MISQUAH — The Fourth of July Committee met Thursday at the fire hall and confirmed the route for next week’s Independence Day parade, which is the route it has been every year since the parade began in 1946: north on Main from the Co-op to the city park, the one direction the one street allows. The confirmation took, by one attendee’s count, under four minutes, “because there is nothing to confirm, but we confirm it, because that is how you know it’s real.”

Entries are due to City Clerk Donna Skoglund by Monday; eleven were in hand as of the meeting, committee chair Sandy Bergstrom said, “which is about where we are every year three days out, and then forty show up.” Lineup is at nine. The Legion color guard leads, by a tradition no one proposes to amend, and the fire truck, by a tradition no one is permitted to amend, goes last. Pete Hagen’s tractor will appear, as it appears. Tim’s Bait & Liquor will have sparklers and the usual stern reminder about them, delivered by Tim, who has views.

The committee’s larger business was the new one. Since December — since a basement meeting at First Lutheran that several attendees now describe as the night the idea got out of hand — it has been planning a Fourth of July boat parade, a slow decorated lap of Big Pelican to run at noon, before the land parade’s evening fireworks. Thursday it set the lineup point at the Loon Lake landing and reaffirmed, at Alderman Lloyd Bunde’s insistence, a no-wake rule for the whole loop. “Twenty-some boats signed up so far,” Bergstrom said. “We’ll see what it looks like. We invented it in a church basement. Everything here gets invented in a church basement, and half of it works, and we never know which half until July.”

Fireworks remain set for dusk over Big Pelican, weather permitting, launched from the resort point and funded, as ever, by the Northern Tap’s winter meat raffle — a financing arrangement by which the town’s summer sky is, in a real sense, paid for in January, in sausage. The committee renewed its annual no-wake plea for the half hour the boats gather to watch, this year with the loon chicks added as a second reason.

The committee also voted, without objection, to invite the Rainbow Walleye to roll in the land parade — “if Walt can get it back out of the barn,” which Walt Sorensen, present, allowed he probably could. “It went in,” he said, of the twelve-foot plywood fish now wintering in his pole barn. “Things that go in come out. Usually. I’ll need a hand and a wider door than I remembered, but it’ll roll.”