Eric

Fishhook Summers.

My earliest Minnesota memory was the summer our family spent at Granddaddy’s cabin at the Methodist campgrounds on Fishhook Lake.  I got lost on the path from there up to Comfort Lodge, where Uncle Rick and Aunt Martha were staying in the summer home of her youth.  Later, during WWII, my mother, brother and I spent some weeks at Comfort Lodge with Aunt Martha, Cynthia, Dick and Kit (then an infant).  At a later summer our Toledo family stayed in the guest cottage, where I took Aunt Martha’s dog Peter into bed to comfort him during a thunder storm.

Eventually summers were spent at Up Norse (Kit’s phrase), the comfortable lodge designed by Uncle Rick.   One summer I was drafted to bury the electric cable through the woods, running out of slack circumnavigating the pines as I chopped through their roots.  With no regard for his feelings I sang an altered version of Old Man River: “that old E. Richard, he don’t know nothin’, he must say somethin’.”    Other summer chores included running the sickle bar.

It was far from all work.  I remember us hanging on for dear life on the tail gate of Aunt Martha’s Ford woody as she raced through the pines coming back from Park Rapids shopping.  One summer my cousin Dick and I walked the circumference of the lake along the shore, fording chest-deep streams along the way.  More usually Cynthia and I canoed across to the Potato River, or chased loons as they swam under water, trying to guess where they would surface.  Aunt Martha loved swimming in the mirror-smooth lake at dawn.  With water and air at the same temperature it was like swimming in the sky. .

Fishhook Lake was a literary retreat.  Aunt Martha’s outhouse had Cynthia’s mural on the inside back wall showing bluebirds carrying a banner saying “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make a mighty ocean and a wondrous land.”  Certain poetry can never be forgotten.  An earlier outhouse at Comfort Lodge was pointed to by a heroic little man on a tree with the motto; “There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may.”

Other memories include trying to evade deer flies by swimming under water, putting on insect repellent to walk out to the mailbox, Kit and Bill’s early morning fishing trips, the wonderful blueberry pancakes served up by Aunt Martha and my mother, with Dick eating twice as many as any one else, evenings playing card games at Comfort Lodge, and the terrible case of poison ivy I contracted planting white pine seedlings at the end of the summer before my senior year at Wesleyan.  Of course the greeting in Wadena, the summer after my freshman year, will never be forgotten.

One summer Mother and Dad went to New Hampshire for the wedding of a family friend’s daughter.  My brother Rick and I demurred, going instead to Fishhook Lake.

I returned again after serving in the Army, and my brother twice took his children to visit the place of so any happy memories.