YESTERDAY WAS a banner day for mid-March in Minnesota
YESTERDAY WAS a banner day for mid-March in Minnesota. So after the day’s chores I decided to take the motorcycle out for the first spin of the year. I stopped on a bluff across the river and was immediately struck by the view. Through the bare deciduous branches of shrubs and oaks, I was able to look straight down the Mississippi and imagined I must be seeing much the same view as Zebulon Pike would have seen in 1805, or Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in 1832. The great river bending around our forested Pine Point and sparkling in the afternoon sun, just a few cirrus clouds painted on the sky.
Thoughts of motorcycling were quickly replaced with thoughts of a canoe, still tucked under a tarp for the winter. So back home I rode, to the old log cabin under the pines—built exactly a century after Schoolcraft’s expedition to find the source of the Mississippi. Soft strains of piano music drifted through the trees as Kathy’s students played their pieces. And I nosed the canoe into the water, watched “our” eagle soar in for a landing in the nesting tree, and absorbed the scene. Pine Point. Our ‘Church O’ The Pines.’ As the sun went down, Sparky the Cardinal trilled his scarlet songs, the eagles chirped, blue jays screamed. Piano music wafted. And I thought about Pike and Schoolcraft and the canoes of long-ago explorations. And I smiled.