Longing for Lakes

 Sujata Massey

View of downtown from Lake of the Isles

I'm filing this dispatch from Minnesota, where I’ve arrived early for a mystery convention. The last two Bouchercon gatherings of 2020 and 2021 were virtual, making this year’s gathering in Minneapolis especially tempting to me, not only to see mystery friends but to revisit the beautiful “City of Lakes” that was my home during 2006-2012; most of my childhood was spent in nearby St. Paul, Minneapolis’s so-called twin city, which also has lakes throughout the suburban parts of the city.  

 

Driving made sense because I could spend the weekend prior to the mystery gathering in Bayfield, a historic hamlet on Lake Superior in Northern Wisconsin. Because I was driving an 18-hour trip, the journey to Bayfield was preceded by a night in Madison, which had gorgeous Lake Monona right out my hotel window. Without a conscious plan, I’d floated into a miniature holiday of northern waters, or lands of lakes. 

 

Wisconsin has a town named Land O’Lakes, and in the 1920s, a group of Minnesota dairy farmers banded together to market their products around the country—naming themselves Land O’Lakes. The accent between Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan is nearly identical, and they all share Superior. The state college systems in Minnesota and Wisconsin have a reciprocal agreement for instate tuition rates, allowing students a chance to stretch beyond their immediate homes without spending extra. 

Lake Monoma in Madison

 

Lake Superior is the world’s largest freshwater lake, if judged by surface area. That makes it too large for the casual exerciser, as it would involve passing through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Canada! I’d been near this lake before at one of its Minnesota shore cities—Duluth. This time, I gazed at it from the very scenic viewpoint of Bayfield, a Victorian town that was built in the 1870s by developers who built grandly because they believed it might become Lake Superior’s own Chicago. Bayfield had some fish canning and lumber industries, but it never became a metropolis—a boon for visitors looking for unspoiled views and delightful ferry rides to the nearby Apostle Islands, including Madeline Island, a 20-minute ferry ride away.

Bayfield Wisconsin sunrise

Ferry between Bayfield and Madeline Island

 

Recently communities are recognizing and acknowledging that lakes were homes to indigenous communities who were driven away by settlers, missionaries, and the U.S. government soldiers. Gichigami, meaning Big Water in Ojibwe, is the first name for Superior. French missionaries in the 1600s called it “Superiore” based on its geographic position, and the name has remained. Monona, one of four lakes near Madison, takes its name from Chippewa language and is said to mean ‘beautiful;’ although the naming was done by an American developer. The original name in Chippewa language was Tcheehobekeelakaytela, meaning “Tepee Lake.” 

 

Minneapolis is another example of an Anglicization of Native language. Minne is a Sioux word meaning ‘water’, and the area of Southern Minnesota was developed by Whites only after US soldiers violently drove off the Dakota and Chippewa living in the area, resettling them in reservations in distant, inhospitable territory. 

Lake of the Isles

 

Minneapolis contains a chain of lakes, with some of them original to the land and others man-made. Lake of the Isles, one block from my Airbnb, was created in the 1880s by dredging a small existing lake with four islands inside (Wita Topa means four islands in the Dakota language). The lake was joined to a nearby marsh, and later connected to two other nearby lakes, one named Cedar, and the other named Lake Calhoun. The city’s most extravagant mansions were built around Lake of the Isles, most of them standing.

An aged outdoor Parks map shows the old name

 

In the early 2000’s, a controversy arose around Lake Calhoun. The lake was named in the 1800s in honor of John C. Calhoun, the former Secretary of War who’d surveyed the land for Fort Snelling, and who was also a well-known slave owner and politician advocating for slavery. A Native-led group requested the Park Board change the name, and in 2017, the board voted unanimously in favor of changing signage for the lake to include the original Dakota name. Legal contests followed from a group who argued that the Park Board the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources didn’t have the right to change the name. The name change was refuted by the Minnesota legislature, but the battle went to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which in 2020 upheld the right of the Department of Natural Resources to call the lake Bde Maka Ska (pronounced Be-DAY Mah-KAH-Ska). I remember when my Twin Cities friends started using the new name when we chatted on the phone. They could say it so easily, and I stumbled. But now, I’m used to it and like it much better. 

 

As I revisit such beautiful lakes on my journey, I feel surrounded by so much that is weighty. Walking with my husband around Lake of the Isles this morning, my mind turned to my two voluntary moves away from Minnesota to Maryland. The first time I was eighteen and desperate to go to college among a more diverse community. The second time I moved I was forty-eight and struggling with the feeling that I would never feel like I belonged in the Midwest, despite my love of family and the environment.The irony is that I've visited here three times in 2022. And each time I return, I doubt my move; all the while realizing how lucky I am to have a choice about such matters, unlike the first people who loved these lakes. 

Snowstorms and Brainstorms

 Sujata Massey

In my long-ago life as a newspaper reporter, there were a few words I wasn't allowed to use. No profanity, of course. And the other expression I remember was THE WHITE STUFF. 

 

White stuff was on the lips of every television weather reporter when they talked about snow.  On the rare occasions that it snowed in Baltimore, the situation was considered too dire for metaphors to be used in the Baltimore Evening Sun.

 

I am a free agent now, and I find myself looking for varying words to express the wonder of snow. Tiny soft flakes, angularly falling snow, the snow that's packed an inch thick on the street, the abstract craggy formations of old snow and ice everywhere. 

 I’ve just spent a week in St. Paul, Minnesota. Through the week, I saw snow falling three times. It carpeted the Mississippi River and the lakes, and it was packed down into a slick surface on neighborhood streets.  A type of snowstorm cheerfully called a “capper” is coming down from Canada today. 

 

I spent ten years as a child in St. Paul. A quarter century later, I returned to live with my husband and children in Minneapolis--a six year stay. I feel at home, and not at home, here. The cities sit side-by-side and are therefore nicknamed the Twin Cities. I'd call them fraternal twins. Minneapolis is slightly more urbane, and St. Paul just a bit homier. Both have theater, colleges, culture and lively immigrant populations; the Minnesotans seen in movies are living in the 'burbs.

And there are hard things about these Twin Cities we must be accountable for. Philandro Castile was shot to death in his own car in the St. Paul suburb where I grew up--no jail time for the officer involved. In Minneapolis, George Floyd was strangled by police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted. Minneapolis and Saint Paul sparkle with lakes and solid, charming old houses, but there is pain underneath, like a filthy black under-crust of hardened ice. 

The first day of my trip home, I made a pilgrimage to Lake of the Isles, the body of water that filled my eyes every time I walked down to my children's school. I stopped nearby at Birch Bark Books, the gem of a bookstore owned by the author Louise Erdrich, where an old wooden confessional booth inside the store plays a dramatic role in her brilliant new book, The Sentence. 

 I listened to The Sentence as an audiobook read by Louise on the long drive from Baltimore to Minnesota. I was transfixed and knew I had to buy a number of hardcover copies to share. The novel includes a tale of crime and incarceration, a love story, a ghost story, and Native American history. It was written during the pandemic and unbelievably, was released while we are still in the thick of Covid deaths. The novel digs into the heart of what happened in the Twin Cities during this momentous time, from the empty store shelves and closed businesses, the full hospitals and struggling medical people, and in the middle of all the desperation--George Floyd's murder. This is a book which made me laugh out loud, and also weep quietly.

 

A few days later, I returned to Lake of the Isles on a different mission. It was a dark Saturday night and relatively warm: 26 degrees! The Luminary Loppet is an annual winter celebration that brings artists to the lake. The artists freeze water into ice sculptures that are illuminated with glowing lights. Fire dancers, musical performers, and plenty of charming dogs trained to lope along with their skiing humans made this such a happy, spectacular gathering. I walked the surface of the lake with friends, marveling at the ice sculptures and spirited entertainment, and at the strollers and skiers, some of them with dogs in tow. 

 

A Minnesota winter also means a lot of indoor time. 

 

The Twin Cities is the home to the University of Minnesota’s flagship campus, which houses the extraordinary Ames Library of South Asia founded with donations from Charles Lesley Ames, a St. Paul lawyer who sailed to India in 1906 and began collecting books about India. In this special library, I’ve found memoirs and travel guides, books of folktales, government records, and other tremendous, rare books. It’s a historical novelist’s dream.

 

A few flakes fell as I drove a short distance to my haven, which is housed in the sub-basement of Wilson Library on the Minneapolis’s West Bank Campus. The library, which is generously open to the public, was uncrowded, as always. A couple of masked students floated through, but that was it. I was mostly alone, hearing only the buzzing of the light fixtures and an occasional opening of elevator doors in the hallway.

 

This time I found two memoirs by British colonials in the justice system: one a judge, the other a police chief. I paged through a beguiling volume of anthropological study of rain. I sifted through another book on the history of advertising in Indian newspapers, and one more about the introduction of paper currency. The day after my library visit, I meant to work on an outline for the proposal. But the first page of that book came like manna from heaven. 

 

 

The brainstorming comes not like a blizzard, but a gentle sprinkling. The very best kind of white stuff.

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