Northern Minnesota

We pulled away from our first night in our camper in that Walmart parking lot and went forward. We met one of Jim’s sisters and her family for brunch in Madison, WI because we could park on the street in front of our niece’s house. We stopped that same night at our son’s house south of Minneapolis because we could pull into his driveway. The next morning, we loved on our two beautiful grandsons for a few hours and left for northern Minnesota. After our son backed the rig out of his driveway.

It felt uphill the entire way. The car pulled the camper well, and I was feeling very confident in both vehicles. By the time we had our first breathtaking glimpse of Lake Superior, the area from Duluth to Grand Marais became mine again.

The year I graduated from SIU-C in Outdoor Recreation, I applied for an internship at the Environment Learning Center https://wolf-ridge.org/about/our-legacy/ in Isabella, MN. It was a magical summer. I traveled the area formed by glaciers, canoed the Boundary Waters, taught kids how to climb and rappel and love nature, explored the many waterfalls, sat on the shores of Lake Superior, watched the night sky for constellations and Aurora Borealis and dreamed. My entire life seemed ahead of me. I suppose that’s why this first camper experience (sans Walmart) had to be in that memorable area, so I could share it with Jim.

We pulled into Golden Eagle Lodge and Campground https://www.golden-eagle.com/ in the Sawtooth Mountains above Grand Marais, just off the Gunflint Trail very close to the Canadian border. It was a beautiful place on Flour Lake, and I’d made sure it was a pull-through site. It was just before dusk and I became befuddled about the first thing I was to do. I plugged into the electricity with a surge protector, connected the water, and chocked the tires. I had what was I’m sure, a life or death question, too.

“Excuse me, but could I ask you a question?” I said to a guy I saw at another campsite.

For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was. He didn’t just give me an answer, he came over and brought another guy from yet another campsite with him.

“I knew where that question would lead,” he laughed.

They decided I needed to raise a tire. I now know how to do that. We blocked the hitch jack, unhitched everything, and they left me to put down the four stabilizer jacks and pads beneath them. Fortunately, I was armed with a battery-operated drill and socket bit.

“Next time, don’t pull in so close to the hook-ups.” Heck, I didn’t know how long the cords were to begin with and didn’t even know which side my hook-ups were on.

Jim and I settled in that night and then I went out to check for Northern Lights. The sky was clear and beautiful and the stars seemed closer to Earth from here. I could almost touch the Milky Way, but sadly, the pulsating swirls of color were absent.

Our first night of Northwoods camping was almost in the books. I felt both exhilarated and overwhelmed. Would I ever get the hang of the many steps of setting up and tearing down? What about water pumps and hot water heaters? There isn’t a mechanical bone in my body. A new appreciation for my husband flooded my soul. He never complained all those years before Alzheimer’s. He did everything I couldn’t see or know or care to know about, for me and our boys. He kept things running. And I thought housework (which he shared) and cooking (which he shared) and laundry (which he shared) and child-rearing (which he shared) were all there were to living life. How totally oblivious I was. But he would be doing all this for me, were our roles reversed.

And why can’t we charge our phones or plug in a nightlight? Those dumb electrical outlets must have some kind of short. But the battery is fully charged, the fresh water tank is still full, the black and gray tanks are mostly empty. Life is good.

The next morning, I saw a woman who seemed to be doing everything with her camper, too. Her husband walked away while she was obviously going to dump her tanks. Like a kid in a candy shop, I asked if I could watch. She laughed and said of course. I knew she understood. I found out this was only her second time to dump the tanks and she walked me through everything, step by step. She even gave me a package of disposable gloves for when my turn came to handle our sewer hose. I told her Christmas came early! I’d hit the jackpot with this woman. She was a nurse and those hoses with their icky content didn’t phase her. She had researched all this long before she bought her camper and I was grateful I could reap the benefits along with her. When she was finished, she came over to our campsite, looked the camper over, and told me what could be different with ours. I asked her about the outlets. She looked at the electric box where our 30 amp cord was plugged and turned the breaker ON. I was so thankful it was a woman who solved the problem we all had missed.

The rest of the day was spent retracing my tracks back to the ELC. It moved from Isabella in 1988 to a magnificent location on 2,000 acres along the Baptism River on a ridge overlooking Lake Superior https://wolf-ridge.org/about/ . We visited with the first director’s daughter Betsy, who was a junior in high school when I was an intern in 1983. While it is an incredible facility and students are so fortunate to have access to this showplace, and I can appreciate its story and be a proud piece of its history, it was not home for me. I had lived at the much smaller, less elaborate, and more primitive facility which was once a Job Corps site. We had to go there, next. I was glad Betsy and some of the naturalists warned me there was nothing left of the old place. It would have been a shock to see the slabs where buildings had been: the administrative building, our dining room, the cabins we interns lived in.

It was a shock to see a guy all set up with a camper who looked like he’d been there for a while and wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It was an incredibly bittersweet place for me. Jim and I went further back on the property and looked for a trail to Flathorn Lake. I desperately looked up in trees to find a relic of our old ropes course; maybe a cable still attached to a tree. The slabs were all I could find. The sidewalk where I’d danced in the rain was gone; our team’s course, gone. I could only guess at the forgotten spots where we had taught children about owls and lichen and laughed and loved. I didn’t belong here and it had been ever so long that I did.

The Knotted Pine, a log bar where people congregated on evenings and weekends off, was still thriving on the corner of the entrance to the road to the old ELC and it made me smile. We went in and sat at the bar and had a beer. I looked longingly at a booth where friends had once sat chatting before a memorable night of swimming, and swallowed back tears. The place was beginning to fill up, so no one noticed my emotional reluctance to leave. Not even my husband, as I suggested we get back on the road and continue our trek back to our campsite in the mountains above Grand Marais. I knew this was the last time I’d be back in Isabella.

The photo above is from the Wolf Ridge ELC, September 2019.