MISQUAH — 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.

Riding behind it, on folding chairs lashed to a second flatbed, were the thirty-seven residents the day was for — a number the committee arrived at, Fontaine said, “the way we count anything around here, which is carefully, and then once more to be sure.” Several had grown up in Misquah, left, and come back. A few had never left at all.

“I have lived here my whole life, and I have been waiting for this parade longer than I knew,” said one rider, a 1994 Lakeside graduate who asked that the paper print only that much. “I didn’t think it would be a walleye. But it’s right that it’s a walleye. It’s us.” Another rider, home in Misquah after twenty years in the Cities, said she had not expected the turnout. “I came back braced,” she said. “I did not need to be. That’s the thing I’ll keep — that I didn’t need to be.”

The turnout is the part the town will tell. Nine hundred is an estimate — the committee counted the crowd in blocks, the way the fair counts, “and then knocked off a hundred to stay honest” — but it is better than a quarter of the town, on a summer Saturday with hay down in half the fields. They lined both sides of Main from the hardware store to the park, three deep in places, and they clapped, and several who had not been sure they would come, came.

Not everyone in Misquah arrived at Saturday by the same road, and the paper will not pretend otherwise. Alderman Lloyd Bunde, who had been, in his own words, “of two minds” in the weeks before, was seen at the parade’s end holding one corner of the ALL WELCOME banner. Asked about the change of heart, Bunde declined to call it one. “A person shows up for his neighbors,” he said, and went back to holding the corner — which several attendees agreed was the most Misquah sentence ever spoken on the subject.

The Ladies’ Aid worked the potluck in the city park afterward, as it works every potluck, and ran out of bars at 6:40, as it runs out of bars at every potluck. Rev. Karl Lindholm said grace over the food without remarking on the occasion — “because grace is grace,” he said later, “and they were hungry.”

Fontaine said the committee has already reserved Main Street for next June, and that the walleye will winter in Sorensen’s pole barn. “Walt says it can stay as long as it needs to,” she said, “which is more or less how we’ve decided to feel about all of it.” The fish will need a touch-up by spring; the crepe paper did not survive the afternoon. The rest of it, she said, looks like it will last.