Finlayson, Minnesota—Okay, no one seemed much interested in yesterday’s post about Petry’s Bait. Places like this dot the landscape and for a few devoted customers they take on enormous importance. They are sites of sacred rituals. They are the places we stop on our way to our favorite haunts. Places for supplies, conversations, advice. This place was where we bought our 16 gauge shells, our Creek Chub lures, filled our gas cans for a 5hp Evinrude. It was the place where we’d stop every single time on the way to the cabin and then our way back home. This and the scores like it become the places that frame our memories and help us balance what is human and what is wild. And today, like years ago, this was a pit stop on a way to a greater destination. A small, barely-named lake in Pine County, Minnesota, that feels familiar but has simply changed. And this weekend where I made the journey back there for the first time since 1983. I was 15 then and 50 now, returning with my 13-year-old son. And I couldn’t help but think of E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.” Among White’s memorable passages in this essay, this one seems meaningful: “I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.” Tell us about your sacred haunts and rituals.
#finlayson #pinecounty #minnesota #creekchub #freshwater #upland #wingshooting #grouse #woodcock #shotgun #shootingsportsman
