The Misquah Pilot-Independent

Main Street closed for ninety minutes Saturday afternoon for the first Rainbow Walleye Parade, a Pride observance that drew an estimated nine hundred people to a town of 3,914 and required, at its center, a twelve-foot plywood walleye painted end to end in the colors of the rainbow and built, over three weekends, in a pole barn.

The day began, as many things in Misquah do, with a committee and a question. Renée Fontaine, who manages the Loon Ridge resort and grew up two towns over, convened a planning group of eleven last winter around a single proposition: that Misquah’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender residents deserved a Pride celebration, and that it ought to look like Misquah and nowhere else. “We weren’t going to borrow somebody else’s parade,” Fontaine said. “We were going to do Pride the way we do everything around here — with a fish, a flatbed, and a potluck after.”

The fish came first. Walt Sorensen, who runs the hardware store, offered his pole barn and a discount on sheet goods, and over three weekends a rotating crew cut, screwed, and painted a twelve-foot walleye out of exterior plywood — “the same way you’d build a parade float or a duck blind,” Sorensen said, “just bigger, and a good deal more colorful.” It rode the length of Main on a hay trailer behind Vern Dahlquist’s Ford, trailing crepe paper and a hand-lettered banner that read ALL WELCOME ON THE CHAIN.