Rice Lake & Cannon Lake
Sunday, July 13, 2025
Yesterday the baby shower for Kara’s friends Mary and Paul wore me out. So much so that we skipped Movies in the Park night, Angels in the Outfield at McRae Park. Instead, we watched it at home, smoking a bowl at sundown and eating Lucky Charms during the movie. Skipping Angels in the Outfield at the park convinced me to book a campsite for Sunday night, a prospect I’d been considering for a couple of days: the summer days run away like thoroughbreds at the racetrack, so carpe fuckin’ diem.
I napped this morning until one in the afternoon, then promptly packed up for camp. Realized, disconsolately, that I left my radio at my apartment, so I drove there before getting on 1-35 S. Stop-and-go traffic the whole way made me rethink the whole trip. City traffic makes me want to put tinfoil on the windows and shut myself in. I smoked a cig after grabbing the radio to calm my nerves. It worked. I said the hell with it, let’s just go.
That instinct was confirmed by way of a shirtless hiker about my age who just walked by.
“You don’t happen to have a map, do ya?” he asked.
“No I don’t,” I lied.
“I’m doing the Hiking Club. I think I’m on the right trail.”
“This is only my second time here, so I don’t think I can be of much help to you.”
“I’m hiking every state park in Minnesota,” he offered. “Been camping since May 11.”
“Wow. Good for you,” I applauded.
“Thanks. You gotta live, ya know?”
“Yeah,” I answered, dumbfounded.
Carpe diem, I thought. I was laying out in the sun on the black and white checkerboard pattern blanket (“Roseville Schools” writing on it), writing in my journal, listening to a country station, reading Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer, a memoir.
If I were reviewing state parks, I’d say the one major flaw with the cart-in sites at Rice Lake State Park is their close proximity to a major hiking trail – one apparently a part of the Hiking Club trail system. Indeed, an older couple followed the shirtless man not long after our conversation. They passed again shortly thereafter, going in the direction from which they’d originally come. All this suggested the trail gets significant use, so camping so close to the trail feels a little unsettling and invasive, especially for cart-in sites, which, in my experience at Minnesota State Parks, are usually situated in spots of solitude (hence why I prefer them). I have not encountered any hikers since 5:30 p.m., though, so hopefully night will provide my desired solitude.
Restless, after encountering a snake at the picnic area, I started a fire a little early – maybe 6:45. A nice breeze is blowing off the lake, swishing through the thick cattails and blowing the fire in a single direction consistently. I put a can of Hormel chili and a baked potato wrapped in tin foil on the campfire grill. Finally, a good song on the radio: Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again.” Around 7:45 I finally found a sports talk radio station, a Fox Sports affiliate out of Rochester. I smoked multiple bowls and cigarettes as I waited for the sun to set and for the potato to soften. Highly recommend the peanut butter cookies from Kwikery, the Kwik Trip bakery.
Sundown indicates my view of the lake is south. An orange sun sinking around a peachy pink sky. Fireflies flickering, making me feel alive and nostalgic. Little black birds, hundreds of them, move as a collective unit, swooping en masse from one treetop to another along the shore, their individual wings, so miniscule, somehow making a great collective Draculean swoosh sound. Red-breasted robins continue to poke around camp past sunset. A single splash in the water suggests the lake is closer in proximity than I thought.
Monday, July 14, 2025
6:00 a.m.: Got the KFAN morning show, listening to that while smoking a bowl in the tent. The low overnight was 60, and I only felt faintly cold in the morning hours. I got up once at six and retreated to the comfort of the tent for a bit longer. It felt good to lie and sleep on the ground, to reconnect with the earth and get in touch with childhood summers. I suppose that’s what I’m seeking for purposes of writing. Meat Sauce gave dinosaur facts on KFAN, complained that the new NCAA Football video game was too difficult.
Hiked back to the car for my coffee mug, then started a fire back at camp to boil water for campfire coffee. While I waited for it to boil, I smoked some more and packed up camp. Before I departed the park completely, I drove around to the other side where the main campgrounds were located. I found them sparsely populated, as expected on a Monday morning. I parked and walked to the modern restroom facility, where I washed my hands and face. From a distance you could hear the building fan hum like an insect of the summer night. Inside it was dank and musty, with two stalls and a single urinal, next to which, in a corner of the plaster cement wall, lived a family of daddy long legs’, some in their webs, all in various sizes so that there looked to be a dad, mom, son, daughter, and so on. Around the area I found nowhere to sit in the sun – Rice Lake State Park is a rather small and compact state park – so I hit the road to Owatonna, a town located 8 miles to the west. I stopped at a Circle K/Holiday station there, used the bathroom, bought coffee, a sandwich, and water. The coffee I got was S’mores flavored, fittingly. On a whim I detoured to Faribault, outside of which I found a nice lakeside park right on Cannon Lake, home to more swans than I’ve ever seen in one place.
A public beach on one end, a boat launch on the opposite end, this park is narrow, hugging the curving shore of Cannon Lake and sandwiched in between the lakeshore and the two-lane country road that ran parallel to it. Heavy July heat like honey or molasses. I sat and read in the sun, wrote some more, even listened to some of my Willa Cather audiobook. Two white butterflies frolicked above patches of yellow and white wildflowers, the tips of which reached upwards of three and a half feet in full summer maturity. A hundred geese literally blocked off the beach when I arrived – later, a truck drove them off – so I chose a spot in the grass next to the covered picnic area. I also toured the metal fishing dock.
Big trucks rumbled by on the nearby country highway. On a grassy hill on the far side of the road, two dozen or so cows fight for a spot in a solitary prism of shade, crowding together there. For a moment I thought myself a character in a Stephen King novel, an outsider just arrived at some Podunk blue-collar town in Maine. In other words, back in the high life again.