Taking the waters

With every final turn, with every additional quarter-mile of distance from the city and every hour from the endless and unjust snows of October, a burden is lifted and a lightness replaces it, and lightness can feel just like a joyous speed.

The Upper Midwest is something extraordinary. When it shines it does so briefly but with totality: the lushest forests of every shade of green, lakes that shimmer and sparkle, and skies of gentle blue and puffy white that stretch endlessly across the entire crisp, clean tableau.

Woods, water, sky: these are the three omnipresent primary colors from which, with astounding tonal variety and subtlety, this entire region is painted.

It is the brevity of the good season in the Upper Midwest which grants its treasured value and deep meaning. Minnesotants talk of summer less as one quarter of an evenly divided year than as a dozen or so weekends: the short span between Memorial Day and Labor Day. These national holidays, which for most Americans bookend the summer season in a symbolic sense, represent a harsh meteorological reality for the denizens of the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.

On Memorial Day, at the end of May or in early June, weather (and moods) have only just thawed and memories of the brutal winter just past are still visceral. Minnesotans respond with almost animal instinct: they cast off the shackles that physically, mentally, and emotionally confined them for the past seven or more months and they lurch, with abandon, into the fleeting season that replenishes this land and its people with energy and life and hope after such a long and hard season of dormancy.

And so they set their compasses north, making their way through heavy traffic on the organized grid of numbered freeways that cuts through and encircles the metropolitan region, a network seemingly designed to offer many routes for escape at the first burst of green on the state's thick tree canopy.

These Minnesotans plow ahead, everyone pushing hopefully northward, on state highways and then onto long county roads that run straight as a taut fishing line through rolling cornfields that stretch onward forever to the light blue horizon.

They turn off here and there onto ever smaller byways that pass through forgotten little towns that never change. They stop quickly at the expensive local grocery with its limited selection of up-north essentials—brats, buns, Old Dutch potato chips—and impressive supply of bait and beer.

They plunge deeper into the woods, ever more spruce and fir as they push on ever northward. Blacktop turns to gravel and the forest closes in on all sides. The light starts to slant and turn golden and sothey're watching for deer now, those year-round inhabitants of the cabin country, as the road twists and races.

They catch here and there a tantalizing glimpse, through tall stands of timber, of glistening clear and endless blue, not sky but water, life giving water, already quenching the emotional thirst of some lucky family whose lake place is ten minutes closer to the city. Their heart skips a beat.

But that final wait, those last ten minutes: totally worth it.

They slow their pace as they near the final stretch on a single-lane road but it somehow feels faster now, not because they are accelerating on their journey but because, with every final turn, with every additional quarter-mile of distance from the city and every hour from the endless and unjust snows of October, a burden is lifted and a lightness replaces it, and lightness can feel just like a joyous speed.

It is an unbinding, a loosening.

And as they slow down the final stretch, a slow descent along a lakeside road lined now with cabins, their hearts quicken toward freedom and joy.

It has been months of waiting for a single moment, this feeling, which unfolds now in real time. Final stretch: music off, windows down, mild and humid and sweet pine-scented air flooding the car, immediately displacing the dry cold air conditioning and triggering a flood of dopamine and a familiar rush of elation.

Crunch on gravel driveway. Car stops. Engine off. Car door shuts, muffled by the lush and abundant surrounding forest.

Look past the cabin. What was earlier only glimpsed for a few teasing seconds stands there now in blue naked glory.

The lake.

It sparkles shimmering sapphire, a startling and joyous shock of opening and light after a journey through the dense northern woods.

Take off running. Shoes shed, shirts tossed aside. Race toward the sunny shore. Pound of bare feet on old wooden dock. Full speed cannonball into cool water, refreshing but no longer bracing, a chilly promise of warm days to come. Memory of the endless hard winter melts away; amnesia sets in. This is therapy, offered free of charge by these life-giving Minnesota waters.

A million joyous whoops and splashes into ten thousand holy blue lakes.

Countless prayers of thanks to the gods of forest water sky that some old ancestor settled in this illogical and unlikely and punishing place.

The hardened heart of an unforgiving winter yielding once again to the grace, the beauty, the joy, the discovery, and the soul-restoration, of another too-brief, but gloriously, perfectly, good-enough summer in a land that, somehow, will sustain us.

They take the waters.

That is how Minnesotans start the summer.

That is how they turn the page.

That is how life goes on in this gentle and forbidding and wonderful place.