Her
snowshoes were soggy with slush. Every fifteen or twenty steps she
would stop to remove it. She was tired but careful. She cleaned her
snowshoes methodically and lovingly, because while she was doing it she
felt movement inside her.
Snowshoeing across a frozen lake
wouldn't have been hard for her at another time, when she was trim and
nimble. But on this day she was walking across the ice of Lake Saganaga
toward a hospital.
In January of 1956 in Minnesota, women
were battling city traffic to take the kid to an ice arena. Others were
hauling the kid to ballet lessons. Dinna Madsen was snowshoeing across
a north-woods lake to have a baby.
Her midwinter journey with an unborn
child by dogsled and on snowshoes remains today one of those wilderness
epics that never quite ends.
Why should it? The child who was born a
week later is now thirty-five, a mother of two living in Tacoma,
Washington. Dinna's husband is eighty-six, an Englishman who went to
North America to trap in the Canadian woods and is still robust,
although at the moment he's sunning himself in New Zealand with
relatives.
And Dinna Madsen is now seventy but
irreversibly Dinna. No one else need apply. On Friday, in the soft air
of an autumn day at the lakeside resort on Saganaga, she made out a
grocery list for the boat trip and sixty-mile drive down the Gunflint
Trail to Grand Marais. She was in good voice. She's almost always in
good disposition. So she reminisced.
"Six miles across that lake," she said.
"It's a piece of cake in September. It wasn't like that in January of
1956. That was an adventure, that's for sure."
The sparse and windburned clan of lake
dwellers on the Minnesota-Canada border is made of individualists.
Dinna may be a little more individual than most. She and her life link
the wilderness frontier with the space age. She doesn't sound historic.
She is saucy and jubilant. She is talkative and more or less
imperishable.
She is Dinna.
In January of 1956 she was going to give
birth in about a week. It was the kind of winter to send the wolves to
Florida. It already had piled up more than 100 inches of snow and a
stretch of cold weather in which the cabin squatters would cheer when
the temperature got above twenty below zero. Art Madsen got squirmy
about Dinna's due date. "You ought to go to Duluth early to give
yourself some leeway in case the roads are bad," he said.
After Art ferried his wife to the
mainland, he was going to stay at their island resort with two of their
small children. Chris, six, was going to Duluth with Dinna. While Art
worked to get his snow machine ready to take his wife across the lake
and on an eventual ride to the North Shore via the Gunflint road, and
ice fisherman they both knew came by with his propeller-driven
snowboat. They put Dinna and Chris aboard.
"I was wearing everything I could,"
Dinna said. "That snowboat didn't have enough fuel to get us all the
way to the landing. So we got off. Another fellow was going
to pick us up in his machine, but when he came by he was
loaded with furs and I said, 'It's all right, I'll wait for Art, my
husband.'"
She didn't know that Art couldn't get
his machine going. She and the boy were in the channel not far from
Seagull River. The temperature was below zero. The boy looked at his
mother. He had come to believe there wasn't much she couldn't do to
take care of her family in a remote world where common sense is almost
as important as love. But he had to ask a question. "Think we can start
a fire?"
The situation seemed to preclude any
elaborate rhetoric. She said, "Sure."
They gathered sticks and birch bark and
tore up an old tree stump to start it. She did it with one match. They
stood over the flames getting warm for a while and then saw Art pulling
a toboggan across the ice and starting to fume as he got closer. "The
last thing he wanted to see was Chris and me standing out there in the
open air. He threw his mitts down and asked why... didn't I go in on
one of those machines. I told him what happened, and he told me what
happened to his machine. He had some showshoes with him. He gave them
to me and put my suitcase on the toboggan because we still had three
miles to go to get to the landing, where I could get a ride. Art and
the boy walked in their boots. It was cold but there was slush on the
lake, so it was hard going."
But it was the beginning. Several days
later, Ade Toftey of the Cook County News-Herald sat down and wrote it
as carefully and briefly as he could. This was the north woods. You
don't talk much about heroics. Things more or less tell themselves. He
called the Associated Press office in Minneapolis. I remember Ade
because I was in the office at the time. We took his story, without
moving a comma, and put it on the international wire:
"She left her small children at the
cabin with her husband. She went by dog team down Saganaga Lake to the
Jock Richardson place..."
People read it in Paris. Dinna knows,
because she got mail from Paris three or four months after it was
written. In those days, nobody faxed. And nobody operated a medical
clinic on the end of the Gunflint Trail.
"The baby kept moving," she said. "Art
was afraid we were going to have it right there. I started going
through the checklist. You know how it is. Take it easy but push. Hurry
up but go slow."
Dinna.
"The road didn't come all the way to
the lake. One of the fishermen had a dog team, and they put me on the
sled. Art had to go back to our island. We went for a mile or so with
the dog team until we came across George Plummer and Charlie Cook
waiting for the mail. It was getting colder all the time, and finally
Georgie said they should take Chris and me to Russell Blankenburg's
resort and wait for the snowplow there. He was able to get his car
through there, and we spent the night in a cabin at Russell and Eve
Blankenburg's. They had a little wood heater in there and there must
have been seven sleeping bags on me, but when the fire went out I found
my boots frozen to the floor.
"The Blankenburgs called the county
snowplow custodian and wanted to know when the plow was coming. He was
gloomy. They counted seventeen inches of new snow. The road was closed
for twelve miles. It was hard to see how they could get through.
"Mrs. Blankenburg told the man, 'Listen.
My husband is the biggest taxpayer in the country, and we've got an
expectant mother here, and we want to see that snowplow.'"
They saw the snowplow.
So Dinna and Chris got a ride down the
Gunflint into Grand Marais and took a bus down the North Shore to
Duluth, where a few days later at St. Luke's Hospital, Helen Sue,
forever afterward known as [Susie], arrived safely and warmly.
She and her family visit the wild
country as often as they can, which means periodic reunions at Sagonto,
the Madsen home and resort on the island. It has been their sanctuary
and their business for more than fifty years, dating to the time when a
teenage milk deliverer from Duluth named Dinna took her mother's advice
and "went out in the world." It was a trip that took her roughly 150
miles up the North Shore, through the Gunflint, and to the resorts at
the end of the civilized world as it existed in northern Minnesota in
the 1940s. She met the Englishman, and they have lived the life both of
them idealized.
Romantic? Sure. Painful? Sure. Of their
six children. Chris was killed in an accident not long after he came
back from Vietnam, and Chuckie fell from the dock and drowned when he
was 3. Much of the wilderness disappeared, but the lakes still glisten
in the summer, and birds feed from their hands. The blizzard screams
outside the cabin in winter, but when it abates Dinna takes her
snowshoes or skis or boots and goes for a hike.
"It's never as beautiful as it is in the
middle of winter. But, he, those kids of [Susie's]. They're great at the
piano and ice skating and you ought to see them on unicycles when they
come to Grand Marais..."
Dinna. She slogged through snow for
miles to have a baby, but you can't tell her today from any grandma in
the world until the blizzard comes.
And then she is different.
