Day 59 – Minnesota was amazing…
Minnesota, our second assignment, was a place of extremes in weather and terrain, but when you understand that, you adapt and make it work for you. Temperatures in the winter could get to 40 below zero at night with wind chill pushing it to -100 degrees. I was told very early that you should always have a shovel, snowsuit, snow boots and even food in your car at all times. You could slide off the road in a storm just going to the grocery store and it would take hours to get help. I was driving to work one morning, and the radio announcer said, “Today’s high today will be 10 below”.
The summers were not very long, very hot, muggy, and with mosquitoes so big some call them the state bird of Minnesota. They call it the “land of a thousand lakes” so that’s why it was so humid and so many mosquitoes. Some would even say of Minnesota, “there is winter and the 4th of July and that’s it”.
The ships up in Duluth harbor had to be out by a certain date because Lake Superior would freeze and crush them. The lake we lived on would have ice at least 5 feet thick on it during the winter.
I got winter tires with studs in them because the roads never thawed out. We had snow on the ground from November 1st until mid-May. I know it sounds like a lot, but somehow you get used to it. Even some of the stores downtown had enclosed crosswalks over the streets connecting stores to each other so you didn’t have to go outside.
We lived on Lake Minnetonka, a huge lake in the town of Excelsior, MN just outside of Minneapolis. I used to take my cross-country skis to work at an office we had downtown and when the workday was done, my secretary, who lived with us, would drive my car home and I would go down to the marina, and ski across the lake to our home. At the time, it was a fabulous experience, but thinking back on it, that was a rather dangerous and risky decision. If anything had happened to me out there in the darkness of the lake, I would have been dead before anyone could have found me.
Mama and Swede came to visit once, and I was driving them around. It was the middle of winter and as we passed the Marina, I told them I wanted to show them something. I pulled into the Marina and started driving down the boat ramp. Mama was freaking out as the ice cracked and moaned, but I knew it was over 5 feet think and had seen trucks bigger than my car drive out there to ice fish. So, I took them to a section of ice-fishing huts on the lake so they could see what people did in the winter.
Those fishing huts were great! a hole drilled into the ice so they could drop a line, then they put a complete hut over the hole with a heater inside, cooler for beer, lanterns, blankets and sometimes a TV powered by a generator. There would be so many on some parts of the lake that they put up street signs like a little village.
The summer took so long to get there, that it seemed glorious. On the 4th of July we would go out with friends on a lake and watch fireworks from their boat…it was all amazing.
I never made to it the Boundary Waters Canoe Area between Minnesota and Canada, but it looked wonderful to be so alone in pure nature. The deep woods of Minnesota were the same…real wilderness.
The beauty of the state was only matched by the beauty of the people there. Some of the most wonderful people I have ever met and like I said earlier, once they accepted you, you were family for life. There was a dark side to all this, but that’s another story I’ll share tomorrow.
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