During seven perfect autumn weeks we three sisters woke up together in Marti’s one bedroom apartment in Sartell.
In my small notebook was a four page list with little boxes next to each task I wanted to tick off during my Minnesota visit.
I checked the box for Twizzlers.
For the St Anthony of Padua quilt bingo.
For resetting the foundations of eight gravestones: our parents’, both sets of grandparents’, the little great-aunts who died in pandemics before our mother was born.
I left flowers in remembrance of old friends, neighbors, great-grandparents, uncles and aunts, and a few people whose lives influenced mine in the old cemeteries of St Cloud, St Stephen, St Augusta.
We caught up with cousins, celebrated our last living aunt’s 100th birthday in St Martin, wore our well-used Halloween witches’ hats to the House of Pizza.
And, finally, my sister Marilyn and I walked along the gorgeous autumnal Wobegon Trail from St Joseph to that stretch along the highway adjoining Freeport.
I will write more about this now famous Trail, named after author Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon.
70 miles in length, it meanders alongside or passes through many of the small towns of central Minnesota.
Most of our fellow Trail travellers were cycling, but we walked in dappled October light along the paved former rail corridor lined with red and gold and yellow trees, farmland, lakes, and swaying pussy willows and grasses.
The cyclists who use the Trail are fast. Even if you keep a watchful eye, they whiz past, some muttering darkly about walkers needing to keep to ‘their’ side of the trail.
Why do they need to go so fast, I wondered.
We ambled an average of eight to 12 kilometres a day up to where the Trail starts snaking alongside the highway, veering away from the quiet woods and farms we’d appreciated off and on for several weeks.
We strolled.
We chatted.
We had long periods of saying nothing, scuffing our sneakers on the tarmac.
We listened to the rustle of grasses, the leaves in the trees, the distant traffic.
I threw helicopter seeds from maple trees into the blue sky and they choppered back to the ground, like always.
But after a few days I realised there was no birdsong.
No chirping, no honks from ducks or other migrating birds.
How could this be for mile after mile in the deep countryside in the fall - a busy time for birds flocking to winter destinations?
I asked my cousin Bob, a hunter, where the birds had been hiding during our walk – the cause of their absence, their silence.
“Loss of habitat,” he said simply.
But the habitat was to the left, to the right, as far as the eye could see during our walk along the Wobegon Trail.
It was hunting season.
Do ducks and other birds know to remain quiet during hunting season?
The walk was beautiful. All we had planned for and dreamed of.
But I felt a frisson of Alfred Hitchcock unease.
Not because there were too many birds, but because there were too few.
Those that shared the Wobegon Trail with us in October were not visible – not present in flocks, or squawks, as in Hitchcock’s old film The Birds.
I had no sense of hard little eyes watching from the bushes, grasses and trees.
We were alone out there on the Wobegon Trail, walking in the golden light, stepping aside for the cyclists.
The months of winter have melted away since that October walk with my sister.
Spring has returned to central Minnesota and to the Wobegon Trail.
Have the birds returned, too?
Are they flocking, squawking, noisily feeding their babies?
Are they singing?
Photos lenamina.com
They had all flown the coop to head down south to visit me!
I guess that is one explanation but there are always birds usually …
Oh Laurie…I just love your thoughts. If u ever need advice on how to take a safer fall let me know.
I am going to write about our hunt for fairy cross rocks at the Blanchard Dam. You were lucky you didn’t break your arm! We were so close, but alas so far from finding those darn cross rocks.
That was sad for me to read!
Maybe there was a logical explanation Janie. But I found it odd!