CLITHERALL, Minn. – I want to tell you a story. Snuggle in, get your tea or cocoa, and let’s begin.
The year was 2002. I was working as a newspaper reporter on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. That might sound like paradise, but I ached for Minnesota. There were nights I dreamed about walking out my front door and discovering that snow had fallen overnight. There are no lilacs in Alabama. No maple trees. It’s hot there — so hot and humid in the summer, it feels like you’re standing in the mouth of a panting giant. I didn’t fit in in other ways. People tend to get married young there, so I was an oddball single woman who had just turned 30.
Somehow I convinced my bosses to let me take the entire month of July off so I could travel around Minnesota. And that’s what I did — sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. I snapped a photo of the world’s largest ear of corn in Olivia, huddled inside the stone bathroom at Blue Mounds State Park during a massive thunderstorm, cleaned up flooded basements in Roseau with a team of teenage volunteers, and startled a moose on the Little Isabella River in the Boundary Waters. (The moose startled me just as much.)
It was a lovely time. So peaceful. Journalism can be a stressful occupation, what with covering fatal accidents and shootings. Spending time in my home state was a balm. It also gave me a chance to reflect on what it meant to turn 30, how I had grown since graduating from the University of Minnesota, and what things about myself I wanted to change.
As my month wound down, I found myself at a scenic overlook at Itasca State Park. It was the kind of spot you can get lost in, in the best possible way, among the old-growth timber and the lake below. For those moments, you exhale the stress, the worries, the fears, the failures, and breathe in the possibilities, the hope, the plans, the pleasures of life.
I wanted to leave something of myself at Itasca. If I wasn’t going to be living in Minnesota — or not yet anyway — at least a small part of me would remain.
I plucked a hair from my head and held it up. It fluttered briefly in the breeze and then I let it go. It drifted downhill and settled among the undergrowth.
In a way, it was a bargain with wild Minnesota, as if giving it something of myself would guarantee my return. It felt slightly pagan. Like maybe a goddess was listening. Or a whole Disney-esque menagerie of animals was chattering: “We like her! Let’s help her return!”
