Pete’s Lake

When we got the Hiawatha National Forest on Saturday, it was fairly late—an hour or so before sunset, about 8:30 EDT—and we were fairly tired, so I was willing to throw over whatever thin sentimental attachment I had for the campgrounds at Pete’s Lake, where I camped in 1989 and 2000, and camp elsewhere. We stopped at a campground south of Pete’s, and it looked all right. From inside the car.

As soon as we were outside and looking around at the nearby lake and the mostly empty other campgrounds, we realized what we'd forgotten on this trip. It’s one of the rules of packing: you always forget something. We’d forgotten mosquito repellant, a pretty serious mistake when an air force of mosquitoes starts maneuvers in your personal space. The place was swarming with them, more than we expected, more than I remembered, but then again this was late spring, compared with early fall. Camping in the age before DEET? No thanks.

I remembered a store up the road further, and discovered that it was open till 10 on Saturdays, mostly to accommodate local families and teens at its small ice cream parlor. I found some Off and off we went, a few more miles to Pete’s Lake, a place so obscure that isn’t marked on either the Rand McNally or Michelin road atlases that I own. That’s one of the reasons I like it.

More people were camping there this Memorial Day weekend than the Labor Day weekends I visited, but it wasn’t at all full, so we picked site #12, set up in the near-darkness, ate sandwiches and other easy food, and went to bed. A light rain started to fall.

Sometime in the dark the storm really got under way. Boom! Boom! Boom! Six years ago, exactly the same kind of storm cut our visit short, since the old tent leaked. I listened to the heavy rain, and thunder, and the swishing of the trees, and dozed. Occasionally I’d move my hand around to see if any water was getting in the new(ish) tent. No. A dry tent. I slept happy.

Against expectation, it was still raining pretty hard after the sun came up. From a dream I woke suddenly to a loud bang of thunder, followed by a long, low growl. Then this sound-pattern must have repeated a half-dozen times: it was like a bowling ball being dropped on an aluminum pan, then rolling down another sheet of metal.

The sky cleared up later on Sunday, and when we returned to camp a little after dark that day, it was a different experience. Instead of thunder, we heard yahoos off in the distance. Not campers, I think, but kids out whooping it up on a long weekend. Yeah! YEAH! WHOO! Awright! WHOO! WHOO! Yeaaaaaaaah!

But they went away before too long. After everyone else in the tent was asleep, I took a walk alone down to the lake itself, a few minutes from the campground. The tree canopy, a lush mix of new-leaf deciduous and pine, is so thick at the campgrounds and admits so little light that I needed a flashlight to find the path to the lake. Near the lakeshore, the trees thin out, and the view of the sky opens up. Next to the lake, benches face a tiny beach. A fine place to sit and see the vault of stars. Flashlight off, it was dark enough to see all the stars of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, which is really, really dark.