Summer of 1987

We grilled chicken this evening.  It seems like a very Minnesotan thing to do on the day before this nation's biggest day since I do not know when.  To a non-Minnesotan, grilling out of doors may not be the first thing you think of when it is in the low 40s, drizzling on occasion and fog as far as the eye can see (usually only feet at this point).  But, we did just that - grilled out of doors over red hot coals.  Once we were done consuming the flesh of the delicious birds - I did what I have been doing since I was very little...marveling at fire.  We had a pile of scrap wood in the garage for years now, and I have decided that it is best used up in anyway.  This includes cutting it and burning it.  I cut up scraps of maple handle railing and piled it up high over the red coals.  

The smoke swirled up into the fog.  With a roaring fire now going, I set to work - back in the house - to finish the loaf of bread that I had started to construct while finishing the preparations for dinner. 

I set the dough aside to rise for an hour.  Outside, the air was coarse with maple smoke.  I went behind the shed where we stacked the remains of our last spruce tree we cut down just two weeks ago - I grabbed several logs.  The moisture on the pine logs snapped and sizzled at the hot coals and flames heated the logs.

Soon the coarse, accrid maple smoke was replaced my the memory-conjuring scent of spruce-smoke.

Like clock work, my memories kicked in.  Mid-1990s, skinning beaver in my parents' garage - the wood stove roaring.  The early 1990s, Perch Lake (near Side Lake; north of Chisholm/Hibbing, MN) - my grandfather sitting in a lawn chair next to the fire; the smell of pine smoke thick in the air.  My mind continued backwards.  It stopped on what I would later find out to be 1987.  My father had been laid off from the mine and to make ends meet, he had taken up helping a guy he knew who was expanding his deli in town.  My dad was doing construction work for him.  All this, I found out after I talked to my father to figure out what year the fishing trip happened in. 

It was the summer of 1987.  With my father working hard on the deli, the owner decided that it would be great to go camping and fishing near the Canadian border.  

I have fond memories of this outing.  The endless trip up to Crane Lake.  The launching of the boat.  The stopping at Canadian Customs on Sand Point Lake (I think I bought a mug with a maple leaf on it).  Most of all, though, I remember the camp fire.  The smell of wet pine burning.   Steaks cooking over the fire.  And rain.  Lots of rain and dampness.   We camped on a island in Namakan Lake, and island that was in the shape of a hand.  My mother still has rocks in her garden from this island.

All these memories came flooding back with the simple whiff of smoke from a fire started in a Weber on a cold, foggy evening.