During the week of Valentine’s Day, my wife and I spent three days at a lake-shore cabin north of Brainerd. The weather was unseasonably warm, about 35 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. At night, it was colder, but still without any discernible wind. The lake beneath the steep hill on which the cabin was located didn’t seem to be reliably frozen: the ice was glazed with fallen snow, but there were polished blue-grey patches, brushed smooth by the winds, that looked fragile. Networks of fissures spread over parts over lake like the craquelure on an Old Master painting and far across the frozen water where normally there would be small shack villages of ice-fishermen, I saw only a single black hut, abandoned, perhaps, due to dangerously thin ice.
The country in this part of the State is more water than land. Squid-shaped lakes cast tendrils out amidst the evergreen forests. Dry land consists of narrow ridges between bodies of water, slim promontories and sandy points and this isthmus-terrain dissected by channels lined with brown reeds pushed up through the spongy ice at the margins of the swamps. Islands clog the narrow passages of these lakes and, if nature were allowed to prevail here, all of the bays and inlets would be connected by marshes pierced here and there by aisles of open water. To make railroad easements and, later, highways, the corridors of dry land between the lakes have been rationalized, some of the estuaries filled up with gravel and packed earth embankments on which to build train tracks and roads. Villages are squeezed between big lakes, frozen white as marble at this time of year.
The resort where we were staying consisted of an event center for weddings, six post-modern cabins, modular cubes with glass walls fronting the lake (or “forest-view” across the clearing), the sort of architecture you see in Iceland or along the fjords of Norway or among the Finnish lakes. The event center consisted of some austere trapezoids stacked like sea-going storage containers on top of one another. Bulldozers had been remodeling the land when the Winter stopped work and some shallow pits full of frozen mud were clogged with debris – knocked-over trees, abandoned tires and shattered utility poles, shards of plywood. Around the edges of the compound, old summer houses built with decaying clapboard and wrap-around porches, screened against warm weather’s mosquitos, occupied high points overlooking the lake. Some of these structures were small, dour-looking summer cabins but several of the buildings were bigger and had once been impressive although they were now in a state of partial ruin, windows hanging loose from their frames, doors askew, shingles abraded by storms and pierced by sharp, fallen branches. The post-modern Ikea-style cabins inserted into the landscape were ribbed with aluminum fins and the color of autumnal woods, built to conceal themselves in the forest. They were screened to hide the light that they emitted at night so that the sky would be dark and laden with wet-looking stars. The wooden houses and cabins were points of darkness, relics spilling shadow out from their wrecked thresholds.
Although the resort, marked with signs of its lavish restoration, was supposed to be in the midst of unspoiled nature – in fact, the place was called Nature Link – it would be a stretch of the imagination to characterize the area as wilderness or uninhabited. To the contrary, these lakes are only 150 miles from the Twin Cities and the area has been exploited for summer cabins and fishing bivouacs, bible and scout camps as well as resorts of all kinds, some of them grandiose and expensive others more rustic, for many generations. The place where we were staying was a resort as early as 1898 with an austere, but large lodge (still visible but now abandoned) above the sandy point of land, an island, channel, and two big bays, each about a half-mile wide. This resort called Minnewawa, undoubtedly replacing a more primitive fishing camp, that was, itself, likely established on this isthmus frequented by woodland Indians since time immemorial. A station on the rail-line about three-quarters of a mile from Minnewawa provided ready access to the resort. (The train tracks are gone now, but the open-air stop with a row of benches under a wooden shelter – it looks a pleine-aire chapel with pews – still stands on fill hauled in to make a earthen dam between lakes and a road-bed for the trains.) A tourist town with motels and boutiques is located a mile to the east of the resort where several winding forests roads intersect. Beginning around 1980, the resort was converted into a summer hockey camp. Boys (and later girls as well) trained in meadows cut into the statuesque fir and pine woods. Of course, there was no ice on which to skate and, so, the kids, apparently, played hockey with brooms and balls, out-of-bounds represented by the pine forest, mostly clear of underbrush due to the dense evergreen canopy overhead. White-tailed deer flickered through the woods; the animals always seem to soar and leap as they run. After drills in the mornings, led by down-on-their-luck, hockey pros, the kids adjourned to the lake to swim or row boats out to the island where fumbling love affairs took place and where there were caches of booze and marijuana stashed among the trees. Bonfires flared on the point of land. The professional hockey players stayed in the white frame cottages overlooking the lake, getting drunk and disorderly themselves at night. The main lodge was already boarded-up, prey to marauding racoons. Then, the hockey camp failed and the place was left to decay for a few years before being sold to Minneapolis investors and, first, rebuilt as a wedding event center and, then, a sort of woodlands motel for wedding guests and, at last, as the Nature-Link resort.
On the first evening that we were at Nature-Link, as the sun was setting under a ribbon of salmon-pink light, I walked down to the point. It was only a few hundred feet, navigating an asphalt trail laid on a diagonal down the hillside to a barrel sauna erected on the sandy spit next to a wooden shack used, I supposed, to store kayaks during the summer months. Fairy lights hung in delicate curves overhead, strung between the tall, ramrod-straight pines. A boy and girl had been sitting next to a smoky fire in a pit by the barrel-sauna but they had departed. Flame still sputtered and hissed in the pit. The barrel-sauna was convex on its side facing the lake, a big bubble of transparent plexi-glass. On the hill overhead, the ruinous lodge and cottages glared down at me with windows like eye-sockets in a skull. The island thirty yards across the frozen water was still, not even the reeds poking through the ice moving, not a breeze stirring and no birds seemed to be about. Far out on the level plain of lake ice, veined with obscure corridors and frozen lagoons, I saw the single ice-fishing shack, a black, featureless monad against white that was now turning blue and grey as it became dark. Something shuddered in the underbrush on the island. It was the sort of place where you might panic, sense menace in a shadow or the flutter of a branch like an eyelid, and, then, run wildly to flee some imagined danger lurking in the darkness.
The next morning, the sun clawed its way through low-hanging slate-grey clouds and, then, the landscape was flooded with light. The pines on the steep descent to the frozen lake stood at dignified intervals and we could look down between their scaly rust-colored trunks to the ice. Near the shore, a line of footprints, each cupping blue shadow, marched out toward the island and some slicks of smooth, wind-polished ice too hard to imprint. Two parallel lines marked the snow drifted up against the edge of the lake, apparently, left by sled-runners. I didn’t recall seeing the tracks or the sled-marks the previous afternoon. Was it possible that someone, pulling a sled had walked out over the frozen lake after dark? And, if so, why? The prints in the snow were aimed in the direction of the island although the marks ceased to be visible where ice blistered the lake surface in squashed blue-green domes. At the edge of the island, indentations in the ice formed a shadowy grey hollow. An upright boulder, thumb-shaped and crested with snow, jutted up over the crater at the edge of the ice. The preceding night had been solemn, dark, still – we hadn’t heard voices. The path of prints in the snow were thirty feet below the level of our cabin, and began at the crumpled shoreline directly under the glass facade facing the lake. The most likely explanation for the tracks sudden visibility, I thought, was the oblique rays of sunlight raking across the frozen lake.
I put on my coat and hat and walked from the cabin to the entrance of the resort. Loops of pale, yellow lights were strung like pearls between trees and outlined the name of the resort hanging over the gate entry. Among the pines, it was always gloomy and the lights shone against the darkness falling from the evergreens. The clouds had returned and the day was dark again. The drive-way into the resort joined with other lanes accessing lake cabins along the shoreline. At the county highway, a third of a mile from the cabin, the two-lane blacktop ran parallel to a snowmobile and bike trail. The unseasonably warm weather had left most of the asphalt trail bare. Between the road and trail, stands of fir were interspersed among hay-colored reeds. I walked for a mile or so and, then, turned around and went back in the direction that I had come. A couple of crows derided me and my feet were cold. On the driveway back to the resort, beyond the amber Christmas lights dangling from the gate, I saw a peculiar building or, rather, several buildings. Two long rectangular houses were linked by an enclosed corridor and a smaller structure between them. The smaller building seemed to once have been one of the cabins at resort – it had screen windows and the vestiges of a porch. This squat little building was locked between the much larger and taller sheds, barren utilitarian structures with walls pierced by a few windows asymmetrically (and haphazardly) placed. The siding on the big rectangular houses was faded blue and water pitching off the overhanging eaves had cut foot-deep trenches in the forest mulch on all sides of the buildings. I had seen pictures of Shaker dormitories, or cult buildings in Guyana or Nevada, and this complex of abandoned structures, set back from the access road, intrigued me. I walked across the field and, then, walked around the dormitories. They were large, austere, obviously abandoned – when I pressed my face to the cold window-glass, I could see bare joists and damp-looking studs in the shadows inside. The interior surfaces of the walls were either stripped away or, perhaps, had never existed. A stench pushed me back from the buildings. Something was dead here and rotting.
The night was dark and moonless. Most of lake cabin were empty this time of the year and the curving shores of lake beyond the long reach of the ice were dark. Fairy-lights, also yellow and faint, festooned the barrel-sauna. There was no bonfire on the point of land. The hillside below our cabin was studded with small lamps, probably solar-powered, and they emitted a faint luminescence in the darkness. How anyone could use those ghostly lights to illumine their way was mysterious to me. Sometimes, an unseen dog barked.
Two black-and-white pictures adorned the walls of the cabin, blow-ups, apparently, of old snapshots. In one picture, a timid-looking girl stood on a dock in the lake. The shoreline behind her was murky, with stands of trees and dark undergrowth. The girl wore a one-piece bathing suit and was unwilling to enter the water. Below her feet, in the lake, some heads bobbed above the white, rumpled surface of the water. On the wall above the bed, another picture showed a ramshackle bridge crossing to the island from the point of land where the barrel-sauna and the fire-pit were now located. The bridge looked like something from a wood cut by Hokusai – it appeared to be improvised, low arches of plywood spanning a half-dozen piers lined up in the channel. The footbridge was already in disrepair when the photograph was taken and it seemed fragile, something that a strong wind or a blizzard or, even, a heavy snowfall might topple into the water. The island was a black mass of trees and brush, a destination that wasn’t worth crossing the water for – the thumb-shaped rock on the margin of island glowed like a tombstone in the gloom.
In the morning light, more tracks had appeared on the snow drifts under the shore-line. Two more sled marks incised the snow and three or more sets of tracks were pressed into the snow, the path lost where the bare ice on the lake was exposed. The trails pointed in the direction of the boulder and the concave hollow at the edge of the island.
In the afternoon, I drove into the resort town. The place consisted of a single road and an intersection. Most of the shops were seasonal and closed. Places sold expensive women’s clothing and kitchen plaques with other knick-knacks for lake cabins. A florist’s place was shut for the season – a sign said it would open in May. Several realtors had offices on Main Street; there was probably a brisk business involving lake cabin transactions. A low embankment marked the old railway right-of-way through town that was now a foot-trail and, near the promenade, there were several candy shops and ice-cream parlors, also shuttered for the Winter. One place sold fashion accessories for Nordic skiiing – it was also closed, possibly due to the lack of any snow in the woods and along the lake shores. The two businesses selling cabin decorations seemed to be adversaries. On the door of one of those places, a sign said: We are a profanity-free store – we don’t sell merchandise with obscene writing on it. The other store had a sign on its door: F-Bombs dropped here. It amused me to think that both of the stores were, perhaps, owned by the same enterprising merchant. In any event, neither was open.
I was intrigued by a shop that advertised that it sold fine olive oils and balsamic vinegars. The shop’s storefront said that it was “tasting bar.” Inside, a slender woman in her sixties was reading a paperback behind a granite counter-top. She greeted me with a little skepticism. Lining the walls were stainless steel canisters, all identical and about the size of a large coffee pot or samovar. Identical bottles occupied the niches enclosing the canisters, flanking those containers. I told the woman that I had never seen a place of this sort. She raised her eyebrows: “Really?” she asked. I wondered why she wasn’t down in La Jolla or Coral Gables. She probably wondered the same thing since she looked a little morose. No prices were listed anywhere – I suppose it would be gauche to a suggest that someone in the market for exotic olive oils or hand-made balsamic vinegars would care about the prices for these luxury products. I selected a bottle of pomegranate balsamic vinegar. The woman watched me closely and was concerned, I think, that I would drop the precious stuff and break the bottle on the floor.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
I said no.
She asked me if I would bring her the bottle so that I could shop “hands-free.”
I carried the bottle over to the counter and set it on the granite. She reached out, fumbled the thing, and the glass clicked hard against the stone. For a moment, I expected the bottle to break but it simply rolled on its side in her direction where she caught it before it toppled onto her lap.
“These counters are so wide,” she said.
I bought a couple more bottles. The woman asked me if I wanted to taste the merchandise. I told her that this was unnecessary. I supposed the balsamic vinegar tasted like vinegar; I presumed that the olive oil tasted like olive oil.
I drove back to the resort with my precious cargo. On the way back, I stopped at grocery store on the edge of town. The food prices at the grocery was shocking. A can of tomato soup that would cost two dollars at Walmart was selling for $5.99. Ramen noodles, normally 30 cents a bag, were selling for 80 cents apiece. I entered the resort offices. Not one but three desk clerks were crowding around the check-in computer terminal. This seemed odd to me – there were only six cabins available for rent and only three of them seemed to be occupied. I asked the clerks about the odd buildings with the faded blue siding across the empty lot from the office.
“That’s a very sinister-looking building,” I said.
The girl nodded her head: “I agree.”
“What is it?”
She said that when the resort closed in 1980, the place was a Summer hockey camp for forty years. The big rectangular structures had been a dormitory.
“That’s a scary building,” I said. “I was wondering what kind of cult lived here.”
“Well, when you return next time, the buildings will be gone. We’re going to have them demolished this Spring.”
I thanked the three clerks for the information and went to the cabin to show Julie my bottles of vinegar and olive oil.
I suppose there are cults lurking in the North Woods. Once, I visited my father-in-law’s cabin on a more remote lake northeast of Duluth. If you’re not a “lake cabin” person, the pleasures of being “up north” as it is said pall quickly: after an obligatory tour of the shoreline in the row boat powered by an outboard Evinrude motor, you sit on a porch and watch water-skiiers; inside, people are napping or frying something or reading dog-eared mystery novels – flies slip through the screen door every time it is opened and kids amuse themselves swatting them. Bored with these tepid amusements, I went for a drive. The road running north toward the Canadian border was suspiciously smooth, well-maintained, and straight, grinding its way through tamarack swamps and endless forests in which pine and fir trees planted by logging companies stood in obedient, perfectly straight ranks lining the polished black top. After thirty miles, the highway came to a dead end. At the turn-around, underbrush veiled a lake, a prism of water green with algae. An extension of the asphalt curved through the trees to a stout gate that was padlocked. Beyond the fence bearing a shrill spiral of razor wire at its top, I could see part of the lake on which a twin-float plane was bobbing off-shore. Some aluminum docks slipped down into the water and I could see a compound of steel sheds near a nondescript house covered in blue siding with several clapboard cottages attached. What kind of place was this? – at the end of the road with nothing between this compound and the north pole but several thousand miles of forests, one of two lonely roads and a vast, empty tundra stretching to the Arctic Sea.
I recall that once I attended a family re-union for which an out-of-use Girl Scout camp had been rented. There was no electricity at the site, but the buildings were reasonably well-maintained and someone had cut the lawns in the clearings where there were flagpoles with cottages standing under the tall, straight columns of the pine trees. During the day, the place was cheerful with curved trails leading down to a small oval lake on which a wooden dock floated on pontoons. Picnic tables stood in the shade and there was a fire-pit on the bluff above the water where a shelter made from field stone and heavy timber with a shingled roof had been erected. It was all pleasant and convivial and the sunset over the lake lingered for a long time as if the summer sky was unwilling to surrender it’s light and, then, when it was finally dark, a bonfire hissed and crackled and threw its orange light at the edges of the great forest. Someone carrying a lantern led us to our cabin and there it was pitch-black and the inside of the sleeping area smelled of pine-resin expressed from the log walls by the heat of the day. In the corners of the cabin, there were rustling noises and I supposed that the overhead beams and joists were swarming with spiders and centipedes and, perhaps, the sounds under the iron bedframes and springs were made by mice or bats or, even, marauding raccoons. In the modern world, we are accustomed to electrically powered light and it was strange and disturbing to be in the middle of the vast forest without any light any where to be seen.
I was grateful that we had missed the first day of the reunion and that we had to spend only one night in the girl scout camp cabin. Early in the morning, when the first light of dawn drew me outside, I walked along the soft, pillowy trail covered in pine-needles up to the fire-pit where a wan, greyish swirl of smoke was rising. My sister-in-law was sitting at the picnic table with a mug of coffee in front of her, the drink also emitting a little coil of steam. It was chilly and my sister-in-law, who lives up north and likes to camp, was wearing a tattered sweater. She told me that the night before we came to the reunion, the family’s sleep was disturbed by a pulsing sound, a sort of rhythmic humming from across the lake that some interpreted as chanting. The next morning, a couple of the men took a canoe and paddled across the water to a landing flagged with “No Trespassing” signs. They ignored the signs, beached their canoe and walked up into the woods. In a small clearing, the men found some folding chairs arranged around a sooty fire-pit and a dead cat.
“What do you think?” my sister-in-law asked.
“I didn’t hear anything last night,” I said.
“No, it was quiet last night,” my sister-in-law said. “It’s a satanic cult,” she added.
“I’m glad I didn’t know about it,” I said.
We left the camp around noon, a little after lunch. It was a long drive back to our home in the southern part of the State.
The next morning during our Valentine’s Day get-away, dawn lifted the darkness over the lake below our post-modern cabin and I saw that there were new sled marks in the snow drifted against the edge of the frozen lake. More tracks had appeared below the hillside. After I dressed, I gingerly walked the path leading down the steep slope to the ice. There were patches of ice on the trail and I didn’t want to slip and fall and roll down onto the ice. At the edge of the lakeshore, I saw that the ice was in disarray next to the bank, mottled with blue transparent windows showing through the veins of snow. The marks made by sled-runners (at least, so I interpreted them) curved in parallel out across the ice, visible where there were patches of snow, but otherwise not discernible an the plates and shields of frozen lake. All of the marks angled toward the island and the place where the thumb-shaped boulder stood like an apparition at the edge of the underbrush. It was probably just a trick of the light slipping obliquely over the lake, but the tracks looked as if they had been made by bare feet. Sole-marks sprouted little toe impressions. It may have been that the sun from the previous day had somehow melted around the footprints and distorted them.
On the night-stand next to the bed, a machine offered noise in different hues to assist guests in falling asleep. The noise could be tuned to “white,” “brown” or “green.” As Julie packed for out check-out, I tinkered with device. The “white” noise was a faint sizzle, like rain falling on metal roof. “Brown” was more granular, sandy, something like the feeling of a beach underfoot. The “green” noise was the color of algae in a lake simmering under a hot sun, iridescent dragon-flies with great rainbow-colored wings hovering over the moss-colored glaze floating on the water. I wondered if the noise machine had been placed to keep people from hearing the rhythmic chanting coming from across the lake.
When checking-out, I asked about the footprints in the snow covering the ice.
“People see those all the time,” one of the clerks told me. (Today two young women wearing ski-sweaters were manning the front desk.)
“I thought they were barefoot,” I said.
“Probably people using the barrel sauna and, then, cooling down with a trot over the lake,” the other clerk said. But she looked a little disturbed and glanced to her colleague.
The other clerk asked me where the footprints led.
“Over to the island,” I said.
The young woman said that there was a natural spring at the edge of the island, near a big rock on the bank.
“It doesn’t freeze in that place,” the young woman said. “Many years ago, a couple of kids drowned next to the island. They pulled them out of the water, but they were dead. Then, they dragged them over the ice on sleds.”
“When was that?”
“No one knows, but a long time ago,” the young woman said.
We checked-out and drove home. We made good time from the pine forests to there corn and soy-bean fields, unplowed and lying Winter-fallow near our town.
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