Ted and I went duck hunting on a Friday morning in October, rose in the pitch black at a quarter to six and strode quietly across our backyard and down to the lake where the canoe awaited us. A thick fog surrounded our house and the lake in our backyard, and everything was silent. I carried the life jackets and Teddy his shotgun. We were bound for a lake near our place that Ted had heard about from the folks down the road at a place called Chalstrom’s General Store. He’d bought his hunting license there a week prior, from a man wearing head to tow blaze orange, in a room filled with gigantic stuffed heads mounted on brown paneled walls.
Admittedly I doubted Ted’s ability even after watching him shoot beer cans off an upturned log in the front yard. But we’d just moved to the country and I’d decided that part of living in rural Northern Minnesota meant doing rural Minnesotan things. Like getting up well before sunrise and paddling around in the dark while wearing two pairs of long underwear under my jeans.
Out on the lake the fog was so thick we could hardly see where we were going. Once we’d paddled 100 feet from our dock our house was no longer visible, our little craft lost in a swirl of black night and silver water particles. We stopped moving, let ourselves float in the dark and the silence, let the possibility of nothing else take us in.
“The thing about fog that’s so crazy,” I said, “is that if you’re actually out doors and in it you can see it, all those tiny water droplets just dancing in mid air.” Until then I hadn’t thought of fog as a tangible thing.
“I know,” Ted agreed. “Also, I kind of wish we were stoned.”
A brief discussion of whether or not to go back to the house and take on that endeavor followed. We soon decided, “best if we don’t” and headed north instead, to find the tiny stream which left our lake and led to a pond a mile or so away. This took a few tries because Ted had only a vague idea of where it was, of which houses and which plots of land it was located in between. We found it eventually, had to jack the canoe over some fallen logs and portage it across a gravel road, and viola, into the pond. From the pond we took another stream, wound our way through tall water grasses and trees, passed houses and RV’s and at least one private landfill. The fog lifted a little with the daylight, but still kept the visibility at a minimum and the clouds in the sky stayed thick. I sat in back and paddled and Ted sat up front, wielding his shotgun. He was half standing, his skinny body crouched and the rifle pointed, ready to explode it with each new bend in the stream.
The fog made the air and the water gray and the grasses brown with a somewhat purple-ish hue. It filled the air between us, seemed to hang low from the sky and rise off the water simultaneously, and at times was so thick we actually misjudged our turns. There were all of these tiny tall-grass islands that the stream would split around unexpectedly, only to then join up with itself a few feet later.
It was a little like being explorers, charting unknown waters, following random streams. We had a map, or at least Ted had looked at one before we’d left the house, and we hoped that when we took the left fork in the stream it lead to tiny Jacob’s lake and not to monestrous Island Lake.
“I feel like Lewis and Clark,” I said. I didn’t think Lewis and Clark actually navigated Northern Minnesota in their canoe, but I wasn’t sure.
“Seriously,” Ted replied. “Can you imagine?”
For a moment I mourned the fact that I would probably never know, that most of us will probably never know what it could have been like to be somewhere and not know anything about where it was you were going. And I’m not talking a spur-of-the-moment-road-trip, when you and your friends take off in your car with a full tank of gas and just drive until you can’t drive no more. I’m talking about literally having no idea what is around the next bend in the stream - ducks or more water or a settlement of people or a bunch of elephants. I mean, obviously not in Northern Minnesota - but it wouldn’t have been obvious to Lewis and Clark back then, would it have? No, it wouldn’t. And that’s exactly what I mean.
After navigating this same stream for nearly an hour and passing over a small dam, about a foot tall, we landed in what we hoped to be Jacob’s lake. The fog was too thick to know for sure because we couldn’t see the shore on the other side, just a small island in the middle covered with birch trees.
Ted instructed me to stay close to the shore. Within minutes he spotted, shot, and hit a mallard - color me impressed. Unfortunately the job was not complete and our feathered friend swam to shore, made it up on land, and waddled away before we could go after him. By the time we reached land, which also happened to be someone’s yard, and Ted hopped out of the canoe to capture his kill, the duck was no where to be found. Ted walked around the property for about five minutes, carrying his shot gun and checking under overturned boats and scouting out the trees nearest to the yard. I stayed in the beached canoe, ready to shove of, waiting for the owner of the property to bust through the screen door wearing a wife beater and tighty-whitey’s, screaming at Teddy and waving a gun of his own. Although a native Minnesotan myself, I wasn’t yet convinced that our somewhat backwoods, Northern neighbors were not stereotypes of themselves.
But no such scene occurred and we continued along the shoreline. Teddy shot a couple more times and missed, and also managed to nearly mow down a decoy floating near a rock. I was beginning to think we would fail miserably and return home with out bounty, and that Ted would bitch about it for subsequent weeks to come. But then up ahead to our left, out on open waters, sat a cluster of ducks enjoying some communal fishing time. Maybe they were busy chatting, or maybe it was the fog, or perhaps Ted and I really are stealth killing machines, but the ducks didn’t move. Ted looked at me like, “Should I?” I shrugged and nodded, as if to say, “What the heck are we out here for?” and he opened fire. And as the living took flight, two poor souls rested on the water.
“Go, go, go!!!!!” Ted started yelling, “Come on hurry up!!”
I was thinking, “What is this, ‘hurry up and go, go, go?’ Is there a motor somewhere that I haven’t seen?” But I hauled ass anyway, shrieking from the frenzy of the moment, and Ted picked up the Other Oar, a florescent orange plastic paddle that looked like it was meant for a kayak. We paddled as fast as possible and the whole time I was wondering how we would get there fast enough, how we could reach those duckies before they were water logged and sank to the bottom, why we didn’t bring some sort of dog along?
I learned an important thing about ducks and duck hunting that day folks. Those ducks float, yes they do.
Ted picked them up out of the water and put them in the canoe between us, and there they lay, all limp and soaking, and I tried not to look at them too much.
We got another one the same way but I guess that one wasn’t quite dead because Ted picked it up out of the water, put one hand around its head and the other just below its neck, and told me I might not want to watch. I turned my head away, looked down at the water instead, and out of no where began to belt out that Elton John song from the Lion King, The Circle of Life. I didn’t know I knew the lyrics, and by the time I’d sang the chorus once through it was over. And then there were three, two mallards and a lady bird, lying in between Ted and I.
Ted thought that three was his the limit and I had to get to work, so we decided to make for home. We’d been heading in one direction around the lake so we kept going, and while we paddled the sun rose higher, burning off the fog and revealing the scenery before us. We’d been in Jacob’s Lake after all, it was so small we could see the whole place from our canoe, save for what was on the other side of the island. The trees were in full color all over the lake, their red, yellow and orange leaves like a paisley scarf against the light blue sky, and big white clouds cruised slowly over their crowns. The water was clear next to the canoe and blue across the lake, and the prairie grasses and cattails and wild flowers grew thick along the banks. W found our opening with out trouble, and with frozen hands and soaking feet we paddled home, me and Teddy and the three ducks between us, sacrificial lambs on the silver canoe bottom.

Happy birthday Woodland Rock(et)! There isn’t enough beer in Duluth for all the toasts you deserve, though there is probably enough to get you drunk, so enjoy, sister!

Or

Yep Duluth, I Live Here Now – A brief history and explanation.

At some point last winter a friend of mine asked me to move with him to his mom’s lake home about 15 miles outside of Duluth. She uses it herself June – August and rents it out September – May, he explained. No f-ing way, I said. But then my other plans for Leaving Minneapolis Come Hell or High Water fell through and he asked again. This time lacking other options, I conceded. Another friend of ours had agreed to come along, and I dragged a friend from Madison with as well. And then there were four.

Thus, after spending two post-college years back in Minneapolis, after working full-time for an Edina-based corporation committed to spreading both urban sprawl and terrible haircuts, after losing my creative ambition and acquiring a drinking problem, after too much drug use and boy chasing, I attempted what I hoped would be a spiritual cleanse of sorts, a reawakening in the Great North Woods. I would retreat in September, become a recluse and a hermit, pursue the various artistic endeavors I had daydreamt about while slaving away at the office, and emerge in May, reborn as inspiration incarnate.

Unfortunately, some pretty scenery and a lot of free time do not an overnight visionary make. After all, a person’s gotta work, which means a person’s gotta drink, which, at least in my case, can lead to most evenings spent rabble rousing and ballyhooing, not pontificating on Alan Watts while practicing guitar chords by the fire.

Regardless, Duluth (and surrounding areas) has not been such a bad place to call home. And what it lacks in shopping and eateries, it makes up for in scenery and a lot of nice folks who can drink their weight in $2 tall boy PBR’s. And just about anything else alcoholic that the Pizza Luce bartender de jour puts in front of them.

So, I hope the following entries about our lives and the friends we have made in this new place will, at the very least, be a record of our adventures, and at the very most, assist in the salvation of modern civilization.

Stay tuned for Duluth: Some Astute Observations.

Do the rock, do the woodland rock
let it all hang out ev’rybody shout
do the rock, do the woodland rock.
- Marc Bolen