Grand Marais

Minnesota: Grand Marais

May 30th 2012

Grand Marais is a remote place. The nearest big town, Duluth, is two hours away and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are a good five-hour drive. 

It’s amazing to think that you could drive a fair way up the whole length of England in that time it takes here to drive to the nearest McDonald’s.                                

Here it is still possible, and sometimes preferable, to live “off the grid” as they say.  Pulling water from a well and heating your house with a propane cylinder.  And if living in such a remote town doesn’t give you enough space you can move ‘up the trail’ – The Gunflint Trail –  a road which runs into the North Woods for fifty miles before disappearing into The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Your only neighbours there will be moose, the wolves, black bears and the North Woods all around you.

On the day I went into town it was raining. When I say “raining” I mean that the car park in front of the Co-op was under three feet of water, part of Highway 61 had been washed away by a waterfall, and the  harbour walls kept disappearing and reappearing like the Cheshire cat, as the fog rolled in off Lake Superior.   

My impression is that Grand Marais has a lot of rain – and moose references. You can stay at the Mangy Moose Motel, or buy local art at The Blue Moose Gallery, or camping gear at Moose Tracks. You can just enjoy the pictures, paintings and postcards dedicated to this knock- kneed local celebrity.  The Java Moose Café is where everyone hangs out when its raining. Over a cup of coffee and a  cookie I talked with Sarah who I had met the previous weekend while we were building a Yurt. She and her husband moved here from Montana a few months ago and have decided to stay. We talked about the music we had both been listening too on Spotify, mostly americana and folk, and she showed me the stunning pictures that she had taken in Glacier National Park and the area around Missoula where they used to live. As she went out the door, Carolyn came in. She is the Associate Minister at Spirit of The Wilderness Church and married to Milan, a local doctor, who once took medical missions to Peru. They started coming here on holiday and decided eventually to move here full-time and she still can’t believe their luck.  I don’t blame her one bit.   

Grand Marais is so full of art you can hardly move, the majority of it beautifully evocative of this local area. Paintings of silver birch and pine trees, ceramics which incorporate the blue shingle and stones which line the shore, representations in fabric of Lake Superior, the largest fresh water lake in the world, which is both backdrop and context for this incredible town. The Grand Marais Art Colony actively promotes the arts in the town through exhibitions, courses and events and you can tell. When you have had enough of all that art you can pop into ‘Worlds Best Donuts’ and ask for a cinnamon sugared special.  

The other place I had been instructed not to miss was the North House Folk School, another Grand Marais institution which has made the town a haven for artists and people interested in sustainable living. You can learn to build a boat or a bee skep, take pictures of birds or bake bread. It’s an amazing grass-roots enterprise with local people sharing their skills and learning at the same time. Like the art colony it attracts visitors to the town and to the wider north shore area. When I went, they were building a log cabin using a technique known as ‘notching’.  I blurted out a question before I could stop myself.  “Is that the way Pa made the log cabin in Little House on The Prairie”, thus giving away my mental age. 

Finally, half soaked, I ended up at the local bookstore, rattling the handle hopefully as a big black cloud completely obliterated the sun. A hand appeared from round the door and a voice said, “ Hey Alex, we’re shut…come in”.  Rescued in the nick of time by Lee and Carl I shelter in their warm cosy bookshop and read a book about a hippo’s belly button, while they move shelves around and bicker sweetly. I find myself somewhat thankful for Grand Marais’s remoteness. If it wasn’t difficult to get too I can imagine things getting out of hand. There is so much art, so much shore and so many trees that none of us would ever be able to stay away. on every signpost there is a picture of a moose.