Growing up, my folks and I would go to Itasca State Park, north of Park Rapids, in Minnesota’s lake country.
The place has changed since then, a little.
The place I remember as a parking area, a little north of the Mississippi headwaters, where the river officially starts, isn’t there any more. It was about a thousand feet east of the Mary Gibbs Mississippi Headwaters Center.
Google Maps says that spot is the “Headwaters Concession Ruins”.
The new Mississippi Headwaters Center was under construction the last time I was there.
More accurately, at that time it would be under construction. All we saw was a sizeable clearing that’d been cut in the forest. My folks and I noticed it after following a foot trail westward from the headwaters. I don’t remember when. Maybe late 1960s.
New buildings. A place I remember labeled as a ruins. Change happens.
But the Mississippi Headwaters is still there, and so is the forest.
One of my favorite parts of Itasca was Preacher’s Grove, about halfway along the east side of Lake Itasca toward the Douglas Lodge area. I went there, virtually, this week: using Google Street View and Photo Spheres.1
There’s more ankle-high-plus-a-bit undergrowth there now, than what I remember; and less undergrowth-free pine-needle-carpeted ground.
Maybe that’s due to efforts at restoring a particular pattern of growth, maybe my folks and I were there during dry periods. It still looks like a nice place, though.
The Picture-Taker and a Trail Near the Tiptoeing Ghost
One time — I don’t remember how old I was at the time — my folks and I went walking in the Douglas Lodge area, down near the south end of Lake Itasca’s east arm.
They’d noted, another time, that on maps of the lake, it looks like a tiptoeing ghost. I like the comparison.
At any rate, Dad was an enthusiastic picture-taker — or photographer, if I wanted it to sound fancier.
Either way, he was pretty good at it: and he knew what he wanted the picture to look like. That often involved him moving around before clicking the shutter.
Dad had gone a few yards off a trail before turning to get a photo of Mom and me. Undergrowth was thick, but not much more than ankle-high. Dad got the picture, and then looked down at the patch of undergrowth he’d been standing in.
Some places, there’s a variety of plants growing.
Here, there were several square yards of some plant with glossy green leaves. Leaves with pointed tips that came mostly in clusters of three.
Dad may have been wrong about this, but at the time he identified it as poison ivy.2
I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have waded into a lush bed of poison ivy, even if it was a good spot for picture-taking. Not intentionally. And this time he definitely hadn’t realized what he’d been walking through.
The Curious Case of the Absent Rash
I don’t remember our hurrying, but I do recall that it wasn’t much time before we were back where we’d been staying. And that Dad was particularly industrious about cleaning his feet and legs.
Oddly enough, he didn’t get a rash. Maybe that’s because he’d been wearing thickish socks and pants. Or — and this is something we considered as a strong possibility — Dad was one of those folks who aren’t particularly affected by poison ivy.
I’m not all that unlike him — although my sense of smell is even more emphatically lacking than his — but I haven’t made a point of testing my poison ivy resistance. That’s not, I think, so much a sign of good sense: as me seeing such a test as being a daft idea.
Sure, I’m curious: but the benefit-risk ratio is highly unfavorable.
And, after my wife and I married, she’d have had words if I’d made the test.
Not-entirely-unrelated posts:
- “Odors, Experiences, and a Life Without Scent”
(March 15, 2025 ) - “The Eagle, My Father, and the Warehouse”
(March 8, 2025) - “My Oak Tree and Its Travels”
(March 1, 2025) - “My Wife and I: A Fragrant Memory”
(December 14, 2024) - “Sledding With My Dad: Good Memories”
(June 22, 2024)
1 One of my favorite places to have been:
- Wikipedia
- Minnesota State Government
- Google Maps
2 A nice-looking regional plant with irritating leaves:
- Wikipedia
- Poison ivy
- Toxicodendron
- Toxicodendron radicans (the sort of poison ivy growing in my part of the world)
- Urushiol (the irritating stuff in poison ivy leaves)
- Urushiol-induced contact dermatitis (what most folks get from touching poison ivy)
- Minnesota Department of Agriculture:
Poison Ivy (word of advice: DON’T BURN IT)
