{"id":9178,"date":"2025-05-17T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-17T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/?p=9178"},"modified":"2025-07-26T21:12:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T21:12:20","slug":"dad-and-a-poison-ivy-patch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/dad-and-a-poison-ivy-patch\/","title":{"rendered":"Dad and a Poison Ivy Patch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Tony<\/a>
Tony Webster’s image: Itasca State Park, Minnesota, a little south of Preacher’s Grove. (June 2017)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Growing up, my folks and I would go to Itasca State Park, north of Park Rapids, in Minnesota’s lake country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The place has changed since then, a little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Maps says that spot is the “Headwaters Concession Ruins”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new Mississippi Headwaters Center was under construction the last time I was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New buildings. A place I remember labeled as a ruins. Change happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the Mississippi Headwaters is still there, and so is the forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s more ankle-high-plus-a-bit undergrowth there now, than what I remember; and less undergrowth-free pine-needle-carpeted ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The Picture-Taker and a Trail Near the Tiptoeing Ghost<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"Esculapio's<\/a>
Lovely, isn’t it? Poison ivy: looks nice, gives most folks a rash.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\"Based<\/a>One time \u2014 I don’t remember how old I was at the time \u2014 my folks and I went walking in the Douglas Lodge area, down near the south end of Lake Itasca’s east arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They’d noted, another time, that on maps of the lake, it looks like a tiptoeing ghost. I like the comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, Dad was an enthusiastic picture-taker \u2014 or photographer, if I wanted it to sound fancier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some places, there’s a variety of plants growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, there were several square yards of some plant with glossy green leaves. Leaves with pointed tips that came mostly in clusters of three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dad may have been wrong about this, but at the time he identified it as poison ivy.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The Curious Case of the Absent Rash<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"Hardyplants'<\/a>
Hardyplants’ photo, taken in Minnesota: poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans. (summer of 2008)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oddly enough, he didn’t get a rash. Maybe that’s because he’d been wearing thickish socks and pants. Or \u2014 and this is something we considered as a strong possibility \u2014 Dad was one of those folks who aren’t particularly affected by poison ivy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not all that unlike him \u2014 although my sense of smell is even more emphatically lacking than his \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, I’m curious: but the benefit-risk ratio is highly unfavorable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, after my wife and I married, she’d have had words if I’d made the test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not-entirely-unrelated posts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n