The Misquah Pilot-Independent

The idea for a boat parade was born in the basement of First Lutheran on the second Tuesday of last December, before eleven people, a thermos of coffee, and one question that took the better part of two hours to settle: whether a town that already has a parade needs another.

It decided, narrowly, that it does. At noon on Saturday the first Misquah Fourth of July Boat Parade will push off from the Loon Lake public landing and make a slow, counterclockwise lap of Big Pelican — twenty-six boats registered as of Monday, from a twenty-eight-foot pontoon down to a single aluminum canoe, in what the celebration committee is calling, without quite defining its terms, “the biggest thing to happen on the Chain that didn’t involve a fire.”

The land parade has gone up Main Street every Fourth since 1946, and nobody proposed replacing it; it will still step off at 9 a.m., north on Main, the one way the one street goes. The water parade is an addition, and the case for it, as committee chair Sandy Bergstrom put it, was less spectacle than arithmetic. “Half the town’s on the lake on the Fourth anyway,” she said. “We figured they might as well point the same direction for twenty minutes.”