Day 43 – Round Lake to Lake Itasca National Park (Headwaters Mississippi)

Day 43 – Round Lake to Lake Itasca National Park 17.08.2015 Tamarac / Round Lake Itasca Lake National Park 73,3 45,547 3622,2 2250,73 15 18,31 482 23174 13 - 22 The National Park at Lake Itasca is truly wonderful! Coming from North Dakota with its arid broad landscapes the transition from Fargo / Moorhead has become quite evident. Rolling hills in the first part marked the upcoming change. Yesterday I made a little map error and instead of going on Hwy 34 from Richwood I turned up 21 and then had to go on Hwy 110 through the White Earth Indian Reservation on my favorite type of road: gravel! For more than ten miles.  But true to my newly acquired motto to life, I weathered it all with patience and a certain sense of self-irony, since only a day before had I bragged to my new friends at Moorhead that having three sources of map information I’d never (!) make a wrong turn… So here I was … 😉 The Reservation once again underlined my previous impression of Native American towns and lands as being unproductive, unkempt and in poor state of repair. Not consistently so but much more so than in other places. Careful – need intelligence to follow the sentence structure – just as in Latin . Here goes. So I finally reached the campground of Lake Itasca and after pitching my tent I went off to see the park. Beautiful beach, interesting exhibits on “The Itasca Story” (see links, I find it too eclectic to repeat general information here – our servers are too full of redundancy anyhow, so if you’re interested in the history of the national park and want to know why Mary Gibbs (who was she????) confronted armed men in 1903 to save some Pine trees, check for yourself – I already know )) and, of course, the headwaters of the Mississippi River. As with every origin of mighty rivers one can hardly imagine the big M. starting off as the little stream it is up here, where it flows out of Lake Itasca (Henry Rowe Schoolcraft coined this name on his surveying mission to find the true headwaters of the Mississippi river in 1832 after the Latin words for “truth” and “head”, veritas caput). This mission, of course, had only one goal: to ensure that the government’s influence would be expanded further and further – the same objective which had driven the Lewis & Clark journey in 1804 to 1806 … Tons of tourists gave me the creeps, however, and after NOT having said no to a slice of pizza and a Caesar’s salad at the visitor’s center I found a nice quiet spot on the Lake to relax and write this (recursive, I know! – but why shouldn’t I have the same freedom that Mr. Shakespeare assumed in Sonnett 13 or was it 113, I forgot – in any case the one in which he SEEMS to declare love to a woman but in reality declares love to poetry) Mosquitoes are once again my company – I prefer different pets … like Kazoo, Kazu (Delia, help me here …)