![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
Ever since it was settled, Park Rapids has been a crossroads for tourists.
The trains that hauled out white pine at the turn of the century brought in summer guests, who were met at the depot by resort owners and taken to the lakes in wagons.
When highways were built, Park Rapids became the gateway to Itasca State Park, 20 miles to the north. After the rail line was abandoned, it became the western trailhead of the Heartland State Trail, one of the nation's first paved bicycle trails.
In Bemidji, three faces tell much of the town's story.
Chief Bemidji stands facing the lake the Ojibwe called Bemidgegumaug, or "river flowing crosswise.’’ His real name was Shay-Now-Ish-Kung, and he fed the white people who settled on the lake's shores in 1888.
Their settlement became the first town on the Mississippi, which starts 35 miles south in Itasca State Park, winds north to Bemidji, flows through its lake and turns south again.
In 1896, a St. Paul man named J.A. Berkey came to Minnesota's Leech Lake, threw out his line and reeled in a whole new industry.
"He set up white tents for some men from Kansas City, who fished their guts out and said, 'We’re going back and telling everyone,’ ’’ said Renee Geving, director of the Cass County Museum.
The hook was set. Over the years, Leech Lake’s reputation as a fishing hole grew as big as its muskies, which can be huge. The town that grew on the shores, however, wasn’t called Berkey, or even McGarry, after the town founder, a resort owner who is credited with coining the slogan "Land of 10,000 Lakes.’’
In Minnesota's early days, creating a park was no picnic.
As the public admired the towering pines around Lake Itasca, loggers dreamed of the miles of board feet they could produce.
"No measure was ever more unreasonably harassed and opposed," wrote park founder Jacob Brower. But in 1891, the Legislature gave the people their first state park by one vote.
In winter, only the most dedicated pilgrims make the trip to Itasca, Minnesota's most revered state park.
Yet the park is beautiful without its forest canopy. It's easy to see its bones, the lumpy quilt of knobs and kettles laid down by retreating glaciers. It's easy to see the 300-year-old pines that escaped loggers. And it's easier to listen — to the sassy chatter of a squirrel, the prehistoric croak of a crow, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker.
In winter, the park grooms 32 kilometers of trails for classic and skate skiing. On the trails, skiers see the legacy of Jacob Brower, the far-sighted surveyor who, in 1891, used his own salary to start piecing together the state's first state park.
On lazy summer days, Walker is a classic northwoods Minnesota town.
I've been going to a lake resort near there with my family for years. We ride our bikes into town on the Heartland State Trail,
eat ice cream at the Village Square and buy muskmelons and corn on the cob from the stand near the gas station.
The pace is slow, serene — unless a Crazy Day Sale falls on a cloudy day, in which case the resorts empty and shoppers crowd into the town of 1,100 like sheep to salt.
One winter, I went to summer camp.
It was the German-language immersion village in Bemidji, Minn., to which my daughter went for eight years. She always returned starry-eyed and eager to go back: "I wish I could go there year-round,'' she'd say, sighing.
I’d always wondered what kind of pixie dust the Concordia Language Villages counselors sprinkled on children. Then
Concordia started offering family weekends in winter, and I got to find out.
It had become a summer tradition: Drive my daughter up north to her German camp at Concordia Language Villages, look enviously around the fabulous campus and whine that adults should get to come, too.
Someone was listening. One day, a flier arrived at my house, announcing the first French and German adult weeks. As it turns out, others had whined, too.
"We've got these millions and millions of dollars' worth of facilities, and we want to use them,'' said Larry Saukko, dean of the Finnish and academic-year German programs. "Besides, parents and grandparents would come on closing day and say, 'When are you going to quit wasting it on kids and start doing it for us?' ''
By rights, the northern Minnesota hamlet of Dorset shouldn’t even exist.
It’s on the road to nowhere, a mile and a half off the highway that links Park Rapids to Walker. It’s not on a lake. It has virtually no houses.
It does, however, have a knack for hyperbole. In the 1920s, it tried "land of clover, the big white potato and the dairy cow.’’ It tried boasting of "the shortest state highway in Minnesota running through its downtown’’ and, until 1986, was "the smallest town in the United States with a bank.’’
