The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

This is about boats, so of course it’s about desire. The beautiful forms of boats arouse the longing to have one, and to go places you couldn’t without it. 

My father had this bad as a kid. In the summer of 1932 in Duluth, he talked his friends into building the next best thing to a boat: a raft. Scavenging scrap lumber and driftwood, they dragged the stuff down to the shore of Lake Superior, nailed it together, then pushed the ungainly craft into the water and paddled out furiously with some old two-by-fours.

Minnesota boasts no defining fine artist, no painter of universal renown. Alexis Fournier, Seth Eastman, Nicholas Brewer, Wanda Gag, Dewey Albinson, George Morrison—any of these names may ring a distant bell. But Minnesotans have no Albert Bierstadt or Winslow Homer, no Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe or Frederic Remington to lionize. The central Minnesota town of Aitkin, however, has made a bid to raise the profile of its most famous son, Francis Lee Jaques.

Guthrie, Minnesota, is not much more than a sleepy little huddle of buildings nestled between Lake Itasca and Leech Lake. It’s classic lake country, where tourists have been coming to summer resorts for generations. Cabin season is short and the impact of tourism can be dramatic, especially since logging and mining have ebbed. The locals have quietly tried to adapt. Here, the famous Paul Bunyan Trail, which runs one hundred miles from Brainerd to Bemidji, is still unpaved.