of these long solo walks. I like to think about those early cabiners, those that stayed in the stone lodge on Gryce Styne or back behind the new power lines in log huts a ways off the water.

Scene #6: Driving my mom to town to cheer her up after she'd had a rough morning--perhaps a bit too much testosterone for her to handle in her cantankerous sixties. My mom was born in 1939 and is part of what Gail Sheehy calls the "Silent Generation." I was born just after the last of the Baby Boomers and am part of the so-called "Me Generation." But during this long ride into town, you'd never know it.

Scene #7: There is a guy who lives on the lake who invented the identity kit for kids, the one with the free fingerprinting archive at all the state agencies-- you know, that came out in Minnesota after Jacob Wetterling disappeared? That one, yes, well he invented it and got rich and puts on this fantastic fireworks show over the lake at night. Lasts over forty minutes and is actually as grand as any town fireworks I've ever seen. We all piled onto the pontoon and drifted over to the west end of the lake: the two boys in front, me in the middle, K. behind, Mom a little tipsy from too much wine, sitting behind Dad, who was at the wheel driving this old engine. We couldn't turn it off once we got close to all the other boats with their green night lights because sometimes it won't start up again. So we kept it in neutral and had the sputtering of the motor as backdrop to the sprays of gold and red and green bursts, the young loons crying out in the distance. After the fireworks we sputtered back again under the night sky--the Big and Little Dippers, Venus, and even a tiny satellite watched over us, each one of us resting our heads back against our seats, our eyes wide to this low and sparkly dome.