To the Editor:

I have been president of the Mud Lake Association since 2015, a period during which the Association's membership has been two, the annual meeting has taken eleven minutes, and this newspaper has covered us in the same paragraph as the mosquito count. I mention this not as a complaint. I mention it so that what follows is understood in context.

On Saturday a business in this town put the name of our lake on the front of a building in letters two feet high, on purpose, having considered the alternatives at length. I would like to thank Annika and Jonas Holt publicly, and then I would like to make one point and stop.

The point is this. Mud Lake is 214 acres, it is spring-fed, it has the best bass fishing on the Chain and always has, it does not freeze the same as the others and never has, and the reason it is called Mud Lake is that in 1889 a surveyor from Duluth wrote one word on a map after standing on the one soft shore in the whole basin. We have been living with that man's afternoon for a hundred and thirty-seven years. The renaming question is tabled to 2027 and I am content to leave it there, because after Saturday I am no longer certain we need it. A name that people have to explain is a name people remember. I am told this argument has been made recently by somebody else, in a taproom, and that it carried the day. It has been the Association's position since I took office.

The annual meeting is the second Saturday of July. Anyone may attend. There will be chairs.

Dorothy KnutsonPresident, Mud Lake Association

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