This guy is paddling about on the waters of Ely Minnesota. Loon laughs can be heard for miles when the forests are dead still and the waters are reflecting that mysterious melancholic power humor: “This is my lake” coupled with “It’s time to raise a family.” I still remember individual instances of stopping my miles-long walk to and from school through forested paths along the lakes and streams and ponds and sloughs and marshes so as to listen intently to this sound shattering all pretense at having other thoughts in one’s mind and heart and soul.
Early on at the Prep School that was part of my home parish, our English prof whom we called “Slink” (O.S.B.) assigned us to write an essay. I hated this and I was disgusted at what I had written, knowing it was sterile, boring, without merit. I was not yet introduced to the fact that also I have an imagination that can draw in analogies – philosophical, theological, mathematical… – to whatever perspective I myself (who would’ve thought?) might want to envision, even putting all that into a story line.
After all was said and done, a friend let me read his essay. It was on loons calling in the quiet early morning shadows of the mists and fog rolling over the lakes and through the forests. I was captivated. “You can that with words?!” It was the entrance into another universe entirely our own and now more entirely “our own” than ever.
Meanwhile, I had been introduced to the concept of “global warming” since I was in Kindergarten in – what? – 1965. But don’t be fooled. This was truly scientific and it was not called “global warming” but rather “global unfreezing.” Up in Minnesota we have lakes and loons, and an explanation for lakes and subsequently loons that made sense to us as kids and which makes sense to me still today some 55 years later.
We took field trips to numerous places used as examples by geologists and climatologists to demonstrate to the scientific community that the sheer abundance of lakes in Minnesota came from the landscape being plowed up by mountainous glaciers extending from the polar ice cap down to Minnesota because of an ice-age some 10,000 years ago that was itself caused by a cataclysmic event bringing about global cooling, such as the impact of a large meteor. When the world temperature started to heat up again as the atmosphere cleared up from all the ash, the glaciers started to melt, dumping their water, of course, in the basins they had plowed up, creating the lakes in which the loons now frolic. Call to mind such as mastodons eating ferns being instantly frozen only now being found in northern Siberia as the melting following the great freeze continues. It’s not that there is global warming. No. It’s that the earth is finally getting back to it’s normal temperature. I’ve been writing of this for a long time and no one has an answer. Tender snowflake ideologist bullies merely stare at me with glazed eyes, knowing I speak the truth but they are unable to “go there.” Another agenda is at hand for them.
Let’s glean some trivia from William Bornhoft on the lakes in Minnesota.
- Minnesota has 11,842 lakes over 10 acres each. Our license plates are low-balling us with 10,000.
- Wisconsin says they have 15,000 lakes but with no size requirement. Going by their looser standard, Minnesota has more than 20,000 lakes.
- Minnesota has 6,564 (69,200 miles) of natural rivers and streams.
- We had 18.6 million acres of wetlands in 1850.
- Red Lake is 288,800 acres
- Mille Lacs Lake is 132,516 acres
- Leech Lake is 111,527 acres
- Lake Winnibigoshish is 58,544 acres
- Lake Vermilion – 40,557 acres with 290 miles of shoreline. That’s a full day of car travel to drive around.
- Lake of the Woods has 950,400 acres total with 307,010 acres in Minnesota
- Total Area Covered by Lakes and Rivers (deep water): 2,560,299 acres
- Total surface water area including wetlands: 13,136,357 acres
ARISE! LET US BE GOING! 