Skiing with the Larsons

The Chernaks, the Mungers, and the Larsons.

We’re blessed with friends. That’s the one thing that I can say with certainty about my wife Rene’ and I. It’s been that way for a long while now, being blessed by friends. Many of our closest friends are folks we met in high school, at Duluth Denfeld. A few, like Jan and Bruce Larson, I met years before. In Jan’s case, it started at Piedmont Elementary in Duluth when we met in kindergarten. With Bruce, it started when a curious Baptist kid (that would be Bruce) started bugging his parents about where babies come from. Now, being that the Baptist church is fairly conservative, but wanting Bruce to know more than what he’d learn in hushed huddles during Boy Scouts, Bruce’s folks sent him to a sex education class run by Episcopalians. That’s where we met. When Rene’ and I started dating in 1976, she was welcomed into a crazy group of close and loving friends. She’s been one of us now for over thirty years.

Of course, the old friends aren’t our only friends. There are Fredenberg friends (folks we’ve met and grown to love out here where we live), family, work friends, and a whole host of other connections and friendships made over a lifetime. Some mine. Some Rene’s. But all important and sustaining. Still, the time we spend with folks like the Larsons and their relatives, the Chernaks, is a window to the past as we joke and laugh and, as we also reflect on our parents’ ages, a glance into the future. This past weekend, shortened as it was by Rene’ dealing with a flu bug (we couldn’t get up to the Larson cabin on Thomas Lake near Two Harbors until Saturday morning), was one of those get-togethers that sustains us in a world of sometimes seemingly unending uncertainty.

We were lucky. When we drove from our place on the Cloquet River to Thomas Lake early Saturday morning, it was snowing: Big, fat, fluffy early winter snow was coming down despite the fact that it was the third day of March. Let’s face it: This winter has been abysmal, a total bust. We’ve had little snow, temperatures that have been too warm, and gray sky after gray sky since November. Hell, our winter has been more like a Kansas winter than one spent in northern Minnesota. So to see snow piling up so late in the season, was, in a word, wondrous. When we arrived at the Larson cabin (which, when I was a Boy Scout and Jan’s dad, the legendary Arnie Erickson was my scoutmaster, was the “Erickson cabin”), the Larsons and the Chernaks were seated comfortably around a fire roaring in the cabin’s stone fireplace, sipping coffee and talking in low tones. Rene’ joined the crew while I hauled in our stuff and some groceries. We’ve been making this annual ski gathering for a decade or better and the ladies in the equation pretty much have it down pat as to who brings what. Bruce makes sure that there’s firewood aplenty, that the sauna is ready to go, that no water pipes have burst, and that the weekend will come off without a hitch. Me? I pretty much just show up.

The pleasantries exhausted, we knuckled down to some hard core political and philosophical discussions, beginning with my diatribe about Russ Limbaugh’s insensitive remarks about the young law student who testified before Congress, and moving on to the state of the economy in Ely, Minnesota, where Charlie and Sue Chernak hale from. By noon, Bruce had heard enough: it was time to hit the state ski trail a few miles from Thomas Lake.

Rene and Sue on the Mother Bear Trail.

Shit, I thought as I plodded along behind Bruce on my skis, I’m more out of shape than I thought.

Bruce and I generally take turns breaking trail. That’s the way it’s always been. And usually, we’re about even in our pace, with the women chatting and taking a more leisurely amble behind us. But this year, I could tell that the extra ten pounds I’d added over the Christmas holidays hadn’t come off: I struggled to keep up with Bruce as we glided silently through the snowy canopy of the forest. Charlie wasn’t with us in the trees: He was content to man the fire back at the cabin and stroke Bella, the Chernaks’ kind and gentle Golden Retriever as he sipped another cup of coffee, leaving the skiing to the rest of us.

I better get myself in shape if I want to be skiing with my grandchild.

It was a serious discussion, the one I had with myself, and one I will take to heart when I get back to that dust-covered treadmill in our bedroom in our house on the Cloquet River.

We were denied, Bruce and I were, our usual course, which is to split off from the women and take the esker trail to the right, a more difficult route. The groomer hadn’t gone up the esker and so, with some prodding from a gasping writer, Bruce agreed to take the easier spur to the left. We pushed on. The only wildlife we saw, or more correctly I saw, was a ruffed grouse which exploded from its hiding place under a spruce as Bruce and I passed by. Bruce never saw, never heard the bird: Likely the reason the Larson freezer is without grouse for table fare.

Bruce and Mark.

Bruce and I took a longer route but, inexplicably, we ended up at the junction with the main trail just as the girls arrived. From there, the five of us skied together on the last leg of the Mother Bear Trail back to the car.

We all knew what awaited us back at the cabin: An afternoon and evening of snacks and cold beer and a hot sauna followed by a nap and Sue’s homemade beef stew and more beer and a board game or two pitting the women against  the men. As usual, the men prevailed and Bruce and Charlie and I raised our arms in our fifty-something version of “The Wave” and sang Queen’s “We Are the Champions” as only old men can.

Thanks, friends, for another great memory.

Peace.

Mark

(Photos by Bruce Larson)