Sisters To St. Paul
Day 19

 

Date: August 12, 2005

Route: St. Cloud to Minneapolis

Distance: 60 miles by car

Ride Time: 1.5 h

Elevation Climbed: - something

Weather: mid 80s

Log

OK, so maybe this isn't really a ride log kind of a day ... but in some ways it was an interesting day that some of you may have ... or wish you might complete some day. It was a homecoming day.

For years I've been telling stories to Elizabeth about my (some might say, "misspent") youth ... telling her about living in a family where I was expected to hunt and fish for the family table, where fun was to be had riding nearly wild thoroughbreds pastured nearby, where an old stage coach station might be explored by curious 10-year olds. Where driving on ice was taught on lakes with several feet of ice on them, etc. Well, today was the day that we got to explore some of the places in my memory ... and the exploration was confirmation of the old saying about it being impossible to "go back."

Our old house was still there, though now empty, and surrounded by Mc Mansions. The lake where I'd fished as a boy was nearly all filled in ... with houses now where once I'd pulled stringers of sunfish out of clear water, and the lake reduced to a "water feature."

A hill that I'd once raced a car down through what I remembered to be "feet" of snow turned out to be not much of a hill at all ... and I suspect that the snow wasn't as deep as I'd remembered either.

Malls and housing developments replaced fields of corn and soy beans of memory, and we both decided that Minnesotans must be among the most advanced shoppers on the planet.

 

 

Still, many things remain. The chain of three lakes where I have my earliest fishing memories are still as beautiful as I remember, with the same small but graceful bridges spanning the canals that connect them ... and more interestingly, we noted that walleye were being taken in record numbers on one of these lakes ... something that never happened when I was a boy.

And, most importantly for this ride, the Mississippi remains a beautiful and powerful part of Minnesota. I'm sure that some of the places that I haunted as a boy are now quite different, but the essential nature of the river remains. My brother, who has fished the river recently, tells me that the fishing in the river is better than it has been in decades ... so I guess that Minnesota's environmental restoration efforts are finally showing results.

The flower was just outside our hotel room ... part of the new ecosystem here, and a continuing inspiration to those who love the outdoors.