Relaxing in the north woods

Our week-long lake vacation was wonderfully relaxing, and it renewed a connection to lake life that had once been very important to us. We rented a cabin at the quiet little Pine Terrace Resort on Star Lake in Minnesota's Crow Wing County:

In the late 1950s, my parents had built a modest, much-loved lake cabin in northern Minnesota. It was on leased land, and in 1993 we lost it when the state auctioned off its lakeshore holdings. We couldn't afford a new place, and we never found a suitable place to rent. Coincidentally, the St. Paul Saints started up that same year, so Peter and I threw ourselves into baseball.

We had enjoyed the primitive life at our family place--using natural gas instead of electricity, pumping water at the nearby campground and bringing it to the kitchen in a 5-gallon can, and of course making do with an outhouse. But when we decided to rent a place this year, we didn't really want to live with someone else's decades-old couches and impossibly lumpy beds. We also weren't interested in the big, luxury resorts with golf courses and mixed drinks and noise and Social Life.

I discovered that there are now quite a few small, family-oriented resorts featuring attractive, modern cabins--AND you can find them through the Internet. Our cabin was beautiful--solidly built, well designed, attractively furnished. It is set into a hill, so when you look out toward the lake, you're in the treetops, mostly oak and birch. The resort has 13 cabins, and while the ones along the lakeshore are pretty close to one another, ours was a little apart and very quiet.

The resort is the only one on the lake; there are also about a dozen homes. That leaves a lot of undeveloped shore where we saw a heron, a crane, a beaver, and a family of loons. The owners also have created several nature walks through the woods.

We spent hours in the boat each day...so much that when I closed my eyes at night I saw water and felt myself rocking ever so slightly with the waves. We caught dozens of small crappies (pronounced crah-pees) and bass, and eventually we kept a couple of larger ones. I found that I was eager to clean those fish, to regain my skills after 18 years of not using them. My presence in the fish-cleaning house created a lot of curiosity. The men casually glanced in to see how I was doing. The women asked Peter, "How did you get her to do the fish-cleaning?" He assured them that I loved it, and had been doing it since long before we'd met. He also noted that I drove the boat (although I often had a little trouble controlling our approach to the dock).

The furnishings were lovely and the beds were great. Peter, an every-night insomniac, slept better there than he does at home. He brought his computer and worked off-line a few hours each day. While the resort does not offer internet connection,the owners had WiFi at their home next door, so when Peter needed to send a file we drove over and sat in their driveway for a few minutes. I hasten to add that I did NOT check blogs while there!

The week was just what we'd hoped. If all goes well we'll make it an annual excursion, and we hope the kids and grandkids will join us! . 

Wednesday's Word: "Grilled"

Lisa over at Grandma's Briefs is featuring me today as part of her series of "Grilled Grandmas." Nothing painful; I just answered a few questions about--well, you know, being a grandma. She and I would both enjoy having you drop in at her place, and I did try to say some things I haven't already said here.

My hubby's grandma became senile, and at least once she hung her panties to dry in the front window of their home. Every time I see Lisa's blog header I'm reminded of that story, but Lisa seems quite sound of mind. Really. Would I lead you astray?

All the news....

We have just returned from a week at Star Lake in north-central Minnesota. The weather was fabulous, the resort wonderful, and the fishing fun if not very productive. We had no radio, television, or internet for the week...just the relaxed, away-from-it-all setting we wanted. Did we miss important news? You be the judge.

Family news. Monday evening as we sat in the boat on a very quiet lake, Peter's cell phone rang. It was Augie reporting with great pride, "I went poop in the potty." Given his past stubbornness on the matter, we are eager to provide all the encouragement and positive reinforcement we can muster. The next evening, "I wore big-boy underwear all day and it stayed dry." And the evening after that, "I wore big-boy underwear all night and it was dry when I got up." So each day, Peter congratulated him and celebrated this great progress, and then had a detailed conversation with Mommy about poop and pee. Since Mommy was also looking after our aging cat, there was additional talk about poop and pee of the feline variety.

To anyone on the lake overhearing these conversations, the subject matter must have been funny, disgusting, or at least odd. But we saw and heard other people, also fishing, also on cell phones. Iit made us laugh and shake our heads. At our old family cabin, we had no phone at all...no way to call in or out in case of emergency.  Now we're up-to-the-minute even in the wilderness.

Non-news. Five days into our vacation we had a meal out, at a bar and restaurant where the TV was tuned to ESPN. After five days without news, the one story we heard was: Bret Favre still isn't saying whether he will play for the Minnesota Vikings this year.They repeated this every 10 minutes, as if it meant something.

Good news. Once we emptied our suitcases and put away all the stuff we hauled north, we took a quick look at a few of the newspapers on the kitchen table. One headline jumped out: "A FREE MAN." Beneath, a photo of Koua Fong Lee. Whatever else happened in the world last week (and I haven't yet really caught up), this is wonderful news for me. Koua Fong Lee is a 32-year-old father of four who was serving an eight-year prison sentence for vehicular homicide. Driving his family home from church in a Toyota a few years ago, he came up a freeway ramp and began shouting that the brakes would not work. The car accelerated, striking that of a family stopped for a light; people in that car were badly injured and three died. Lee always maintained that he had been pounding on the brakes, and his family witnessed this, but his attorney decided it would be more persuasive to say he must have mistakenly stepped on the accelerator. Lee was found guilty and sent to prison two years and seven months ago. .
 

AP Photo/Pioneer Press, Ben Garvin

Daughter Number Three brought the case back to my attention with an initial post about the fact that investigators were taking a new look at his car, and a powerful update that prompted me to follow developments more closely. It seemed clear that even if Mr. Lee had mistakenly stepped on the gas, the charges and the sentence far exceeded those in more egregious cases. New reports were emerging about accidents attributed to Toyotas' acceleration problems.Then issues arose about irregularities in the trial itself. Public support grew for a new trial. A hearing on the evidence was granted. And last week, at the end of that four-day hearing, the same judge who had sentenced him ruled that his trial had been flawed in several ways and that he deserved a new day in court. He was still trying to comprehend this victory when word came that the county attorney would not retry the case. He was free to return home, to his wife and four young children. In her most recent post, Daughter Number Three says, "Let's hope something has been learned from all of this."

Future news. There is much to be learned. The case is likely to influence similar accident cases around the country. Meanwhile there are big questions about some actions of the county attorney's office, and about the trial that found Koua Fong Lee guilty despite lack of evidence. There are untold stories--still developing--of the families directly affected by the accident (the family of those killed in the accident supported Lee's request for a new trial, by the way). I hope good people will investigate and report on all aspects of this case, so our community can learn the necessary lessons. But meanwhile I celebrate that a man I never met is at home with his family tonight.

Wednesday's Word: Lily