The Name in the Lodge Record Book
Six Hundred Miles
We left at four in the morning on a Saturday, with the boat-sized cooler in the truck bed and a thermos of coffee between the seats.
Jenna stood on the porch in her robe and waved until we turned onto the highway.
“Bring me back a fish story,” she had said, hugging Hailey on the steps. “A good one. With measurements.”
It is about 600 miles from our house to that lake, if you go the way my dad always went.
Up through Chippewa Falls and Rice Lake to Superior and Duluth, then north on 53 through the Iron Range to International Falls.
Hailey slept until Duluth. When she woke up, the big lake was out the passenger window, steel gray and endless, and she sat straight up and said, “Is that the ocean?”
I laughed for the first time in a while. “That’s Lake Superior, honey. We’re not even halfway.”
We stopped for gas and breakfast in Virginia, Minnesota. She ordered pancakes and ate exactly half, because she was too excited to finish anything.
North of there, the trees close in. Spruce and birch and black water in the ditches. Hailey counted deer. She got to eleven before we hit International Falls and the paper mill smell came through the vents.
The bridge to Fort Frances goes right over the Rainy River. Hailey had her passport card out on her lap fifteen minutes before we got there, holding it with both hands.
The border officer was a young woman with her hair in a tight bun. She asked me the usual questions. Where were we going, how long, did I have any firearms, how much alcohol, any firewood.
Then she leaned down and looked past me at the passenger seat. “Is this your dad, miss?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hailey said. “We’re going fishing. Just us.”
“Where’s your mom today?”
“Working,” Hailey said. “She wrote a letter.” And she held it up in its plastic sleeve, before I could even reach for it.
The officer read it through twice. She looked at the notary stamp. Then she handed it back to Hailey, not to me, and smiled a little.
“Good luck on the water,” she said. “Catch a big one.”
After Fort Frances, it is Highway 11 east a few miles and then 502 north, a long empty road through rock and pine where you can drive half an hour without seeing another truck.
Hailey was quiet on that stretch. I thought she was tired. Then she said, without looking at me, “Do you think Grandpa’s mad at me?”
I took my time with that one. “No,” I said. “I think Grandpa has something going on that he hasn’t told anybody. I don’t think it has anything to do with you.”
“Then why did he say it to me?”
I did not have an answer. I told her that. I told her that sometimes grownups say things wrong, even good ones, and that her grandpa was a good one who had said something wrong.
She thought about that for a mile or two. “Okay,” she said. Then she went back to counting rock cuts.
We went through Dryden and turned up toward Vermilion Bay, then onto the narrower highway north, and finally onto the gravel road that runs eleven miles back into the bush.
When we came around the last bend, there it was. The same dock. The same row of log cabins.
The same lake, flat and silver, with a loon sitting out past the point like it had been waiting for us.
Hailey put both hands on the dashboard. “Oh,” was all she said. “Oh, Dad.”