Wading Into Myth

Behold! The mighty Mississippi River’s humble beginnings a few hours north of the Twin Cities. Wading into these quiet waters, it’s hard to grapple with just how enormous and important this river is.

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Like a handkerchief from a magician’s pocket, the Mississippi River does not exist one moment—and then, voilà, it appears!

To see this magic, I first have to make it past a busload of summer campers in matching green shirts sneakily shoving each other in the back. This isn’t the kind of living obstacle that will prevent me from communing with several yards of the most important water in the whole wide world. Itasca headwaters, trickling forth from Lake Itasca to become the Mississippi River, I see you, and I am patient! A multi-generation family reunion, grouping and regrouping to take multiple photos with their matriarch or patriarch, also will not deter me. You would wait, too. Are we not on Team Wonder, Awe, and Appreciate—even if it takes a few patient minutes?

The Mississippi River! Like the big bang, one moment it’s nothing, the next moment: everything! Like Genesis. One minute God’s spirit is “hovering over the face of the waters,” and the next, “God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so.” Big difference here is that on the dry land by the gathered waters, there’s a snack bar.

And you can wade in this miracle that is a mere half day’s drive from the Twin Cities—which is why more than 569,000 people visited Itasca State Park in 2021. Don’t forget, our state has only some 5.7 million souls, so a half million of us doing anything gets a little cramped.

The best way to privately commune with the headwaters, I later learned, is to book lodgings within Itasca State Park, such as those within the breathtakingly picturesque Douglas Lodge, built in 1903–1905 and grand in exactly the same ways as the historic lodges at Grand Teton or Yellowstone National Parks—old logs, burnished. Or maybe try one of the many in-park picture-perfect wooden cabins. Stay on the property, and you will have lawful access to the headwaters at dawn or dusk (day-use park hours are 8 am to 10 pm). Otherwise, if you arrive in high season, just prepare yourself and make time for the inevitable fray.

Who wouldn’t want private time with the silver sliver of burbling clear water? Who wouldn’t want to sit just there, where it all begins, at the cool, clean border of Lake Itasca, right where water slips past emerald strands of wild rice grass, slides among well-worn stepping stones, and heads off on a journey of more than 2,300 miles? Because this is where all the magic starts!

The Mississippi, the biggest river on the continent. Yes, some people count the Missouri or Ohio Rivers as longer, but they are tributaries of the Mississippi, so those claims can be dismissed as regional cheerleading.

The Mississippi, the very reason for the existence of the Twin Cities, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and dozens more cities.

The Mississippi, our Old Man River, who is actually much older than previously thought. Scientist Sally Potter-McIntyre recently used zircon fragment analysis to establish that the river is 70 million years old, give or take, meaning dinosaurs could have sipped from what we would now recognize as the banks of our great river.

The Mississippi, our own cradle of something analogous to Aztec or Maya ancient civilizations. Just outside present-day St. Louis, around the years 600–1100 ad, the Mississippi River hosted a city of some 20,000 souls we now call Cahokia—rivaling then-London or then-Paris. They even had a stadium for a sport that seems a little like hockey, but you throw spears at the puck, and a celestial equinox-tracking structure a lot like Stonehenge but made with timber. It is called Woodhenge.

Of course, early on, everything in Minnesota was Dakota and Anishinaabe land until the genocidal colonization efforts by Europeans. The first step was 1803’s Louisiana Purchase, when the United States “bought” everything between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains from Napoleon at 3 cents an acre. All of that sounds made up today. Napoleon? The short guy with the complex? Why did that guy fill up his little pockets selling Anishinaabe and Dakota sacred sites and eternal homelands?   

Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act was all about the Mississippi and determining who could live on which side of the river. This act led inexorably to a series of Indian removals allowing for the creation of present-day Minnesota. Seizing the Mississippi was uniquely cruel in many ways. For the Dakota, the Mississippi—particularly around the Twin Cities—was holy land. The confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota, now within Fort Snelling State Park, was where the world began, and the cave Wakan Tipi, a “dwelling place of the sacred” across the river from downtown St. Paul, was a sacred site connecting across generations to ancient ancestors.

Northern Minnesota was the home of Anishinaabe. Of the current 11 federally recognized sovereign Indian tribal governments in Minnesota, many of the largest nations are near the Mississippi headwaters, including the White Earth Nation, Leech Lake Nation, and Red Lake Nation. Bemidji, named for an Anishinaabe leader and located about 50 river miles from the headwaters, has become a vital intellectual capital of Anishinaabe life, with Bemidji State University, home to the first university Ojibwe language program in the nation, now offering dual enrollment with Red Lake, Leech Lake, White Earth, and Fond du Lac tribal colleges. If you don’t manage to get a room at Douglas Lodge, consider staying in Bemidji and working in a stop at the Harmony Food Co-Op, which makes great soups to go, some made with food sourced from the Red Lake Nation and White Earth Nation.

The Mississippi, of course, is more to America than that which we experience up here in the land of pines and snow. That also comes rushing at you as you try to let the enormity of the idea of the Mississippi play in your heart and soul. The Mississippi runs through our inherited cultural stories, be they from Mark Twain or William Faulkner. The Mississippi, particularly in river city New Orleans, birthed America’s original art form, jazz. It is also the fulcrum of the Trail of Tears, when southeastern Indigenous groups were forced to walk from their homelands in eastern regions, like present-day Georgia, to relocate to places west of the Mississippi, like present-day Oklahoma. In another chapter, the Mississippi was intertwined with some more of our country’s darkest days and the means by which enslaved Americans were “sold downriver,” destroying families and lives. As surely as a human is inextricable from her arteries and pounding pulse, Americans are inextricable from the pulse and flow of the Mississippi River. Do you hear Bessie Smith; the Memphis blues; the California-born noodlings of Creedence Clearwater Revival; and, in fact, every sound of America, good and bad, sacred and profane, burbling through this spot where the river is born?

So, yes, it’s sacred and it’s popular. Especially in the summer. If it’s crowded when you go, be patient. Lift your eyes to Lake Itasca and the far shore and try to find words for the colors. The lake is pewter blue or pewter gray, mostly—the red pines and white pines of the shore bringing a lichen-gray tint to everything, possibly because of the way the orange flecks of red pine trunk and the carpet of needles make everything green look more gray. The pitch within these huge red pines was the key technology that allowed Ojibwe canoe makers to turn birchbark canoes into fleet vessels used to glide upon the river the Ojibwe called Misi-ziibi, for “long river.” Would anything be different if we still had the b, m-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-B-B-i?

How long is this long river? No one knows. The National Park Service summed up the current amusing situation: “The staff of Itasca State Park at the Mississippi’s headwaters suggest the main stem of the river is 2,552 miles long. The US Geologic Survey has published a number of 2,300 miles, the EPA says it is 2,320 miles long, and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area suggests the river’s length is 2,350 miles.”

While we may not know how long the meandering river is, we do know why it’s here. It’s because Minnesota is where all kinds of important things are happening that no one talks about—such as our two continental divides!

The Itasca Soil and Water Conservation District estimates that more than a thousand lakes surround the Mississippi headwaters.

You probably know the famous continental divide, the one along the crest of the Rocky Mountains. Dump a glass of water on one peak, and you might send water toward both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. But mountain peaks aren’t everything when it comes to continental divides. North-central Minnesota—around the flatness of Itasca State Park, Brainerd, and Hibbing—is where you’ll find two far less famous continental divides: the Laurentian Divide (now called the Northern Divide by some) and the St. Lawrence Divide. The former runs from Glacier National Park in Montana up to the Labrador Peninsula in northeastern Canada and is the mountain range called Mesabi here in Minnesota. It’s most prominent in the high middle part of the state, in White Earth State Forest and Itasca State Park, before it jogs due east to Hibbing. On one side of the Northern Divide, water goes to the Mississippi. On the other, it flows to the Arctic. (This also explains why another wonder of Minnesota, the Red River, flows north, not south.) In Hibbing, this divide meets another, the St. Lawrence Divide, at what the Ojibwe called the Hill of Three Waters, or the Top of the World. Spill water at the Hill of Three Waters, and some of it will go to the Mississippi, some to the Arctic, and some down to the Great Lakes and eventually out to the Atlantic north of Maine.

These two continental divides surge upward in the otherwise flatness of northern Minnesota, and the water in the region just flows around them. For its first 50 miles, the Mississippi, which starts at 1,460 feet above sea level, drops about 4 feet closer to sea level per mile. If you were to roll a marble along a mile of pavement that dropped only 4 feet, you’d think that it was flat. If you were water, you’d be in no hurry and make a lot of lakes along the way. The Itasca Soil and Water Conservation District estimates that more than a thousand lakes, covering 180,375 acres, surround the Mississippi headwaters. There are more than a hundred lakes just inside Itasca State Park. What is slow water, taking its time, good for? Trees and bogs. Beautiful trees. Beautiful bogs. Especially beautiful red pines, soaring, waving, noble, old—another notable wonder you’ll enjoy during your visit.

Red pines, a wonder? When a red pine gets to be 300 years old, she’s beautiful and tall, standing in a red skirt of fallen needles, and she smells terrific, resinous, and piney. At her feet, the jewels of the northern woodland bloom—ghost pipes, like white glass bouquets; blue-bead lilies, dangling navy-blue fruits exactly like porcelain beads on high drooping stalks. Gather your three closest friends, hold hands, and see if you can get all your arms around her (you might need to bring another friend). Look up: Her boughs 13 stories up carry needles like pencil sketch lines that blur some clouds, bend in the wind, and blur some other clouds. It’s hard to see what’s going on up there—13 stories equals half the size of Minneapolis’s Rand Tower. If we had a few dozen of these trees in downtown, you’d see them from the highways, brushing the skyline, making the skyscrapers look human-size. But we have far more concrete than old red pines today.

Just how rare is a 300-year-old red pine in Minnesota? In 1650, some 200 years before Minnesota became a state, the United States is estimated to have had more than a billion acres of forest area, obviously nearly all old-growth, with the dependent mycological, soil, plant, and animal community that needed those trees. Today, through lumbering and fire suppression (red pines need fire, and big mature trees easily survived the old sort of common lightning fires, literally being above it all, but current fires are hotter and more dangerous—to trees and everyone), a strikingly small number remain overall. Our state covers about 56 million acres, and the DNR estimates we have about 44,000 acres of old-growth forest left—mainly in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a little at Itasca State Park, then a few dots around the northern map. As much as 20 percent of the remaining old-growth pine forest is in Itasca’s enormous boundaries. Yes, enormous: Itasca State Park is 32,000 acres (a little smaller than all of St. Paul, which measures 35,000 acres). Drive or bike the Wilderness Drive Loop, a one-way ring-road that runs around Itasca State Park, and you’ll discover a dozen hiking trails and overlooks. As you go, look for the sign explaining where Minnesota’s remaining old-growth forests are—it shows a few dots on a big, empty state.

Were red pines of yore even bigger? Find the park’s Old Timer’s Cabin, built in 1934 by the Civilian Conservation Corps from windfall ancient pines some 5 feet in diameter. It looks like a children’s sketch of a log cabin, or like a joke about log cabins, just four or so gargantuan logs to make each wall. A sign explains: “Almost humorous in its scale, it is far from that as a reminder of magnificent forests all but extinct. As a relic of the days when trees were trees, this cabin can inspire us to firm resolution to permit them to be so again in the long-term future.”

I am on board. Especially after exploring the other old-growth pocket of red pines about an hour from Itasca in the pristine bit of red pine forest called the Lost 40. Legend has it that a storm blew in and caused a 19th-century lumber surveying team to accidentally note lake where there was actually forest. That oversight led to the inadvertent preservation of one of Minnesota’s few stands of old-growth red pine. After spending time Up North, where everything seems to be a bog, a lake, or a granite outcropping, I could see how one could assume this area was bog or lake too. (The parcel does, in fact, contain some significant bog.) The Lost 40 is unquestionably one of the prettiest spots in the state, a Hobbit-green premodern fantasy of incomparable soaring trees, uncountable glowing mushrooms. Your every footfall is cushioned by red pine needles, and the air is sweet and pine-rich.

Of course, visiting the Lost 40 also caused my heart to twang with grief for all that we logged before we knew how important it was to preserve the trees and the surrounding web of soil and mycology and animal. I’m heartened that this open-air cathedral of pine is safe now and hope we can all use it to feel in our bones the awe and the worth of giant pines nearly 300 years old, of a carpet filled with little ankle-level botanical jewels, and of a forest filled with brilliant clean air. I’m glad it can now grow so that future generations can have a little more than we do. Forests will grow if you let them. Some little shrew will go out another few feet and plant a seed, some little mushroom will send out its babies on a puff of wind, and inch by inch, nature will recover. And we can recover our hope.

Hope, too, is in Minnesota’s bog preserves, a few of which are found in this same magical area of the state, including the Big Bog State Recreation Area near Red Lake and the Bog Walk at Bemidji State Park. Bogs are another magical thing that happen when water lingers and doesn’t much want to leave a place. Bogs teem with life—creepy-crawly life, beautiful photogenic life. Bog appreciation is a fairly recent phenomenon. Big Bog opened in 2000, in response to a desire for new tourism once overfishing killed walleye in Red Lake. (The fish are back now after a lot of time and work.) The Big Bog boardwalk trail opened in 2005. Nature photographers, bird fans, native-orchid admirers, and those who want to see some rare carnivorous plants that peek out of the still, acidic, moss-edged water will want to visit. One plant, the round-leaved sundew, a tiny wildflower that looks something like a sea anemone on a stalk, catches insects in the sticky “dew” that glistens on every one of its movable tendrils. Green and purple pitcher plants catch unsuspecting flies in their stiff, bowing flowers.

One of the most interesting things I saw along the Bemidji bog walk was a woman carefully focusing an expensive camera on a pitcher plant while a hawk streamed a foot above her head carrying what looked like a bog lemming. She was so absorbed in the beauty before her lens, she never even noticed the life-and-death drama playing out in the sky over her head. I found this touching and illuminating because: Bogs teem with important but lesser-known bits of life, and we humans are so new to appreciating this fascinating side of nature, but we’re making great strides.

‘Eternity, I’m in it,’ I thought...‘the thing that carves through and defines our continent, it is trickling past my toes.’

To tell you the absolute truth, I had planned to spend only a few days in the headwaters area, but I spent a week, so amazed by the natural beauty and charm of all there is to do. The local Bemidji farm-to-table restaurant Table for 7, run by chef Amber Lynne, grills a pork chop from her own family’s farm that’s as good as any I’ve had in a five-star restaurant. Slim’s Bar and Grill, near Lake Bemidji, makes a terrific never-frozen burger from meat by local neighborhood meat market (and beef-stick artists) Stittsworth Meats. If renting pontoon boats and WaveRunners is your thing, check into the Ruttger’s resort in Bemidji; it has a truly staggering fleet of lovely floating options. Northern Cycle, in downtown Bemidji, offers rental bicycles for those without who’d like to check out the many, many miles of local trails.

For some reason, no one in the Twin Cities talks about downtown Bemidji as a fantastic boutique and antique destination, but we should. Yellow Umbrella is an airy spot specializing in comfy-chic—the good sweaters, the lounge sets fancy people wear après-ski, but priced for real humans. Grandma’s Attic, Back N’ Time, and Mattie’s Menagerie all offer the truest gift in antiques—stock that hasn’t been picked over by your neighbors.

In a very Twin Cities–centric view, I’d say Bemidji is like half a Stillwater stuck onto a third of an Excelsior. Yes, this means you can find breweries: Bemidji Brewing in downtown Bemidji is the rare spot that’s ambitious and accomplished, but also little and friendly—don’t miss its German Blonde, a big award winner that is crisp and racy. Portage Brewing in Walker, worth the drive, even from the Twin Cities, specializes in adventurous and playful beers: It always seems to ask, “Why not try five varieties of hops? Why not try three grains in the tank?” Somehow, Portage pulls it off.

Still, for me—as hoped for, expected, and eventually captured—the true life highlight and beacon for my journey north was the headwaters. I’ve found in my exploring over the years that generally, patience pays off, except when it doesn’t.

Finally, after enough time hovering around the headwaters, the crowds ebbed and I waded into the beginning of everything, picked my way across the stepping stones with my tiny dog, and sat upon a likely rock. You would do this too, I bet.

“Eternity—I’m in it,” I thought. “The throbbing pulse of America, the thing that carves through and defines our continent, it is trickling past my toes.”

If a dinosaur cried a tear into the Mississippi 70 million years ago, and a teardrop has 1.5 sextillion molecules, could one of those molecules be running over my toes right now?

In response, a common orange and brown angel-winged butterfly known as a question mark fluttered onto the next rock.

A question mark and me here at the beginning of everything? Too perfect.

And then in the midst of my reverie, I hear a voice: “Excuse me, could you move? That’s the perfect place to sit to get the picture I want.”

Alas. Who wouldn’t want a little private time to commune with some of the most important running water in the country?

I stood up and moved on.

That’s the thing about eternity, the biggest truths, the most profound insights—they’re big enough to share.

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