Amateur firework displays from around the perimeter of Cass Lake saluted the 4th of July in this neck of the woods. Boat traffic increased from the occasional fisherman to speedboats towing tubes and water skiers and the frequent party barge slowly motoring along, in no hurry to get anywhere. At camp it was just another day. My budget doesn’t include much room for fireworks, snow cone machines, or fancy carnival rides.
I gave the rest of the staff the evening off and they loaded up the boat and headed to Bemidji. I took a hike across the island to a quiet place called sunset rock and watched nearby fireworks as sunset turned to dusk and eventually to nightfall. On an island this small it’s difficult to find those moments of solitude. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m on the island, I’m working. Even my bedroom is no escape. Occasionally I try to catch a short catnap after lunch but eight times out of ten the phone on my nightstand rings just as I’m kicking off my shoes. Then it’s back to the office to check on an upcoming reservation, or any of the other requests that might result.
Myself and a few of my staff made our debut as the “Star Island String Band” the other night at the local bar’s open mic night. Everybody in town must have been there, including a couple of local bands playing obnoxiously loud rock/pop music. In our flannel shirts, shaggy hair, scruffy beards, and with our acoustic instruments in hand we stood in stark contrast to the regulars lined up at the bar and punk rockers on stage. A bunch of hippies from the island was undoubtedly the image we conveyed.
We pulled together a half hour set of folk and old time music that captured the attention of the audience for long enough to get a pretty enthusiastic round of applause following each song. At one point, even the guys playing poker around the pool table stopped what they were doing and gave us their undivided attention. Banjo, guitar, fiddle, bass and washboard accompanied the lyrics about hard luck, aimless travels, and being friends with the devil. The bar owner, Larry, was beaming the entire time, if not from the music, probably the money rolling in from the patrons. I justified the whole event and our absence from camp as “building community relations” with the locals. I wish all of my responsibilities as director were that easy and fun to execute.
We get quite a few colorful characters coming through camp. If you don’t know much about the Unitarian crowd, Garrison Keillor likes to poke fun at them and can provide some humorous insight into their quirks. It’s a pretty loosely based religion, focused around seven principles relating to respect and dignity of every human person and the democratic process. One of my biggest mentors for this new job, Mr. Blackstone, told me on the day we met, “you get four Unitarians in a room and you get 16 different opinions.” From my observations, he hit the nail right on the head.
Decisions come slow around here, as everyone takes careful efforts to make sure all angles are examined closely before resting on any one conclusion. I think part of that culture of indecisiveness is what makes an outsider like myself a good candidate for the main leadership position.
I’ve noticed that same indecisiveness leads the accumulation of crap. The island is full of it. Nobody throws anything away. I can understand what it means to be thrifty and pack staff away for a rainy day, but I don’t believe it efficient to keep coils of cotton wrapped electrical wire from 1920 lying around. Or old plastic table clothes. I found a whole box of them stashed away under another pile of junk. Vacuum cleaners, broken lamps, leaky gas cans, rusty pipes, burnt out light bulbs, torn screen doors, ancient computer monitors, and the list goes on. I even had to dispose of an old sailboat with an irreparable crack in the hull. I’ve hauled nearly half a dozen pontoon loads of junk off the island and I still feel like I’m just getting started.
We have enough scrap wood to rebuild Noah’s ark. I began restocking our firewood piles with odd ends of 2x4’s. We have so many scraps I figure it’s cheaper to burn that stuff and buy new boards than to spend the fuel on running the chainsaw and gathering real firewood.
The purging of junk also involves a lot of cleaning up and organizing the stuff that is deemed salvageable. I have come to the conclusion this camp has just about any tool a person could need. You simply have to know where to find it, how to use it, and how to fix it should the tool itself be broken. We have a weed trimmer, but without the appropriate pieces on the end to hold the string in. Our power washer is out of commission because someone left water in the nozzle over the winter and the connector fitting cracked.
I guess if I always knew where to find the fully functional tool on my first attempt maintenance work around here would be too easy, leaving me too much time to accomplish those “few” other tasks I must do as director. The challenges are many up here, but the rewards of success are even more.
Happy Trails,
Greg
