Minnesota is all about creeks, ponds, rivers and lakes - and lots of them.
By CATHERINE WATSON
Published February 15, 2004
In Minnesota, the Mississippi River begins its 2,552-mile trip to the Gulf of Mexico as a creek flowing from Lake Itasca, 30 miles south of Bemidji. Go to Minnesota photo gallery
Editor's note: The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of our young nation. Here is the seventh in a series of articles reporting, state by state, what the Louisiana Purchase now represents.
Sum up Minnesota? Easy. I can do it in a word: water.
I don't mean just lakes, though we have about 15,000 of them, not the mere 10,000 we brag about on our license plates.
I mean water in all forms, from Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis to the Mississippi River, from farm ponds on up to Lake Superior.
It's stunningly obvious from the air. The last time I flew was a bright morning in mid November - all the leaves off the trees, little houses standing out clearly, no snow yet, the city lakes still unfrozen.
As we circled, climbing, the sun glinted off the lakes and caught on the braided channels of the Mississippi, and the whole landscape became a quilt of fading green and bright blue - so much blue that it amazed me. I'm a native Minnesotan and should be used to it by now, but that morning this watery beauty still took me by surprise.
There are other landscapes that look like this, of course. Finland comes to mind. Also Manitoba. And I'd better mention Wisconsin and Michigan, so they don't get their feelings hurt.
But on mornings like that one, Minnesota seems to have patented blue water.
The state's name backs that up. Minnesota comes from an Indian word meaning sky reflected by water, which in the 1950s and '60s gave rise to a local brewery's catchiest jingle. Even people too young to have drunk Hamm's beer nevertheless can chant the chorus:"from the land of sky blue wa-ah-ters!"
What all this means is that if you're born here, grow up here or raise a family here, water will automatically be part of your life in ways it wouldn't be anywhere else.
Lakes are the foundation of the classic Minnesota vacation, for example. Depending on your family, this is known as "going up north," "going to the lake" or "going to the cabin." I once read that nearly 25 percent of our population either owns or has access to a family cabin.
I doubt it's that high, but it sure feels like it, if you're trying to drive north from the Twin Cities on any Friday night in summer. Traffic, as we like to say, will be bumper-to-boat-propeller, and 100 percent of it will be on whatever route you've decided to take.
The only thing more frustrating is having to come back, bumper-to-propeller, on Sunday night.
The Mississippi figures in those "up north" vacations, too. Generations of Minnesota family albums feature snapshots of grinning little kids straddling an even littler creek: the infant Mississippi, where it flows out of Lake Itasca.
For sheer Minnesota-ness, however, nothing can top Lake Superior.
In area, it's the biggest body of freshwater in the world, literally an inland ocean, the "shining big sea water" of Longfellow fame. Only Siberia's Lake Baikal holds more water, and that's because it's deeper; I've been to Baikal, and it's no Superior.
We think we own this greatest of Great Lakes, even though Canada has the longest stretch of its 1,300-mile shoreline and Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin share its southern shore.
No matter. It's still ours, and it's hugely popular. If you want to rent a waterside cabin on the Minnesota North Shore next summer, you should have reserved it last summer.
People who haven't seen Superior usually can't picture its appeal.
"Why go there?" a well-traveled woman from back East once asked me.
"Okay," I said, reaching for comparisons,"you know Maine? It's a lot like the coast of Maine. Only it's farther north."
I didn't tell her about the "lake effect." In Minnesota, it does not refer to the heavy snowfalls spawned by the eastern Great Lakes every winter. This is a year-round phenomenon.
It's due to Superior's size and volume, as well as temperature. Superior is 350 miles from tip to tip and up to 160 miles wide; it contains half the water in the Great Lakes, and the temperature of all that water averages 40 degrees - cold enough to give you hypothermia in about 20 minutes.
Superior is so big and so steadily cold that temperatures in downtown Duluth, Minnesota's international port, are 10 degrees lower in summer than up on the heights where most people live. In winter, it's just the reverse, warmer downtown and colder up top.
I've spent part of the past eight summers in Duluth, and, despite being more a river person than a lake person, I too have fallen under Superior's blue spell, a different kind of lake effect.
My favorite moment on the big lake was on an evening a couple of summers ago. As usual, families and couples - locals and tourists alike - were gathering along the Duluth waterfront, an area called Canal Park because it's on the canal leading to the inner harbor.
Kids were throwing lake-polished beach cobblestones into the water while the adults strolled, waiting for the Aerial Lift Bridge to rise and one of the big freighters to come through.
That night, a thousand-footer came in. These red-hulled ore boats are so big that they're like skyscrapers traveling on their sides, and they're startlingly tall - their superstructures tower a good seven stories above the water.
This one glided through the narrow channel like a moving wall of steel, a real-life special effect, like living sci-fi.
A man yelled out, "Welcome home!" and everybody cheered. It was a patriotic moment, and the whole thing brought tears to my eyes - kind of like watching an intimate Fourth of July parade.
The Minnesota water memory I cherish most, though, isn't about Superior. It isn't even my own. It was my grandmother's memory.
She was 10 years old when her Norwegian immigrant family got"droughted out" in South Dakota. They had to abandon their hardscrabble farm and move in with relatives in southern Minnesota. They arrived in the fall, defeated and ashamed.
But to the end of her life, that event was a source of joy for her. In her 90s, my grandmother could recall it perfectly. On their Dakota farm, she told me, the pastureland always dried up by September; that year, it dried up in May. But when they got to Minnesota, the pastures were still lush with grass.
"It was October," she recalled, sounding awed all over again,"and there was still water in the creeks, and everything was so green! I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world."
She continued to think that for the next 80 years. Most Minnesotans, me included, would agree.
- Catherine Watson is senior travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
On the Web
Readers can find all the articles in our series on the Louisiana Purchase, which runs through May, by going to www.sptimes.com/lapurchase There are links to the installments and interactive features.
