Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was a late-afternoon ride of twenty miles to Garrison, a lakeside resort town,
though not an especially fancy one, that had been deserted after the weekend and was
notably empty on the day after Labor Day. I checked into a motel and at the lakeside
lucked into a majestically tranquil scene. A single dock stretched out for fifty yards into
the lake, with two fishing boats moored and bobbing at the end of it, but aside from
that, the surface of the lake, deep purple and rippling gently, was empty to the horizon.
With the onset of evening, the sky was a slowly darkening azure and the air was glowing
amber. On the shore, a flock of white gulls, hundreds of them, were strutting around for
a while like a miniature marching band and, on a silent signal, took off all at once in a
great flapping of togetherness, the whole body of them rising with the steady urgency of
an airplane and angling shiftily this way and that like a tailback loose in the secondary
until they simply disappeared over the water in the distance. Gorgeous. The end of sum-
mer.
I walked about a hundred yards up the road that hugged the shore and stopped
in front of Garrison's most garish attraction, an enormous wooden sculpture of a fish,
twenty feet long and mounted on a pedestal maybe ten feet high. It was a walleye—the
local delicacy—bronze with a white belly and a barbed shield arced on its back, posed
as though breaking the surface of the lake from beneath it, its tail fin swishing fiercely,
its mouth open in anger, baring tiny sharp teeth. Three signs were posted beneath it on
the pedestal, side by side by side.
The first said:
WELCOME TO GARRISON, MINNESOTA
.
The second said:
LEGEND HAS IT THIS WALLEYE WAS CAUGHT BY PAUL BUNYAN AND BABE THE
BLUE OX AFTER A THREE DAY STRUGGLE. PAUL FINALLY WRAPPED HIS LINE AROUND BABE'S HORNS
AND BABE PULLED THE FISH OUT OF LAKE MILLE LACS ONTO GARRISON BEACH
.
The third said:
KEEP OFF THE FISH!
I wish you could see the smile on my face.
My country.
