“Where the coffee’s hot, the lakes are cold, and all the children are above average.” — Serving the Chain since 1897.
Independence Day
For decades the Fourth’s flotilla was a spontaneous thing you joined when you felt like it and left when your cooler ran dry. Saturday it had a route, a start time, and a grand marshal. The lake endured.
For as long as anyone can document, the Fourth of July on Big Pelican has ended with boats — pontoons, fishing rigs, the occasional defiant canoe — drifting out from the landings at dusk in a loose, leaderless procession that formed when people felt like forming it and dissolved when their coolers ran dry. On Saturday, for the first time, that procession had a name, a route, a start time, and a grand marshal, and the town is still deciding how it feels about that.
The first official Misquah Fourth of July Boat Parade launched from the Loon Lake public landing at noon, some two dozen craft strong, and made a slow no-wake lap of Big Pelican before the evening’s fireworks — a far more orderly affair than the “willy-nilly conga line,” as one longtime participant fondly called its predecessor, that the town has staged by happy accident every summer for decades.
The formalization was the work of a committee convened last December in the First Lutheran basement, and it arrived with the full apparatus of formality: a lineup time (11:30), a designated lead boat, a no-wake rule enforced more by the loons than by anyone official, and — the detail that generated the most basement debate — a grand marshal, a role filled this year by Alderman Lloyd Bunde, the town’s recognized authority on the proper way to wave from a boat.
Outdoors
A young bull, rare this far south, spent two days on the quieter of the Pelicans. Even the moose, the Mud Lake faction noted with satisfaction, skipped the fancy lake.
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Around Town
The longtime children’s librarian was taken ill over the holiday weekend and is recovering in the Cities. Summer reading continues, in newer and slightly overwhelmed hands.
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Business
Yvette Boone left commercial lending in the Cities to run First State Bank of Misquah, succeeding Howard Lindgren after thirty-one years. She came, she says, on purpose.
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City Council
The July 7 meeting takes up the most consequential agenda in months — and, among lighter business, what to do about the mark Al Lundquist left on Main Street.
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Heritage
One of the oldest structures on the Chain — a landmark older than the state’s memory of it — will see another generation, thanks to a crew, a family, and a sum nobody quite wants to print.
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Business
Annika and Jonas Holt will pour the Chain’s first pints in the building that once made the town’s butter. The Pilot once eyed the same back hall for its press, and never quite moved in.
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Looking Ahead
Entry books are out, the second-week-of-August dates are set, and the Bjornstads and Aakres are once more “coming along nicely,” which longtime fairgoers know to translate as: war.
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Outdoors
The two Big Pelican chicks came through the holiday’s boat traffic intact — helped, for once, by a parade that was made to slow down on purpose.
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Fishing Report
The post-Fourth lull is honest fishing weather. Tim’s report: go early, go deep, and for one month, let the kids have the dock.
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Legion Baseball
The Legion nine has climbed to .500 as the bats come around — playing, as ever, beneath the one tower that still works.
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Independence Day
The Fourth’s footraces at the school went off without a hitch, producing the usual handful of genuine winners and the usual diplomatic finishes for everyone else.
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Our View · Editorial
The town gave its accidental boat parade a route, a start time, and a grand marshal. We are of two minds about it, which on a question like this is the only honest number.
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Letters to the Editor
A reader takes issue with the boat parade’s no-judging policy — on principle, she maintains, and not for any reason involving produce.
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The Klatch · From Eunice
Eunice on the one meal of the year the whole town eats together, the perils of mayonnaise in the July sun, and the quiet diplomacy of the shared table.
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