Governor Nelson State Park

"Glistening sun to-day, with a slight haze, warm enough, and yet tart, as I sit here in the open air, down in my country retreat, under an old cedar." Whitman "February Days"











One open day of vast blue skies, at the park benches that line the shoreline of state park, and one envisions, easy enough, the tan hued families sitting atop of purple beach towels in June.  The blue and blue, of water and sky, occasionally the thin-hooked mast of a sail drifting by as lazily as a seagull's wings against a slight northeasterly breeze.  We carefully walk over the rip rap today, coated by the melt as it swells and drifts out into the vast white bubbling frozen lake.  A stiff wind has picked up and it bites through our caps.  It wakes up the eyes and stirs up a clambering raucous in the oak savannah that rise up just slightly as drummonds behind us.  Foot tracks reveal a great migration to open water across the slush.  Weasels, fox, otter tracks all.  The old scars of ski tracks line the trails where tufts of prairie grass now show, matted, bent to the will of the winter, but not seemingly for long. There across the lake the great city ice cap the Dome over looks the isthmus waters still and without a single blink.