Losing Leech Lake

Enlarge Image By Anastacia Mott Austin

As a child growing up in Minnesota, I knew that no matter what changed about my regular life, our summer cabin was always there, timeless and welcoming, at least to my child eyes.

Honestly, it was an ugly thing. Built by my father and his friend the year I was born, they posted a gold plaque in the outhouse which read, "Built by two left-handed preachers."

We always laughed at that, and the fact that neither of them were particularly handy with a hammer. But darn if that rough-hewn, one room glorified shack didn't withstand 40 years of Midwestern winters, tornadoes, thunderstorms, and the like.

It had no electricity, and as mentioned, no plumbing. There were giant wolf spiders who shared the cabin with us, and of course mosquitoes and deerflies, it being Minnesota. Our family of five, and then four after my parents split up, shared the one room whether we liked it or not. Eventually they built a three-level bunk bed, but before that it was the horribly lumpy pull-out sofa mattress and various cribs and playpens when we were babies.

I grew up in a number of places, but the only place that stayed the same as my home changed and as I grew was the cabin. Every summer without fail we'd drive the five hours to northern Minnesota to the cabin on the Leech Lake Indian reservation. We could not own the land, nor apparently the cabin, because it was on the reservation. But we leased it year after year, and it felt like it belonged to us, or more than we belonged to the cabin.

Everything important that happened to our family either happened at the lake or was reflected there. We drove to the cabin from Winnipeg when we lived in Canada, and after my parents got divorced and we moved to Minnesota to live near my grandmother (my mom's mother), we drove up instead of down. It felt the same to me.

Nothing about that cabin was glamorous. It had cracked linoleum flooring, recycled dishes, hand-me-down board games, canned food that we cooked on the propane stove. For water we pumped at the well my parents put in. First you had to prime it with lake water to get it going, then pump, hard, until the clear, fresh water came pouring into the bucket.

To wash dishes we'd heat up water in the kettle and pour it into the dishpan, one side soapy, the other side hot rinse water, then dump it outside. At night we'd visit the outhouse "one more time" before bed with the flashlight, trying to avoid the wolf spiders and the other creepy-crawlies.

Sounds great, right? Maybe not to you, but if any place on earth ever felt like home to my soul, it was that cabin on Leech Lake in Minnesota.

The water in the lake was so clean and clear you could see all the way to the bottom even while standing in chest-high water. Yes, there were leeches, or it wouldn't be called Leech Lake, but that never bothered us either. There was no more beautiful place anywhere than sunset on that beach, with loons calling to each other.

The family who had the plot next to ours were lifelong friends of my parents, and Papa and Joanne would tell enchanting stories by the campfire at night. My favorite was the legend of Leech Lake, how the Native American warrior Bouganigishig bravely fought and slayed the giant Leech, cut him into hundreds of tiny pieces, that are now the leeches that live in the lake. And Joanne, who looked not unlike a witch herself, sang a creepy, scary song about an old witchy woman who moaned and wailed and then all of a sudden shouted "BOO!" and scared us all out of our skins.

Everything tasted better at the Lake, we all agreed. And the sleep was deeper, a restful and peaceful sleep. It always took a few days to get into the spirit of the cabin, with no electricity or bathrooms or television, but once we settled in we never wanted to leave.

No place is perfect though, and a shadow hung over all our days at the cabin. The land was owned by the Ojibwe tribe who lived there, and every few years they would threaten to not renew our lease. We knew in our hearts that it was never truly ours, and maybe that made each visit more special, knowing that it would possibly be the last time, so we had to make the most of it.

After I moved from Minnesota to California when I was 23, I missed the cabin terribly. I visited often at first. My sisters and I went back to share milestones with the cabin. My older sister's fiance proposed to her at the lake, my younger sister got married there. I spent part of my honeymoon on the beach. It had always been a litmus test of sorts for people outside our family. If you could get beyond the roughness, the outhouse, the propane lanterns and the bugs, and see the glorious beauty, then you were in, you were good.

When my husband and I started our own family, it became a lot more difficult to travel, and I went to the cabin less and less often. With the threat of it being taken away always over us, I had to let go a little, or it would hurt too much. I felt that by moving away, it wasn't really mine anymore. But I ached for that place of permanence, where everything would stay the same.

That's the thing, though. Nothing, not even Leech Lake, stays the same. The tribe members who had been our friends, our allies, died or moved away. We no longer were invited to powwows, or knew anyone in town. Eventually they began to develop the area more, and suddenly there were roads where there had only been rocky paths. Every time I went there, something was painfully different. The ominous threat of being asked to leave seemed even closer.

So I stopped going. It was too painful to see all the changes, the encroaching development into nature, the cutting down of the birch trees so dear to us. I told my mom I'd rather remember it the way it was, when we were little and it felt like it would always be the same.

The last time I visited the cabin was the weekend before September 11th, 2001. We decided to have a family weekend at the cabin, so my sisters and I all came, and my mom. I brought my two-year-old daughter.

We came home on Monday to my mother's house and my older sister flew back to New York on September 10th. Back at my mom's house, we were due to fly out that fateful Tuesday morning, when my sister, who was already home in Connecticut, called and said, "You're not flying anywhere today."

It seems fitting that the cabin would somehow have brought us together on yet another fateful occasion. We spent the week at my mother's house, checking the flight schedule every day, watching as they were canceled every day, and eventually I found a flight that went close to home.

I had not been back since then. This week, my mom called me and left a message on my machine, saying "I have bad news about the lake." She had gotten a phone call from a tribal representative, who had told her our time was finally up. They had said this many times before, but had never followed through, and my mom just kept making the lease payments, hoping that they just wouldn't say anything. They never did, until now.

To her request of wanting to have some notice to clear out, have one last weekend together at the cabin, the tribal representative said, "You have no time. If you are found on the property, you will be fined or arrested."

That was that. We aren't even allowed to retrieve 40-year-old sand pails, old dishes or sheets, the board games that will mean nothing to someone else. My mother said she was going to drive up there anyway, to collect a few things and say good-bye to the cabin, even if they try to arrest her. Somehow I can't see the tribal marshal arresting a 70-year-old woman traipsing through the woods clutching an old kettle, but it's her call.

I'm really struggling with wanting to go there myself. If I do, it needs to be soon. Something tells me that with all the development going on, they must need the lot for something, and probably will bulldoze the cabin. But everyday life intrudes, and I'm not in a position to just up and leave my life for a few days.

But the cabin needs to be told. It needs to know what's going on, we need to tell it, "Thank you for all these years...and good-bye." Call me crazy but that old cabin has a soul, I know it does.

I can't believe it will end this way, that the tribe will not even give us what amounts to a moment in time, to wrap up our affairs and cut our ties to 40 years of family history.

So now we get to the point of this article. There was something akin to an underlying feeling of loss underneath every visit to the lake, knowing it did not really belong to us, knowing that it would never be ours, and that we would have to say good-bye someday. Maybe that forced us to not take it for granted, and enjoy every moment we had there, knowing it may be the last one forever.

I never really appreciated that, though. As a child of divorce, I already felt like the world was on shaky ground, and I needed something that was stable. Despite the undercurrent of loss, the lake was that place for me. But now it is gone.

I think if we'd been clearer about things, if it had been a resort we simply returned to every year, it might have been easier. Because then you know, yes, the owners might sell, they might change their plans, it might not be there next year. But then we wouldn't have made the sheets to fit the strangely shaped bunk beds (or built them ourselves), or brought just-yellow and orange dishes because that's what we had at the lake. You don't get as attached if you know it's a summer resort that belongs to someone else, and you're just visiting. Our lake cabin felt more permanent to me than my year-round home. It was different.

There was a part of me, my entire life, or at least from the time I moved away and knew that the lake wasn't going to be part of my children's summer stories, that swore I'd find another place like that for my own children.

That hasn't happened, and I'm running out of time. My kids are ten, nine, and six. Pretty soon I won't be able to convince them to go on family trips (though I swear I'm going to make them anyway), but more than that, there won't be a lifelong history to the place where we go every summer. I want them to have that.

The closest thing we have is a house in Lake Tahoe that my mother-in-law rents every summer. The kids love it, they're attached to it and love to return there every year. But it's clear that it isn't ours. Not only that, it has electricity and television and all that, so we're not forced to deal with each other in a new way, play games together until it gets dark because that's all there is to do, and then go to bed or sit by a hissing lantern.

We don't leave anything there, it does not remember us from year to year, we don't belong to it, it does not have a soul. It would not grieve if one day we just disappeared and never came back.

It's hard to put into words what I would want from a "vacation" home, but if I could bottle it, that'd be it. A place with a soul that would remember you next year, where you leave your mark, the milestones of your family's life.

Preferably, it would also be bare bones. There is nothing that compares with being forced to sit with your family in one room, figuring out together what to do. No television, no phone, no electricity. You learn to talk to each other, play together, or just be together in amiable silence.

I'm not alone in preferring to go bare bones. Trends in travel show that the more stressed out people are in their regular lives, the more they crave really getting away from it all, and "all" usually means the noise and the constant need to be in communication with the rest of the world.

There are plenty of rental options available if you don't mind not knowing if the place will be there next year. Countless vacation spots throughout the country, either in well-known areas like Lake Tahoe, or tiny hidden communities that take some searching to find, offer rustic, isolated cabins near lakes or streams.

Traveling and renting are good ideas for scoping out where you might want to find your own special Leech Lake-type cabin. My parents rented cabins at a resort on Leech Lake for several years before deciding on the perfect spot to build their own private cabin. I wouldn't recommend trying to find permanence on a reservation though, unless you are of native blood. There's nothing like the ache of visiting the same well-loved and cherished spot your entire life and then being told one day you can't even go back to say good-bye.

That's why I recommend saving your pennies and buying your own rustic piece of paradise. Housing prices are at record lows, if you have some cash stashed away, now is the perfect time to make the relatively low-cost investment of a summer cabin.

If you own it, no one will be able to take it away from you. You will never have to wonder if forces beyond your control will arrive someday to say that's it, it's all over now, you can't ever come back.

Think of the roots it will give your children, knowing that no matter what else happens in their lives, through the ups and downs that inevitably fill every life, there is a safe place to go that will always be there, and bears the marks of their growing. In today's world with its ever-increasing worries about the future of the planet, it's a good lesson to know that we're only borrowing the land, the wood, the lake, the cabin. Nothing is ever really ours.

But still, it's a priceless gift to have that illusion for a while, if you can.