The Wilderness Within Reach

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.