The Wilderness Within Reach

To experience the wilderness is to get off the grid and away from the creature comforts, noise, and distractions of civilization. To experience the wilderness is to surrender your calendar, your agenda, and your desire for order and control to a higher power. It compels us to experience the ancient rhythms of the earth and all its creatures.

Photo by Dennis Donohue

For some of us, experiencing the wilderness is transcendent—we are changed by it; we no longer care as much about ourselves, our stuff, or our sphere of influence. We crave to return to untamed places and reconnect to these limitless sources of power and tranquility. I have experienced this feeling in some of the most unlikely places, and I never know if a walk in unfamiliar woods might lead to one of these wilderness experiences.

It was on a walk along the shores of Mille Lacs that I first realized just how wild that lake is. I was walking on the beach on the northern shore near Redding Creek with my dog, my son, and my son’s godfather when I realized that the beach is as it was a millennium ago. The wooded shoreline stretched ahead of me as far as my eye could see, unbroken by dock, yard, or cabin. To one side, the wind whispered through the woods, punctuated by the tinkling notes of a pair of purple martins. To the other side, the waves lapped at the sand, complemented by the mournful yodel of a solitary loon. The light fog shielded my senses from the shadows of civilization and shrouded the four of us in mystery. Here and there lay a piece of driftwood, a jawbone of a walleye, or the feathers of a loon—flotsam and jetsam on the shores of an ancient sea.

At the end of the last ice age, a huge glacier sat on this spot and melted rapidly, carving channels to the aquifer below and creating the Rum River to the south, which flows into the Mississippi near Anoka. Parts of the Mille Lacs shore are rocky. But the prevailing winds covered the rocks with fine sand on the northern shore, creating 100-foot dunes in places. The whole living, breathing ecosystem is teeming with life and swept by frequent storms. The lake is so vast it creates its own weather. It doesn’t take long on Mille Lacs for one to realize that the lake is in control.

The Redding Creek beach is the finest I have encountered in Minnesota, and walking it is the closest thing to a sea experience I have had in the state south of Lake Superior. Though it is certainly a highlight, it’s not the only place I have experienced the wilderness around Mille Lacs. Father Hennepin State Park on the southwest end, between Isle and Wahkon, is another place where the wilderness calls to those who listen. And any time I get out on the lake—especially in a sailboat—barely within sight of shore, I feel its power. It both exhilarates me and causes me to take extreme care in my every tack.

My son’s godfather has a cabin a mile or so from Redding Creek. I have spent many a tranquil moment at the end of my friend’s dock peering to the south and wondering where Spider Island is. The island holds a special place in my family history. In the early 1930s, my mother’s aunt, Arna Brittin, and her husband at the time, Northwest Airlines founder Colonel Brittin, built cabins on the island from red granite stones on the reefs surrounding it. When I was a kid, Arna and her cabin on the big lake were frequent topics of conversation. Arna divorced Colonel Brittin shortly after they built the cabins, and he never returned to the island. Apparently, they had fallen into conflict about it—she wanted to spend more time there and he was more interested in being a captain of industry. The island was her connection with the wilderness and her refuge from industry. She eventually died there, and my uncle John scattered her ashes over the lake after her funeral.

Photo courtesy of The Minnesota Office of Tourism

One day, I put the canoe in at Father Hennepin State Park and paddled out and around Spider Island and back. It was a risky plan because Mille Lacs is rarely a good lake on which to launch a canoe—wind and waves often prevent safe paddling. But with the prevailing wind from the south, there was a good chance the canoe would encounter little resistance in the lee of the southern shore.

Spider Island is obscured by a point for the first half of the journey. Rounding that point is like solving a mystery, as the island gradually comes into focus stroke by stroke and wave by wave. The ancient white pine stands like a sentry above the rest of the trees on the tiny island. Gradually I made out a mix of black spruce, cedar, alder, and jack pine around two stone cabins connected by a covered walkway and buttressed by colossal chimneys. My 11-year-old just wanted to look over the side of his canoe at his reflection in the water. I got his paddle moving with another mystery: What if Aunt Arna buried treasure on her island, just waiting to be discovered?

By the time we reached the island, the wind out of Wahkon Bay had started to pick up, blowing the canoe northward over one of the reefs that extend from the island like spiders’ legs—hence the name. Most any other boat would have run aground, but the canoe ghosted over it without a scratch until we made the lee of the island and our labors diminished considerably. At one point, a stair was cut into the seawall. I imagined Arna sitting there and soaking her feet with the view of the whole lake to the north.

We made a complete loop of the island, peeking into the cove on the eastern shore to see where a launch might land if the pilot knew how to navigate the reefs. Then I sensed the urgency I have often perceived on Mille Lacs—the weather was rapidly changing, and the wind would soon blow too hard to get back to the park safely, so we’d best not dawdle. My son was disappointed he couldn’t dig for buried treasure (I wasn’t—I knew we would be trespassing on private land), but he was happy to get back to the lee of the point after a harrowing ride through the chop.

Photo courtesy of The Minnesota Office of Tourism

As usual, our time at Lake Mille Lacs was all too short. Like packing up and moving out of a favorite campsite, driving away from Mille Lacs is a somber experience. It’s a moody, brooding lake that is not to be trifled with. But if respected, it reveals its treasures in wind-swept beaches and serene sunsets. Its music is common to all seas of its size. But it is a uniquely central Minnesota inland sea: The sounds of loons and eagles, purple martins and scarlet tanagers mingle with the wind through paper birches and white pines.

Though I never met Aunt Arna, I feel I know a part of her spirit through my experiences at her favorite place on earth and final resting place. Her voice now blends with Mille Lacs’ music and adds a calming middle movement to its stormy symphony.