A Midsummer Night's Camp

 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.

White Noise

 

"The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered. The older the man or woman, the more carefully dressed and groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright knit shirts. Women with a powdered and fussy look, a self-conscious air, prepared for some anxious event. They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead."

Don DeLillo

White Noise