During the current coronavirus, my YMCA has been closed, as it should be. To exercise, I’ve been riding my Trek touring bike a significant distance whenever possible. Often, these rides take me along one of the many wonderful trails that follow the Mississippi River as it meanders through the Twin Cities, separating Saint Paul and … Read more
Easter Sunday, and it snowed nearly six inches in Saint Paul. Mid-April, but it looked more like bleak December. By late afternoon, I’d been stuck in the house way too long and needed an outing. I walked to Como Park, not far from my home. The weather was grim, the low, slate clouds still spitting … Read more
I’m not a native of Minnesota. I moved here when I was thirty years old so that my wife could attend law school at the U of M. Before that I’d been a gypsy kid, living in a lot of places over the years, never really able to call any of them home. I tell … Read more
Tim O’Brien, one of my favorite authors, published a marvelous book several years ago titled Into the Lake of the Woods. It is, in many ways, a mystery, one that frustrates a lot of readers because at the end, the protagonist heads off into the labyrinthine archipelago of Lake of the Woods and is never … Read more
The Northwest Angle: A geographic anomaly, a small triangle of American territory completely isolated from the rest of Minnesota, cut off from the United States by sixty miles of Canadian wilderness and the vast, mysterious waters of Lake of the Woods. Lake of the Woods: One of the largest bodies of water on the North … Read more