A Sense of Place

     It was an innocent age, back then, many years before I shouldered the double burden of discovering that my father knew nothing, and that I knew everything. I stood on the shoreline of a small northeastern Wisconsin lake, watching dragonflies light on rotten logs, all blur and stop-motion and there-they-are and there-they-aren’t.

     “Go ahead and take the canoe out,” Dad yelled. “Catch us some bluegills for supper while I set up the tent.”

     I suspect that a lot of today’s kids would be unable to conceive of the joy of being a small boy, free from adults, and alone in a canoe with a new fishing rod. I casted while my father’s swear words filtered through the trees. Setting up a tent was in those days akin to assembling a nuclear weapon from the household junk drawer, and this was no ordinary tent. It was a tent made of “miracle fiber” fabric, and we were testing it as a service to the manufacturer, Dad’s employer. This was the 1970’s, and New and Improved was the law of the land. Tang replaced orange juice on shiny, forward-thinking breakfast tables, and if we as a society could routinely send men to the moon, then we could damn sure come up with a better tent fabric.

     Late in the afternoon I pulled the canoe up onto a spit of sand. Dad filleted my fish as a storm approached, and we retreated to the tent as the first big drops smacked the canopy of the trees. Above our heads the water pooled and then began to drip through, first in trickles in a few spots, and then in torrents, everywhere. My father laughed, and I joined in, drinking from my can of Jolly Good while Dad sipped his nightly martini from a mushroom jar.

     Since that long-ago moment I have stayed in expensive resorts, and on a cruise ship, but I haven’t found anything which will match the pleasure to be had in the combination of a tent, a canoe, and a wild shoreline. We’re not exactly cachet here in Wisconsin. We don’t have large rodents acting as mascots. We don’t have palm trees, and our few nude beaches show that modesty is not only a virtue, it is also frequently a necessity. The latter circumstance is not our fault. What else can be expected when, as the old saw goes, the Wisconsin year consists of nine months of winter and three months of poor ice conditions?

     Okay. We’ve established that we’re not trendy. What do we have? We have cheese curds, and the Green Bay Packers. Oh, yes—and 15,000 lakes. Not to mention 17,000 miles of streams. Sure, we have mosquitoes. But we also have the dragonflies to eat them.

     Consider ourselves blessed.