Dennis Anderson: Bad news travels fast -- and north

CRANE LAKE, MINN.

D ifficult as peace of mind can be to achieve in a wired world, most people give it a whirl under the guise of vacationing. Yet success at this assumes no further mischief from Iraq, North Korea, Chinese food importers; a whole laundry list of power mongers and evildoers. News is now delivered instantaneously, planetwide, and their problems are ours, vacation or not.

At Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth on Wednesday morning, time and space unfolded customarily. Campers arose, coffee was made. The radio crackled with no special reports. Some of us pedaled our bikes atop the asphalt trail that leads south to Hinckley and north to Duluth. On it also were rollerbladers and the odd hiker.

Pretty as its campsites are, the park's showpiece is the St. Louis River and the steep, rocky gorge it divides. The rock is layered in timeworn sheets angled steeply upward, geologic compressions a billion or more years old. Today, tomorrow and the next day take on different meanings in this context. Life really is fleeting.

I had no real schedule and rode my bike toward Duluth before turning back to my campsite. My wife and kids were along, and we really wanted to end up here, at Crane Lake, on the Minnesota-Ontario border, by late afternoon. My brother, Dick, and his wife, Patti, keep a cabin on the lake, and they were on site this week, vacationing. We would catch up with them and pass a day or so fishing.

It was Kierkegaard who said life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward. This means nothing to very young people because they assume, most of them, that one day will lead to the next and the next and the next; that the future will unfold as they imagine it, in linear fashion, albeit in installments, and in that respect -- even better -- like a TV series.

But with age comes the realization that our Danish philosopher friend was correct, that a person doesn't know what he doesn't know and isn't likely to learn it until after the fact.

When I was a kid, for example, I didn't know the cigarettes my dad smoked would someday kill him. Just as I didn't know, as I now do, that ill-designed swimming pool drains can suction kids toward them.

And that not all bridges stand forever.

U.S. Hwy. 53 is a thoroughfare best experienced driving north. We passed through Cloquet, Cotton, Eveleth, Virginia and Cook before vectoring northeast to Crane Lake. I was driving our pickup camper and was concerned about the boat we towed behind. Tire inflation, given our weight, was also a bugaboo. And, eager as I was to fish in coming days, and happily so, I viewed each ditch warily, fearing the ill effects on our rig of a rogue wind gust.

To which the kids were indifferent, completely.

At Crane Lake, Water's Edge RV Park is positioned as its name suggests, and its gracious owners guided us to a shaded camping spot with picnic table and campfire ring.

Crane Lake, the lake, leads to Sand Point Lake and on to Namakan and Kabetogema lakes. These are border waters of unique north woods beauty whose cacophonous history spans the entirety of human experience. Here, fortunes were won and lost as great pine flotillas were roped together and encouraged toward downstream mills. Ore was mined, fur trapped and moonshine run on dark nights -- big ideas, each of them, that produced success, nurtured confidence and suffused faith, periodic misfortune notwithstanding.

The usual.

We loaded the boat with provisions and cast off. My brother's cabin can be reached only by water, and when we arrived the low angle of sun threw itself in panels across its deck. Smoked salmon was laid out and cool drinks concocted.

The next morning, Thursday, the walleyes would be snapping, hitting nightcrawlers on sliding sinkers. Had we known this as we ate supper Wednesday evening, talking and laughing, we would have been surer still, if only for the moment, that one day does in fact lead to another and another still, linearly, as we imagine it will.

Then the phone rang.

It was Dick and Patti's daughter, Katie, near the Twin Cities, saying something about a bridge, and that we should turn on the TV.

Which we did, and immediately -- live, via satellite -- everything was different, vacation or not.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com