It was Monday, October 6th. We’d been on the road for a couple hours when my brother asked me to take the next exit off Interstate 80. Said he needed to find a post office.

We’d just passed the exit for Punxsutawney. Could’ve stopped to see Phil the Groundhog, seer of seers, prognosticator of all prognosticators. But who wants to look too far into the future these days? Might not like what we see.

I took the next offramp. Slab Run Road curves to the west and turns into Main Street when the blacktop crosses a gurgling gully and enters the town of Falls Creek, Pennsylvania.

My brother, Brady, was mailing some custom trading cards he’d designed and printed for up-and-coming UFC heavyweight Thomas “The Train” Petersen, who grew up near Farmington. He got to know Petersen a few years ago when he made a few custom trucker hats for the fighter’s UFC debut. Brady pays the bills with his window washing business, but really he’s an artist in songwriting and design.

We both have an eye for detail and a tendency to be critical, some might say cynical. We also share a sense of humor and a tendency to ask “why” more than people find helpful. Not trying to be annoying, really. Just trying to understand.

I couldn’t get a signal in the parking lot. So much for checking in with the office. I wandered inside to find a postal clerk happily explaining boxes and envelopes to my brother. I think she was glad to see a new customer.

Brady listened carefully and politely. I watched as he asked three detailed questions, then chose his preferred shipping option. Even happy, even calm, he almost vibrates with energy and tension.

We passed a lounge called the Pine Inn on the way back to the interstate. The roadhouse shares a name with the old bar and restaurant near our family cabin back in Minnesota. I tell myself I don’t really believe in signs, but I like to notice these things.

Brady dozed off and I let my mind wander through the Appalachians, winding across the early October ridge-and-valley landscape with fall leaves just about to peak.

It’s easy to forget how flat the Upper Midwest is until you leave that good soil.

I’d always lived in the North Star State. I went to college in a small town 65 miles from our hometown of Farmington, Minnesota. Three years behind me in school, Brady stuck around for a few months after graduation then headed for the mountains. He spent most of the next decade in Colorado or back and forth between there and Minnesota He’s settled down a little bit in the last few years. Living back there now, planning a wedding.

We stopped at a gas station east of Scranton. Brady said he’d stay outside and pump the gas. Great, I thought, we’ll be back on the road right away. We were making good time.

I was heading to the counter with an energy drink and some beef jerky when he came in.

“Grab whatever you want quick,” I said. “I’ll check out and start the car.”

“How about you chill?” he replied.

We stared at each other over a rack of potato chips.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” he continued. “You’re on vacation. We’re on a road trip across the country.”

I kept my mouth shut. Brady paused a second, then grinned and headed for the restroom.

He had a point, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Sometimes little brothers are the worst.

Like our father and grandfather before us, we’ve both been described as intense. I used to scoff at the idea, at least when applied to me. Passionate, maybe. But I’m starting to understand.

Why was I in such a hurry?

Does a person need a reason?

The Akins came to America from Scotland in the 1660s and settled in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Two generations later, my branch of the family moved west to Quaker Hill, New York.

Situated on a pastoral ridge above the eastern Hudson River Valley, Quaker Hill is located in “The Oblong,” a two-mile wide by 55-mile long strip of land along New York’s border with Connecticut that served as a buffer between colonial Dutch and English settlers.

If you guessed my ancestors were Quakers, you’re right.

It was in 1767 at the Oblong Meeting House in Quaker Hill that the “first formal and effective action by an organized group in the United States to halt slavery” took place.1 That’s what the plaque says, anyway. The local Society of Friends passed a resolution declaring that slavery was inconsistent with Christianity. The resolution worked its way through the Quaker governance structure of monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings before being formally adopted a few years later. By 1776, Quakers in the American colonies were prohibited from owning slaves.2 The Emancipation Proclamation would follow nine decades later.

By the time Akin Hall was erected in Quaker Hill in 1880, my branch of the family tree had already moseyed west to Minnesota. Distant cousin Albert Akin was a gentleman farmer, business leader, and local philanthropist who built the community hall to provide a location for worship and other gatherings. The Akin Free Library, which was dedicated several years after Albert Akin’s 1903 death, remains to this day. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, along with the Akin House back home in Farmington.

The library was a good reason to take a detour to Quaker Hill. Brady and I spent a few hours kicking around the countryside before continuing our journey.

In the fall of 1778, Washington’s troops took over the Oblong Meeting House to use as a Continental Army hospital. The Quaker Hill locals were mostly pacifists who didn’t want to grind an axe against the British Crown. Status quo types, I guess. What few records exist indicate that they mostly ignored the troops and tried to go about their lives.

I should’ve finished this story back in October, but I didn’t. Too busy learning about more Akin history. And now here we are with an example of my family keeping their heads down during an occupation by ragtag troops and trying to avoid pissing off the government.3

Have I mentioned that I’m from Minnesota?

Yes, the very state that President Donald Trump has flooded with federal “law enforcement” troops who are snatching people off the street and going door to door to check papers. So far, they’ve killed a blonde poet mother and shot another guy in the leg. That’s in addition to all the tear gas and pepper spray and facial recognition scans that are connected to God knows what database.

The government says the operation is not only legal but necessary. And that people who say otherwise are bad and wrong.

A friend sent a message the other morning asking what to do after she saw masked agents take someone in front of her home. People I went to school with are delivering groceries to neighbours who are afraid to leave their homes. I saw video of ICE agents at my local gas station in Saint Peter, the one I visited several times a week for caffeine and lottery tickets for the last decade. Don’t go thinking I’m tough, wading through all the dangerous criminals that hang out there. There aren’t any. The place sells live bait, for Christ’s sake. There’s a group of guys my parents’ age who show up every morning at 7 a.m. to buy their dollar coffee and sit around in folding chairs shooting the breeze.

You can see why many people in the state are upset by the daily presence of unidentifiable government agents with guns in their neighbourhoods. Some of these Minnesotans blow whistles and honk car horns, try to point out how the Constitution usually works. Bloodthirsty shit like that.

So naturally the President of the United States posted that Minnesota’s “day of retribution and reckoning is coming.”

Can we slow down for a minute and think about how truly insane this is?

Then again, I guess it’s no crazier than threatening to take over Greenland, the United States’ ally in one of the strongest and most stable military alliances the world has ever known.

Maybe the hand-me-down Nobel Prize medallion will help distract the President from Minnesota and Greenland. And I thought participation ribbons for little kids were supposed to be cringe. Pathetic.

But maybe all of this is just what life is like in a post-truth world.

While the Quaker Hill bunch quietly went about their business in the autumn of 1778, the Akins in Dartmouth lost it all to a British naval raid in retaliation for their support of the Revolutionary cause.4

Stood up for what they believed in and got crushed by the empire.

Go figure.

We continued through the forests of western Connecticut before stopping for the night at the Old Riverton Inn. The historic property is located on the shores of the Farmington River—another echo of home. We didn’t know until after we arrived. The lodging house dates to sometime between 1796 and 1811, when it opened as a stagecoach stop on the trail from Hartford to Albany. Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw have stayed there. Harper Lee is said to have worked on To Kill A Mockingbird at the inn.

We didn’t see any ghosts, but you can’t tell me that places like these don’t carry some memories.

It was a peaceful night, even though this whole damn world feels haunted.

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I haven’t written much since I arrived in Nova Scotia in early October. Some of you have noticed, and I appreciate your questions about when Bayview Wonder would return and your encouragement to continue.

I didn’t set out to take more than a week off, but time slid by as I completed the permanent residency process, imported my Jeep, and started to learn the Canadian healthcare system. I’m adjusting to a new professional role and doing a lot of dreaming and a little scheming about what my future job (or jobs) will look like. Hayley has a busy teaching schedule, so I’ve been trying to keep ahead of things around the house—I even built a dog gate for the top of the stairs. Duke is mostly recovered from his knee surgeries in July and October. He’s not as fast as before, but last week he started joining me on little hikes through the forested land behind our home.

We hosted Canadian Thanksgiving for Hayley’s family in October, threw a joint housewarming/Hayley’s-belated-birthday party in November, traveled to Minnesota in early December to visit family and wrap up a few checklist items before selling our house there, and spent a quiet Christmas in Pictou.

I guess that seems like a pretty good list now that it’s written out. It’s been a good fall and early winter.

I like it here.

And I’ve managed to collect a few stories as I wonder along the way.

This time a year ago, I was preparing to return to Minnesota as Hayley stayed in Nova Scotia to start her new position as a faculty member at St. Francis Xavier University.

At work, I was in the midst of a search to find the next president of Gustavus Adolphus College, the liberal arts college where I went to school and spent most of my career. As the search coordinator, it was my job to manage communications, processes, and relationships while serving as the central connection point between the board, search committee, search consultants, and campus community. It was a neat role that played to my strengths. The search, nearly a year-long process from start to finish, was probably the most fascinating and educational project of my career.

It was also pretty stressful. I don’t recommend doing a project like that while also preparing to sell a house and move to a different country.

Fortunately, everything else in the world was stable and predictable in 2025, right?

Ah, well. I guess not.

Yesterday, I bagged up garbage and compost before our biweekly pickup. It was time to get rid of Christmas leftovers and stale cookies. I wanted to start the new year with a cleaner slate, or at least a cleaner refrigerator.

I was hauling a bag out to the garage when I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. A bald eagle was taking off from its perch atop a big evergreen at the edge of our yard. I stopped and watched it take flight.

In the spirit of the times, go ahead and choose your own metaphor. There are lots of options. It could be anything, really.

Whatever interpretation you choose to apply, just be prepared to promote and defend your story with vigor. Remember, whatever you say loud enough and often enough is what counts as truth these days. Even better if you can find someone to blame, whether they’re at fault or not. Try it. Doesn’t even matter if it’s a stretch.

The great bird’s wings beat once, twice, three times, then it glided silently across Division Road and disappeared into the distance.

Was the visit a reminder of my departure from the states? A sign of friendship? A symbol of the rapidly expanding surveillance state? Why not all three?

Or perhaps it’s that the ideals of freedom and liberty persist, even in this harsh December.

To be honest, I didn’t think much about the bird at the time. Too busy cleaning up my own messes, I guess. Plus, I see a lot of bald eagles around here. More than I did back in Minnesota.

Is that the metaphor, that life in Canada is somehow more free? That’ll touch a nerve. Before he died, my father-in-law often made a point to tell me that he thought so. I don’t know.

There’s a cattle farm half a mile from here that processes some of its own beef. The eagles gather in the fields to fight for carcass scraps. That’s probably where the bird was headed.

Hmm.

My civics are rusty, perhaps, but 2025 didn’t really jive with what I learned back in seventh grade when I first visited Washington D.C. on a school trip.

Anyway, I digress.

Like Freud said, sometimes an eagle is just an eagle.

It’s nice to have garbage pickup day on December 31 this year. Out with the old and all that. I tied a knot in the top of the trash bag and went inside to bake biscuits. Control what you can control.

My world has gotten very small over these last few months. I work from home, rotating from the living room to the kitchen table to our makeshift office that’s waiting for me to save up the money and motivation for a paint job and some new bookshelves. I spend time in the garage or picking my way through the overgrown trees at the back of our lot. The worst traffic I encounter is in the shared parking lot between Sobey’s grocery store and Tim Horton’s. Once in awhile I cross the harbour to run an errand in New Glasgow. We see friends and Hayley’s family. We’re happy to cook at home and quietly spend most evenings in front of the wood fireplace.

A few years ago I stumbled across an article about what’s known as the coastline paradox. The math behind it is sort of convoluted, at least for me, but the gist of it is this—the smaller the unit of measurement that you use to measure a coast, the longer the coastline will appear to be. Using centimeters or inches will allow you to take much finer measurements of the shoreline’s contours than doing the same thing in kilometer- or mile-long segments. And if you use small enough measurements, the coastline’s length can approach infinity.

The more you zoom in, the more detail you see. There’s a richness that you need to slow down to fully appreciate.

That makes sense, right?

Looking ahead to 2026, it sure does to me.

Take a cup of kindness this New Year. And give some too.

Do it for auld lang syne.

2026 Resolutions:

• get better at fixing stuff

• walk the dog

• catch some fish

• more seafood, more meatballs

• spend summer on the water

• read more books

• write a bunch

• embrace the coastline paradox

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My younger brother and I pulled out of the driveway of our childhood home at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning.

Before leaving Farmington, we topped off at our neighborhood repair shop, a locally owned place at the corner of a couple state highways on the edge of town. The entire convenience store could fit inside the coffee section of one of the new Kwik Trip stations that have popped up across the Midwest. (Sorry, Canadian readers. I don’t know the gas stations here well enough to make a comparison yet).

My dad has lived within two miles of the place for most of his life and is regular enough to have the owner and lead mechanic’s cell phone numbers. Twenty-some years ago, I rode along as he dropped off a case of Busch Light and a card for the guys in the garage the week before Christmas. I still stop for gas and a Gatorade every time I’m in town. Old habits.

We were bound for Pictou, Nova Scotia. I pointed the Jeep to the east.

The night before we left, my brother and I visited Grandma Akin. It was the first time I’d seen her since she moved to an assisted living apartment at the end of the summer.

Grandma was waiting inside the main entrance when we arrived. She was excited to see us. We were introduced to a new friend of hers in the lobby before heading to the elevator to see her apartment.

When I was a young child, before my brother was born, we lived three doors down from my paternal grandparents. Between being their first grandchild and living so close, I spent a lot of time with them. I learned to play baseball in the back yard with Dad and Grandpa, went on walks and wagon rides with Grandma, and cuddled up next to her in the living room to watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. When I was at their house, my nap took place at the same time as the soap operas that Grandma liked to watch. Funny how that happens.

Grandma showed us around the new apartment, taking extra time to point out her curio cabinet full of the angel figurines that she’d collected over the years. She grew up poor and her father passed away when she was a child. There was no money or room for things that didn’t have a use besides being pretty to look at. I’m glad she has them with her now.

We sat in the cozy living room, her organ squeezed into a corner by the window that overlooks the parking lot. She told us about the move and joys and challenges of learning to live in a new place. She mentioned the forgetfulness that had started to creep in, that she’d lost some independence.

My brother and I tried to keep things positive. I was glad he was there with me to make a few jokes that lightened what could’ve been a much heavier conversation. It had been a year of change in our family, in so many ways, and nobody quite knew what would come next.

In the last days of packing up the house in Saint Peter, I came across my childhood teddy bear and blanket. Nestled in the same box were a smaller blanket and clown doll that had been my nap-time toys at Grandma’s house. I knew the Jeep wouldn’t have much room, but I couldn’t bring myself to let them go. They made the move to Canada.

When we were leaving the apartment, Grandma grabbed my hand as we walked down the hallway. She squeezed three times in quick succession. I immediately recognized the secret code from childhood: 1-2-3 = I. Love. You.

As we say in Minnesota, uff da.

My brother picked up the conversation as I took a close look at the bird enclosure in the lobby.

We hugged our farewells. I managed to keep it together.

My brother promised to visit and show her pictures when he got back from Nova Scotia.

Early in the drive, my brother pointed out a field of cannabis plants along the highway, the result of Minnesota’s legalized market. The world’s come a long way since we were kids.

Growing up, I was pretty much a rule follower. I wanted to know the parameters for whatever sport or game or activity was at hand, then would do the best I could to win within those guidelines. I didn’t break curfew, or drink alcohol until I turned 21.

My brother often had a more flexible interpretation of the rules.

Whenever we left the house as teenagers, we’d hear two things from our parents.

“Make good decisions,” they’d say. “Be a leader.”

I always thought those were expectations and worked hard to meet them. First borns, right? My brother, I think, sometimes saw them as constraints. He’d readily push back on people and ideas he didn’t agree with. Looking back now, I think we both held the line a little too tightly on our respective ends of the rules-and-expectations spectrum.

Our route took us down US Route 52 to catch Interstate 90. We drove past John Hardy’s BBQ in Rochester, a family favorite and perhaps the best restaurant of its genre in all of Minnesota. My dad and brother still make the two-hour round trip from Farmington just for the shredded pork dinner with fried potato slices.

We drove through the Minnesota bluffs of the Driftless Area and crossed the Mississippi River into Wisconsin.

Illinois, Indiana, and western Ohio passed uneventfully. Conversation topics included the number of billboards for personal injury attorneys in Chicago, the University of Notre Dame and American higher education, and the Great Black Swamp in northwest Ohio that was drained in the late 1800s and is now primo farmland.

When I started talking about the swamp, my brother asked one polite question then turned up the music.

Blame Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader and Wikipedia rabbit holes.

We stopped for a late supper at a Ruby Tuesday in Streetsboro, Ohio. As kids, it felt like a restaurant that was a little bit special. Your whole family would go out on your mother’s birthday. You’d take a date there once you could drive a car. Good food, and that great salad bar.

Not this trip. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but everything was sort of flat and lifeless. We couldn’t decide if the quality of the restaurant chain had taken a hit or we had lower expectations as teenagers when there was a location in a neighboring town.

Then again, a lot of things look different to us now than they did back then. Part of that’s life experience, I guess. Your perspective evolves.

And the world continues to change at what feels like a steadily increasing rate.

Everything seems optimized for speed, revenue, and topical gotchas—rarely for quality, nuance, or depth. Some of the changes are for the better. A lot of it seems worse.

How can you help but feel nostalgic? Even if what you’re remembering isn’t the full picture of what actually happened.

After settling up, we pulled into the lot at a neighboring Hampton Inn.

It had been a good first day. We’d covered more ground than I’d hoped.

I slept better than I usually do on the road.

Better than I had for the last couple months.

To be continued…

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I was in my office in the college’s administration building at 8 a.m. on Homecoming Saturday.

That wasn’t out of the ordinary, I guess.

But I was in a different office than usual, one I’d been squatting in for a few weeks as my replacement (upgrade, hopefully) got settled in. And I wasn’t there to check emails or print out the day’s itinerary. I was packing up the last of my stuff to leave campus, maybe for good.

I’d been awake since before 5 a.m. This was unthinkable eight months ago, but circumstances dictated—and fortunately for me, other circumstances allowed for—an adjustment. I spent the morning tossing more bags in the rented dumpster at home, packing up my Jeep, and strapping down the soft-sided travel topper that was about to depart on its second 2,000-mile roadtrip to Pictou.

All week, I’d joked with colleagues that if I made it to the Homecoming football game it would mean that the morning had gone smoothly at the house. By 12:15 p.m., things were looking good. I hopped in the shower, pulled on a college polo, put on my name tag and lanyard, and headed to campus. It was a strange feeling to know everything I did—exactly the same as so many other fall Saturdays over the years—was now happening for the last time.

Hollingsworth Field sits on the west side of the Gustavus campus, across the street from the president’s home, the baseball field, and the northern tip of the college arboretum. The current stadium opened in 2007, just in time for my freshman season on the football team. Between practices and games as a student-athlete, pickup soccer as an employee, and supporting big events like the annual commencement ceremony, I spent a lot of time on that turf over the last 18 years.

I wasn’t meeting anyone specific at the game, so I floated through the crowd. I ran into former co-workers who’d moved on, old college teammates, and current colleagues and friends. I got a big hug from the senior associate dean of admission who first hired me as a student tour guide back in 2010. Neither of us knew it at the time, but that summer job set me on the path to life as an administrator at a residential liberal arts college.

And what is a liberal arts education? Most people couldn’t tell you, but they know there’s a word in there that feels political.

It’s not, but that’s just a good example of how our collective dialogue has become dumbed down at best and intentionally misleading at worst.

The “liberal” in “liberal arts” derives from the Latin “liberalis,” meaning “free.” “Arts” comes from Latin “ars,” for “knowledge” or “skill.” The word “artifact” has the same root: something made by human skill or knowledge. “Liberal arts,” in this sense, is education that equips a person for life as a free citizen.

- Blaine Greteman, PhD

Now, before you go thinking that quoting a university professor about the meaning of the liberal arts is an exercise in circular rhetoric that only reinforces the walls of the Ivory Tower, you should know that Blaine grew up in Hydro, Oklahoma. A speck on the map an hour west of Oklahoma City on Route 66, the most distinctive feature of the town of 927 residents is that it has good well water (hence the name). And Blaine didn’t go to an “elite” institution until he was named a Rhodes Scholar. He did his undergraduate studies at Oklahoma State and has spent his career teaching at the University of Iowa and the University of Tulsa.

My point, I guess, is that higher education—and especially liberal arts education—isn’t about indoctrination. It’s about opportunity. It’s about learning to use a variety of tools to solve problems in our organizations, businesses, communities, and the world.

A liberal arts education offers an expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry.

By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences, you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly. These skills will elevate your conversations in the classroom and strengthen your social and cultural analysis; they will cultivate the tools necessary to allow you to navigate the world’s most complex issues.

- Princeton University

As a teenager, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I had serious conversations with recruiters from the U.S. Marines and was leaning toward that path. Would the military have prepared me for life? Absolutely. Would a community or technical college or big university? Sure thing.

But then I started to get a little bit of attention from some local NCAA Division III football programs, including Gustavus.

My parents recognized the opportunity before I did. Neither of them have a four-year degree. They encouraged me to get serious about the small private colleges in Minnesota. Looking back now, I’m sure glad they did.

I was a decent high school student, played multiple sports, and was involved in some leadership groups. I had okay grades and good test scores, but I hadn’t really applied myself in the classroom.

The same admission staffer who gave me a hug on Homecoming told me years ago that students like that were the hardest for her to evaluate when reviewing applications.

“Smart, but haven’t done the things that prove they’ll be successful in college,” she said.

Fair enough.

I hope I’ve proved it since.

I checked out a few other colleges, but Gustavus felt like home from that first visit with the football coach. More than anywhere else, it felt like they wanted me.

Community is a big part of the fabric at Gustavus. After experiencing it for four years as a student, I’ve spent most of the time since trying to create that feeling for others. Whether it was meeting with prospective students, writing about current students and professors, hosting visiting speakers, or providing strategy and logistics support for the senior administration and Board of Trustees, hospitality has always been part of the “other duties as assigned.”

Even at my last Homecoming, I found myself answering questions, giving directions, and straightening things up in the grandstand.

In the third quarter, I said my goodbyes and got a big hug from the new president. I walked across the sunny autumn campus as cheers from the stadium faded into the distance.

When I drove down College Avenue, I didn’t know how to feel.

I’d expected to cry, but didn’t. Too tired, I guess. Too much to think about. Too many next steps to consider.

It’ll all happen in good time.

The next day, my brother and I left for our road trip to Nova Scotia.

We arrived on Wednesday afternoon. I’m writing from Bayview now.

It was a different kind of homecoming.

Both of them felt right.

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My brother and I leave Sunday morning for a road trip that will take us east across the 2,000 miles of blacktop that lead to my new home in Bayview, Pictou County, Nova Scotia.

I will be 37 years, 1 month, and 27 days old, and I’m moving away from Minnesota for the first time. Our route will take us through Wisconsin, across the Rust Belt, and into New York. We’ll spend a morning exploring some family tree history in the Hudson River Valley, then stop in Maine and press on to Nova Scotia the next day.

We talked this summer about visiting Niagara Falls and maybe the Baseball Hall of Fame. But I think we’re both looking forward to some time in the car with nothing but music and conversation. And I’m excited to get to Pictou.

Hayley will be there to greet us.

Duke will have just arrived home after his second knee surgery. I wonder in what other ways life in Bayview will be similar to how it was in July, and in what ways it will be different.

A few more big meetings and events at work between now and Sunday. My house in Saint Peter is starting to look pretty bare. I booked a cleaner to tidy up the messes that I’ll surely forget.

Thank God it’s been a slow and gentle goodbye at work. I told a colleague last week that I didn’t know if I could handle a going away party. I’ll miss this campus and these people a lot. It’s a great place to build a community and a career.

But there’s still a part of me that feels like I’m escaping from beneath the weight of things undone.

I know that’s not fair.

It must be a symptom of the burnout.

A road trip with my brother will be good medicine.

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Piece of cake or fake it till you make it? That’s for me to know, but I’m drinking a lot of caffeine.

As I was packing this weekend, I came across a shoebox of memories from high school—old report cards (good at English and history, bad at math), assignments, and some newspaper clippings.

It’d been a long time since I thought about my stint as a student columnist for the local newspaper back when I was a high school senior.

Unfortunately, the Farmington Independent has since fallen to the same fate as thousands of other local newspapers across the country over the last 20 years. It’s really too bad, because robust local news would come in handy these days. “Local” is where community is built. And it’s hard to hate your neighbor if you know them as a person. But local news wasn’t worth the money to whoever counted the beans, I guess. Not enough ROI. So here we are with an entirely different set of “news” options.

I digress.

Today, I would approach some of my editorial decisions differently. And boy, check out that mug shot.

Anyway, it being a busy week and all, here’s one of those columns:

1/11/07

As a part of the curriculum at Farmington High School, juniors and seniors are given the opportunity to take part in a class known as service learning. Service learning places students in a non-traditional learning environment in which the student assists others to learn lessons about human nature and life instead of arithmetic of history. Many students assist teachers throughout the school district, grading papers, tutoring students and providing a helping hand. Other placements include helping at the Trinity Care Center or organizing artifacts at Dakota City Heritage Village. After weighing my options, I decided to work with my former fourth grade teacher, Tom Murphy.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I first started going to Mr. Murphy’s class, but I soon fell into a rhythm that seems to work well for him, me, and the students in the class. On a typical day, I’ll arrive a few minutes after his math class begins and get to work grading any papers that he has for me. After that comes my favorite part of the day. I get to cruise around the room visiting with kids and helping with math.

I think the students today are still a lot like we were eight years ago. There are hyper kids, smart kids, quiet kids, and class clowns. Every day I look forward to their good-natured teasing about high school, how I’m ‘weird,’ and the time I fumbled the football in a game against Rochester John Marshall… Yes, the fourth graders have long memories.

Anyway, it has been quite an education these last six months or so, as I learn more about them. One difference I notice is in the technology that is available. I’ve seen a couple of fourth graders with cell phones. Digital cameras and iPods seemed to be popular gifts for Christmas. Beyond that, the differences seem to be negligible. Maybe that’s how it always is. Kids are giddy and don’t take everything seriously, but for the most part they know when to quit and buckle down to the task at hand. Surprisingly to me, it appears that everyone gets along. I don’t see cliques or bullying, although perhaps I view their world through rose-colored glasses. Theirs is a life of academics and recess, tag and homework, but not the oppressive kind that will be piled on them in a few short years. If I could tell them one thing it would be to enjoy it. Enjoy the friendships, the teachers, the outdoors, the bus rides. Because although youngsters long to be older, I’ve decided that it’s just not the same. Sure, I can drive to school and go on dates on Saturday night, but I wouldn’t mind the chance to forget once in awhile and just play on the swings before heading in and listening to Mr. Murphy read aloud to the class.

Go Tigers!

JJ Akin is a senior at Farmington High School. His column appears every other week.

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I wrap up my time on campus at Gustavus Adolphus College at the end of next week. There’s a lot to do between now and then. But today, I had a chance to step back from the busyness of the transition and reflect by sharing a message with the community in Christ Chapel.

At a time of great change, how should we respond?

Focus on love, and each other. And don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and help.

September 25, 2025 | Christ Chapel | Gustavus Adolphus College

Thank you, Chaplain Ben.

The first night I ever spent on campus, I slept on the floor of Alumni Hall in a hand-me-down sleeping bag. I’d come to Gustavus for a middle school youth retreat with a group from Farmington Lutheran Church. My friends and I played dodgeball on the blue and swam in the pool and ate Icees in the caf. We gossiped a little bit, and we bragged a little bit, and we had deep conversations.

I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I thought that this was the best place ever.

Then I forgot about Gustavus for awhile. I was a teenager. I had other stuff going on.

I came back as a high school senior and I realized that this was where I wanted to go to college. When I visited here I felt welcomed. I felt like I belonged.

And I think, looking back now, that I needed a place like this. I was a pretty good student, but I didn’t always do my homework. I needed people who would check in on me every once in awhile. I liked being part of a team. I found those things here.

I came to college with the goal of being a teacher and coach, but after taking a few education classes I knew that wasn’t my calling.

I struggled to decide what to major in. I remember taking a writing course with legendary Gustavus professor and poet Phil Bryant.

We were walking down the hall in Confer-Vickner after class. Could I really be an English major? I was filled with doubt.

Now, Phil and I don’t appear to have a lot in common.

He grew up on the south side of Chicago and came to Gustavus at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement. I grew up in a small town on the south end of the metro here in Minnesota and was a student at Gustavus during the Great Recession. He liked jazz. I played football and listened to Jimmy Buffett.

“It’s okay to tell your parents you’re majoring in English,” Phil said to me. “Just don’t tell them if you’re going to be a poet!”

A few of my family members are here today including my mom and dad, Dave and Kris. Thanks for sending me to Gustavus all those years ago.

Looking back now, I guess we didn’t know exactly what I was getting into.

And I’d like to thank Phil Bryant, Florence Amamoto, and my other professors. I’ve done a lot of writing for the college since that conversation in the hallway. I’ve written a few poems too.

I was raised in the Lutheran church and I’ve built my life here on this campus with its steeple overlooking the Minnesota River Valley, but I had to ask Chaplain Ben to tell me more about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

It’s good to be curious. But it’s also good to have smart friends.

In Corinthians, Paul is speaking to a community experiencing change. The question before them is how to build a better future—how to build a community that will thrive.

These questions led to conflict and arguments by people who thought they were being faithful and finding that they were disagreeing with other people who also thought they were being faithful.

In the verse for today, Paul says, “Listen! We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Now Paul means that not every believer will die, but that all who believe will be granted eternal life.

Now, because I’m an English major, I know that translation is a selection of words and that the selection of those words tells a story. And I like this translation because it talks about the mystery of creation and the magic of change. “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, we will be changed.”

It frames change itself as a mystery, a great unknown that we must walk into with faith, yes, but also with each other—even if we have unanswered questions. Even if we don’t always agree.

Like all colleges and universities, Gustavus is going through a period of transition and change right now. It’s happening throughout our communities, our nation, and the world. People who are being faithful to what they believe are coming into conflict with other people who are being faithful to what they believe.

Now, in a conflict like that, what’s the answer? What do we use as the compass that will point us in the right direction?

Paul tells us that the answer is love. That’s what Corinthians is about. Love each other, and build your community accordingly.

I like this because it’s a simple rule that can be applied in almost any situation.

Now, I haven’t always been able to do it.

None of us have.

But striving to infuse love for people from all backgrounds and walks of life into our decision making—trying to do that every day, in every decision—that seems like a good place to start.

The chaplains asked if I would talk about my faith. I’m not sure how I’d categorize that these days. I have a lot of questions. But being Lutheran or culturally Lutheran or philosophically Lutheran—whatever I decide to call it that day—I know that questions are okay.

But making decisions with the community in mind, doing the work that is in front of us, and remembering to keep love for others first. Call that whatever you want. Those are ideas that I can get behind.

Which brings me to the hymn for today: “Here I am Lord.” Now, Chaplain Ben tells me this is a vocational hymn. It’s about answering the call and serving something greater. It’s about looking out for those in need.

The hymn is based on texts from the books of Isaiah and Samuel. As you listen to the verses you hear the voice of God—the Lord of Sea and Sky, the Lord of Wind and Flame.

Imagine the awe-inspiring power and unknowable mystery of the creator. Imagine feeling that you’re connected to something bigger but being afraid of the possibility of what that might mean. Imagine raising your hand anyway to say “Here I am. I will help.”

It’s scary. The mystery of creation. The uncertainty of change. The commandment to love. The call to serve.

It’s always easier to lean out and to lash out and to push others away. But taking that path doesn’t build community, it fractures it.

After spending half of my life on this campus, I’m leaving next weekend to build a new life in Nova Scotia with my wife, Hayley. This wasn’t part of our original plan, but then again neither was majoring in English. In many ways, what awaits me in Canada is a mystery. It’s a major change in my life, and one that’s being done out of love.

I hope that when your call comes, whatever it is, you will stand up and say “Here I am.”

Even if you’re afraid of what comes next.

Gustavus is worth it. The communities we live in are worth it. The people around you are worth it.

I came here for the first time 25 years ago and left feeling like Gustavus was the best place ever.

Today, I know a lot more than I did back then. I’ve learned about people and conflict and community and change and, yes, even love.

I think back to that first visit to campus all those years ago and realize that some of my best days are ones where we make good decisions that are borne out of care for the community—and days when I get to gossip a little bit, and brag a little bit, and have deep conversations with my friends and colleagues.

And when I leave this place next week, I leave with the clear-eyed understanding that Gustavus can be the best place ever.

But it’s going to take all of us looking out for one another and saying “Here I Am” to do it.

Thank you. For everything.

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Somewhere towards late afternoon, my old boss asked about the chalk on the side of the Administration Building.

“The sidewalk is one thing,” she said. “But we can’t have people chalking the buildings.”

I nodded. It was a Tuesday in mid-April, sunny, crisp, and breezy. Naturally, some students were upset. Could've been anything, really. Happens every spring.

I took off my sport coat and laid it over a chair in my office, rolled up my sleeves, and went to the kitchenette in the basement. I didn’t spend much time on the “Garden Level,” as the fundraisers who worked down there called it, so I couldn’t find the light switch. I used the glow from the hall to locate an empty pitcher. Then a passing colleague saw me there in the dark, waving my hands as if performing some kind of incantation as the sink ran wide open behind me. He paused for a second, then thought better of it and moved on. It had been that kind of year in higher ed.

I gathered the pitcher and thin paper towels I’d charmed from the glitchy automatic dispenser, went up the stairs, and stepped into the sun. There was chalk on the Admin Building and it was my job to wash it off.

It was thick chalk, almost oily. The first jug of water didn’t do much. I filled it and tried again before deploying a paper towel. It hit the wet concrete and melted like cotton candy dropped into an expensive drink, the kind they serve at those cocktail bars I’d read about in Esquire but would probably never visit. I walked back down the stairs and returned with a full pitcher.

I admit that I didn’t spend much time thinking about censorship or administrative overreach. It was a clear policy violation to chalk a building. Besides, the cause was not one that had evoked much outcry on campus. The chalk was not protesting economic uncertainty or the Middle East. No, the college’s academic calendar had changed and a handful of graduating students were mad they couldn’t hang out on campus for a few more days before moving on to whatever came next.

After dwindling in length and popularity over the last several years, the new calendar meant that "Senior Week" had been all but eliminated. I learned later that extra days on campus were the decades-ago result of a need to buy time for the college’s registrar to get degrees finalized and printed before Commencement. That practice had ended, but the idea of Senior Week as a celebration for the graduates remained. I guess to be a part of any organization is to participate in some level of myth-making. When the chalkers struck, the administration had already worked with the Student Senate on a celebration plan that made most seniors happy. The point, I guess, is that these things happen.

More water.

A part of me can’t blame them for wanting to stay on campus just a little bit longer. And who am I to judge? God knows I’ve stuck around at this place for a long time by now. Eighteen years since I came here as a first-year student, half my life I’ve been living and dying on this hill.

Scrubbing the wall, I wondered if my perceptions of 1960s activism were exaggerated. The history books and documentaries growing up had me believing that every protest march led to victory and every campus in the country was a hippy colony or Black Panther den. I decided that wasn’t the case after all. Whatever the cable news says, it hadn’t been like that then and it wasn’t now.

More paper towels.

What makes a person accept or reject the status quo? Has the explosion of real-time news media made protests seem cringy or routine? How does a person choose to be a bystander, an advocate, or an activist? Do they choose at all? What makes someone align so strongly with a cause that they take up the chalk, or something stronger? Should I have moved back to my hometown and sold insurance instead of building a career at a residential liberal arts college?

Probably.

More water, more paper towels.

The facilities office could have taken care of it, but it didn’t feel right to ask someone else to tidy this mess. A custodian didn’t make the decisions that led to the loss of Senior Week, some administrators and a faculty committee did. And sometimes the students protest. It’s a part of the learning experience. Besides, it was a nice enough afternoon.

When I was done, the walls of the Admin Building were clean but the chalk on the sidewalk remained dry and legible. I went back inside and climbed the stairs to my office to see what was next.

I’ve been trying hard to be a kinder person lately, slower and softer in judgment, quicker to say “thank you” or "good job."

I’ve been trying to clean things up when I can.

I have a clear memory from childhood.

My class was getting ready to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

I’d been listening to Christmas music on Cool 108 since Halloween and the only thing that stood between me and a week and a half off school was a class party and a holiday concert the next day. It was music rehearsal and I was locked in.

The teacher counted off. I took a deep breath and prepared to do my best Christmas lounge crooner impression.

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,” I half-sang in an unnaturally low bellow. The teacher glanced my direction.

Oh good, I thought, she noticed.

“Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.” The teacher’s eyebrow twitched. I gasped a quick breath.

“But do youuuuu recallllllll”— she cut us off.

We waited. Now she offers me a solo, I thought.

“Someone over here,” she gestured to the risers in my general direction, “is doing an ugly voice. My friend over here should stop and sing normally.”

I wondered who she was talking about.

We tried again. We barely got through a line before the teacher waved us off. She took a few steps closer.

“I can’t tell who it is, but one of my friends over here is singing in a voice that doesn’t sound good,” she took another step and leaned in. “Someone over here. Just use your normal singing voice.”

Shit, I thought, she means me! My face turned bright red.

I hated the thought of being embarrassed. Of course, you can’t stop class to explain what you were trying to do and how you thought it would be better. Just trying to help. Just trying to make art. Just trying to be a performer. It would not be the last time that I’d have creative differences with an authority figure.

But then, I had a more troubling thought: wait, am I a bad singer?

That one stuck with me, and it’s been a real bummer.

When I moved home after college, Dahlke and I got really into karaoke. I’m not sure how it happened but I know it was his fault.

Was I still self-conscious about my voice? Yes, but the rum and cokes helped.

Karaoke in college barely counts—groups of sloshed people with plastic cups sticking microphones in each other’s faces while the jockey mercifully drowns out everything with the bass and backing track.

Not Dahlke and I, no sir. Not on what we dubbed “The South Metro Karaoke Circuit.”

Once we settled into a rhythm, we’d do Thursday nights at The Ugly Mug (now just “The Mug”) and Saturdays at Celt’s Pub in Farmington. Once in awhile, we’d head to Celt’s Rosemount location or Bogart’s in Apple Valley.

We were in our early twenties with jobs where we had the mornings off and worked till evening. It was a pretty good schedule for lifting weights and going to the bar.

I usually chose Come Monday by Jimmy Buffett or Fire and Rain by James Taylor for my first song of the evening—something nice and easy to get into the swing of things. Dahlke often took a more direct approach, screaming Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” to open the night.

This is illustrative of our personalities. I wasn’t a confident singer and tried hard to pick songs that would sound good with my voice. Dahlke didn’t care either way and was there to have fun. There were times when I envied the approach. Still do.

It was a growing up, figuring it out time for both of us. We met new people, some that became fast friends. Others, not so much. People regularly mistook us for brothers.

Sometimes, we’d leave the bar early and just walk the streets of Farmington at night. We scaled a few roofs, put on miles through the parks, but never caused any real trouble. We’d talk about anything and everything, meaningful life stuff, drunken ramblings, relationships, our families. We never really talked much about the future, I’m realizing now, though we were both making plans and trying to figure out the next step. Dahlke was on his way to being a paramedic. I wanted to start a career.

We got to know the regular jockeys and worked with them to host ugly Christmas sweater karaoke and Zubaz karaoke and Halloween karaoke and karaoke contests. (You’re looking at a grand champion, ladies and gentlemen. It was based on applause volume rather than tonal quality. And I had a lot of friends at the bar. The $25 tab as a prize helped defray the evening’s expenses.)

At the end of the night, we’d usually get a pizza at the gas station and a ride home from my mom.

Before that though, Dahlke and I would take the stage for one of the last songs of the night. We almost always picked Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love.”

It’s a great karaoke song—a recognizable and easy-to-sing power ballad and rock anthem with a catchy chorus. And people forget this about the song: it’s a duet.

Dahlke and I played this to great effect. We’d split the first few verses, both of us belting out our version of Meat Loaf before coming together on the chorus. The whole bar would be rocking.

Or already empty—it was Farmington, after all.

Four minutes in I’d break into Lorraine Crosby’s part, pushing to a higher register.

Will you raise me up?
Will you let me down?
Will you get me right out of this godforsaken town?
Will you make it all a little less cold?

If I hit it just right, the bar went wild.

Can you picture it?

Two loudmouths on stage, Minnesota’s version of the Blues Brothers but short on talent and a generation late. You’re not wrong to look at it that way.

But you might also see nearly 500 lbs of unabashed male joy screaming into dual microphones. The mix of friendship and youth and alcohol. The possibility of the world, even from our little town, even though we were young and didn’t have careers or serious girlfriends or any idea where we’d end up. We were foolish and happy and unafraid, not knowing what we didn’t know.

These days, Dahlke lives on an island and runs a coffee shop with his wife. They were on HGTV a couple years ago. He’s still a go-with-the-flow guy and jack of all trades.

I’m moving to Canada soon. No big TV appearances for me, but I once gave a milquetoast statement to the Washington Post that ended up in print. Long story. I’m trying to roll with the punches more as I get older. And I’m slowly getting better at fixing things.

And that teacher from all those years ago? It wasn’t even my natural voice that she was criticizing. It’s funny the things that stick with us.

I miss karaoke sometimes.

This didn’t happen every week, but when it did, it was magic: standing next to one of my best friends and finally feeling, for a few minutes at least, like I could sing.

Like I could be free.

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I was bouncing a knee in the lobby of the admission office shortly before 8 a.m. when Rich Aune walked in.

He sized me up.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

It was January 3, 2012. It was my first day of work as an admission counselor—my first “real” job after graduating from college six months earlier.

I didn’t know Rich very well at the time. I’d worked in the same office for a year as a student-employee and we had a good relationship, but he was also adjusting to a new role after being promoted to serve as the Dean of Admission. And I was trying to establish myself as a professional.

“Just thought I might be able to help,” I said.

He looked me up and down again.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll show you your office.”

I’d applied for an admission counselor job the summer after graduation but was the second choice for the position. I was back in my hometown working in community education for the public school district, doing a mix of school-age daycare and youth sports. It was an okay job but it didn’t feel like something I wanted to do forever. I’d had a few conversations about an entry level marketing position at a big health insurance company and was waiting for the next interview when I got an unexpected phone call.

“One of the staff is leaving for a new position and we’d like you to join the admission team,” the enrollment vice president at the time told me. “You just interviewed and people liked you, so it’s yours if you want it.”

What can I say? He had a way with words.

I said yes on the spot, then said yes to almost everything else in the job for the next several years.

Now, you may think that every admission counselor is just a summer camp counselor or college orientation leader with a steady paycheck. Rah Rah! Whistles and jazz hands. Come to (INSERT COLLEGE/UNIVERSITY HERE) and you’ll have the best four years of your life!

And for many of them, that’s true.

But this is not my personality. To the contrary, I had to give myself pep talks before setting up my table at college fairs. You want to be good at your job, I remember thinking, and for the next two hours that means standing here and making small talk with teenagers. I much preferred meeting with students and families in the admission office on campus, where I could make personal connections and talk about their individual interests, goals, and how college might help achieve them.

My recruiting territory meant I usually took a weeklong road trip through northwest Minnesota in late September and spent a week or so in both Colorado and Nebraska in the fall and spring. I also had a few high schools in the Twin Cities suburbs that I’d visit a couple times a year.

When we were on campus, the entry-level admission counselors would work with students to complete their admission files, meet with them when they visited campus to answer their questions, then review their applications. The on-the-road work was a mix of college fairs, visits to high school guidance counselor offices, and individuals visits at coffee shops or people’s homes.

I loved it because of the variety of work it entailed, the energy of a college campus, and the opportunity to learn about so many different areas of how a college or university operates. As an admission counselor at a residential liberal arts college, you need to know at least a little bit about every academic program, athletic team, campus organization, fine arts activity, and administrative office on campus. Many of the lessons that I learned in those first few years are ones that I still use every day in my current position.

One of the highlights of my travels each fall was attending the Western Slope College Fair in Aspen, Colorado.

Now, before you make the snap judgement that you may have been conditioned to make—that a private liberal arts college recruiting students in Aspen is representative of an out-of-touch economic and academic class—some might use the term “elite”—let me quickly disabuse you of the notion.

First, the Western Slope College Fair in Aspen is the only major college fair each year that covers students from all of western Colorado, an area larger than the state of Pennsylvania. Over 200 colleges and universities attend. Despite being held in Aspen, the fair draws students from a range of communities, backgrounds, economic circumstances, and interests.

And Gustavus is expensive, yes, but it also provides significant merit- and need-based financial assistance for students in addition to individual support that they might not receive at bigger schools. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, the cumulative debt load for students who earn a bachelor’s degree at a private non-profit college in Minnesota is only ~$4-5,000 more more than those who attend an institution in the University of Minnesota or Minnesota State system.

Colleges and universities (including expensive private ones) unlock opportunities for economic advancement for students. As much as we like to think that each of us is special and can transcend the economic circumstances of our birth through hard work and #grind, the numbers don’t lie—a college degree is one of the single most important indicators of a person’s lifetime earnings. That being said, I want to be clear that I’m not saying it’s for everyone. We need skilled tradespeople, for example, and good ones can earn as much or more as many college graduates. But we’re talking about averages here, and on the balance college is good for people from an economic perspective.

I could go on about how colleges and universities are a public good for many other reasons, including that they serve as economic drivers within our communities, states, and the nation. And I’ve never seen political indoctrination take place in a college class despite spending half of my life on campus. I stopped watching the news awhile ago—most of what the red-faced anchors and pundits say doesn’t reflect what I see in my daily life on campus or more broadly. I don’t need a bunch of ginned-up anger and bad-faith arguments impacting my life, and neither do you.

Anyway, I rolled into Aspen on a Saturday in early October and checked into my hotel. My knowledge of the town was informed by a loose constellation of ideas—my brother’s service industry work and ski bumming in a different resort community, Hunter S. Thompson and Jimmy Buffett, rich people taking long weekends, and Dumb and Dumber. On my walk to dinner, I saw art galleries where my annual income wouldn’t make much of a dent. I joined a group of colleagues from other schools for dinner. I’m introverted and a little bit shy, so I never liked these small-talk networking events. When the group finished dinner and made plans to visit a nearby club, I excused myself and looked for a quieter bar to have a few drinks.

At the college fair the next day, I managed to make connections with a few students who eventually chose Gustavus, though I wouldn’t know it for several months (and in one case, a year and a half). Such is life in the college admission business. After packing up my brochures, I left town and drove alone in my rental car across Independence Pass the week before it closed for the winter. It was one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever been on and only a little bit white knuckle. I stopped in Leadville to get gas. It’s the highest-elevation incorporated city in the United States—a sign outside of town says “We ♡ Leadville: Great Living @ 10,200’.”

My other travels took me to New Orleans (karaoke on Bourbon Street and jazz at Preservation Hall); Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska; Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut; Detroit and San Antonio; and Washington D.C., among other places. Being an admission counselor is a great job for a person in their 20s.

As much as I liked to travel, I always preferred to be on campus. That’s where the magic happens: getting to talk everyday with smart people from all kinds of different backgrounds and disciplines, playing pick-up soccer on my lunch break, calling play-by-play for one of the best women’s hockey teams in NCAA Division III, eating in the cafeteria. Meeting Hayley.

Back in 2017, I bought my house in Saint Peter from the men’s tennis coach. I lived half a block from campus and right across the street from Rich, my first boss.

Rich graduated from Gustavus in 1981, 30 years before I walked across the commencement platform. Today, he’s one of my best friends and most trusted mentors.

He retired a couple years ago. He and his wife, Tami, (who also spent her whole career at Gustavus), spent this summer cleaning out their house and getting ready to move. They closed on the house and left town at the end of August. I miss talking to Rich on the street and having dinner in their screen porch, but I’m glad, I guess. The seasons are about to change. Summer to fall, Minnesota to Nova Scotia, seasons of life. Change is okay.

As I prepare to leave Gustavus and Saint Peter myself in a few short weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be part of a community. College campuses are special places, despite what the cynics say. I’m glad I’ve been a part of this one for so long. It’s easier to focus on all the things you didn’t get done, but I like to think I’ve made a difference.

I remember the first question that Rich ever asked me, back when I applied to be a student tour guide all those years ago.

“What do you do if you see an empty beer can or piece of litter on campus?”

“Pick it up,” I said.

“Great,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “I’ve never hired anyone who said anything else.

Taking care of this place is everyone’s responsibility.”

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I watched from the shore as my dad made false casts with a fly rod.

He stood at the end of the dock, stripping line and whipping the dry fly through the air. He released the fly, which floated out onto the lake and settled on the surface of the water.

I took a few steps closer as he reeled the line back in.

I was but a child of seven or eight. It was the mid-nineties and America was booming. My family was at the Loon’s Roost, the “up north” family cabin that my grandparents on the Akin side bought as their future retirement home before I was born.

My dad was a longtime angler but relatively new to fly fishing. This session was more about practice than trying to catch anything. He reset the line and started the process again.

The fly hummed through the air.

“Dad,” I said.

He stripped more line off the reel and continued the ritual. I was standing directly behind him on the wooden steps that lead to the dock.

“Dad! You’re going to get me!”

Warm-up completed, he reared back for the actual cast. The fly stung me and buried itself deep in my upper arm.

Anyway, don’t blame the old man. The whole thing took less than 10 seconds. He felt horrible.

We spent the next couple hours in the emergency room of the hospital in Aitkin, Minnesota. It’s lake country, so the doctor was well-practiced in the art and science of hook removal.

Plus, I learned a valuable lesson: don’t stand in the path of an airborne fishing lure. And if you do, don’t be surprised when you get hooked.

If I suspected it was going to happen, why didn’t I move? Good question. Then again, there are plenty of situations like that in life. And not just when you’re a kid.

My first experience with a fishing-related puncture wound had occurred several years earlier. I snagged my Grandma Nancy through the meaty part of her hand where the index finger meets the thumb. I was using a short kid’s pole, but there’s no such thing as a training hook for fishing. She, too, visited the emergency room.

I’ve spent most of my career as a professional communicator. Like any other field, there are various ways to approach the work.

Maybe you’re an R-PIE person (Research, Plan, Implement, Evaluate). Perhaps you prefer the SMCR (Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver) framework to plan and segment your messages. Personally, I am a fan and practitioner of the Page Principles and Situational Crisis Communication Theory.1

It all matters, even if people don’t always notice.

What’s that? I need a hobby? No kidding.

Which brings me to another communication and storytelling tool: narrative hooks.

When you read a sentence (or a few) at the beginning of an article or story that immediately draws you in and makes you want to read more, that’s a narrative hook. There are lots of ways to do it—drop the reader right into the action, make a joke, start with a play on words, begin with dialogue, lead with a bold claim…

You will likely recognize the style. I’ve employed it quite a few times in the friendly pages of Bayview Wonder. And if you don’t recognize it from here, well… thanks for reading even though the first lines are boring.

Hooks are also a thing in songwriting. Slightly different approach but same general idea: get the listener’s attention. Blues Traveler even wrote a famous song about it.

Communications is a broad field. One of my longtime colleagues comes from a magazine background. Her high-gloss feature storytelling—drama! intrigue!—and my often straight-laced business communications style were sometimes at odds, but we became fast friends. Her debut novel was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Other good projects are forthcoming just as soon as the audience is ready. Our offices used to be next to each other in the basement of a house-turned-office at the edge of campus.

“Who’s the audience?” we’d call through the wall while editing each other’s work. “What message are you trying to get across? Where’s your call to action?”

The graphic designers across the hall thought we were crazy. Oh well.

One time, I asked what her favorite part of the job was.

She didn’t hesitate.

"I like making cool stuff,” she said.

It could be anything—an article, a feature package for the magazine, a video, a social media post. It was the process of creation and the opportunity to share with an audience that did it for her.

My former boss referred to the time between announcing her retirement and her last day of work as the “long Minnesota goodbye.” It’s a feeling I can relate to as I prepare to head back to Nova Scotia next month. You get desensitized to it. How many times can you say goodbye? In how many ways? And when will it feel real?

Nearly a decade ago, my friend and colleague from the basement office gave me a plain white business card. Printed on its face in neat black type, it said:

“This is all preparation for your extraordinary destiny.”

Isn’t it nice to think so?

I’ve had that little card for years but of course I can’t find it now amidst the chaos of finishing things up and packing at home and at work.

That’s okay. The card is just a reminder.

I’ve learned a lot from my friend about writing, and work, and life.

Back in June, I signed up for an open mic slot at a literary festival on campus. I’d selected a couple poems as options along with a short reflection about working on a college campus these days. My friend and her son were there too. All three of us took a turn at the microphone.

Cool stuff.

I was fishing with Joel and Dahlke during a guys’ weekend trip to the Loon’s Roost.

We were flipping Rapalas for largemouth bass. Joel reeled one in.

He was working a treble hook out of the fish’s mouth when it gave a sudden shake.

Joel yelled something colorful, I don’t remember what.

The other hook had lodged between the first and second knuckles on his index finger. It was in solid, past the barb.

By then I was in my early 20s. I’d seen plenty more fish hook injuries since my childhood days at the cabin and worked several out myself.

After making sure he knew what I was doing, I used a small bolt cutter to free the fish from the hook in Joel’s hand. Dahlke tossed the bass over the side.

A meeting of the minds ensued. Dahlke was an Eagle Scout and an EMT. Joel was a fisherman and worked at a hardware store. I had the most hook-injury experience of the group and was the nerd who’d read and memorized how to deal with things like this.

We considered the options. There are three main ways to remove a fish hook.

In an easy case, you can give the hook a slight push down to clear the barb, then back it out. This works when the hook is straight and not very deep. It will still hurt. Depending on when you had your last booster and how much of your own research you’ve been doing lately, you may want to get a tetanus shot.

Another method is to carefully tie fishing line around the hook and use the line to apply backward pressure from the bottom of the hook. While you apply pressure, push down on the free end of the hook. This will pivot the hook, reversing the path it cut through your flesh. Once you’ve started to back out the hook and feel like it’s lined up for a successful exit, yank on the string. If you’re lucky, you’ll clear the barb. If you’re not, you’ll lose a little meat but at least it will be over fast.

Finally, and least pleasant, is the “push it through” method. It is what it sounds like. You grab the hook, hopefully with a pliers, and push it further into the skin, pushing through so the hook punctures the skin on the other side. From there, it’s easy—just use the bolt cutter to take off the tip and barb, then back the remaining wire out through the skin on the other side.

Because of the hook size, location, and depth on his finger, Joel opted for option number three.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “We can go to the emergency room.”

“Fuck that,” he said.

Dahlke and I caught eyes. He shrugged.

“Let’s do it,” Joel said.

We gave him a work glove to bite down on. Dahlke trapped Joel’s arm across the bench of the old aluminum boat and braced him from behind. I held Joel’s finger firmly in one hand and lined up the pliers with the other.

Later that night, Joel waved a bandaged finger at us from across the cabin living room.

“Popped it through and cut it off!” he said. “The paramedic guy just sat around while the English major did surgery right there in the boat.”

“Wasn’t worth my expertise,” Dahlke shot back.

“You were crying so much I needed him to hold you down,” I added.

I clanked my Captain Diet against Dahlke’s can of Hamm’s.

“Just another story now,” my dad said from his chair in the corner.

A hook’s nothing to be afraid of, really. Sure, sometimes it’s sharp, but it’s really just a tool that’s meant to bring something closer.

The barb is what you need to watch out for.

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Mr. Anderson opened the door and scowled.

“Why are you at my house?” he asked.

He was a teacher and coach in Farmington. I’d never had him in class, but knew him through my dad. They were both golfers, and I was involved in enough school sports and activities that we crossed paths pretty often.

But this was the first time I’d ever been at his house.

“Is Polly home?” I replied.

“Why do you want to talk to my daughter?” he asked.

Ah.

I was 16, Polly had just graduated. I thought she was one of the prettiest girls in school. We’d traded maybe a dozen words ever.

When you grow up in a small town and interact with people for long enough, even in passing, it’s natural to assume that you know them and they know you. And to some degree, that’s true. But standing on the front walk with Mr. Anderson looming over me from the step above, it was suddenly clear that we were only acquaintances.

If Mr. Anderson had known me better, he would’ve realized there was no way I’d make a cold ask for a date. The prospect was terrifying.

Nope. She was one of the best sprinters and hurdlers on the high school track team. My reasons for knocking were competitive, not romantic.

“I’m putting together a bed race team for Dew Days,” I said.

He rolled his eyes and smirked.

“Of course you are,” he said.

By the time I left, Polly had agreed to participate.

The Sweet Dreams Speed Team was off and running.

My hometown of Farmington, Minnesota used to drink the most Mountain Dew per capita in the United States—so I come by my love for it naturally. In 1979, PepsiCo stepped in to sponsor an annual community festival.

Over the years it’s been called Mountain Dew Days, then Founders’ Days, then Dew Days, then Rambling River Days, then Dew Days again, and now it’s been rescued by another company that puts Farmington in distinguished Midwestern territory. As of 2025, the new name for the community celebration is “Top the Tater Days”—after the cult-favorite regional dip that’s made at the Kemp’s dairy plant in town.

Mountain Dew and Top the Tater. Can you think of two better distinctions for a small town?

There’s nothing unusual about the annual town festival. Food vendors, rides, a kiddie parade, and vendors from local business and community organizations fill the streets of town.

My dad’s team won the bed race championship in 1988, a month and a half before I was born.

What is a bed race, you ask?

It’s a bed on wheels. Four people race it down the street with one rider on the bed. At the end of the course, the team has to stop the bed and complete a task of some sort, then race back to the other end with four new runners. The first team across the original starting line is the winner.

That first year, Dahlke and I cobbled together a team and ordered some cut-off muscle shirts with a hastily-designed logo. If I recall correctly, we managed to knock off the highly vaunted team from Pellicci Hardware that seemed to win every year, but fell to the fire department. Oh well.

A few summers later, we decided to give it another go. We decided to keep the team name and dress in patriotic garb. Dahlke and I got serious about our game plan.

“There’s nothing in the rules that says you have to touch the bed,” I said. “All it says is four runners and one rider.”

Dahlke and I usually pushed the bed from behind, using our stocky sprinters’ builds to accelerate from the starting line standstill.

“Ah,” he said. “Like running through first base.”

“And then into a wall,” I continued.

“Only if the rider is cool with it,” he said.

I nodded.

After a team meeting, we decided to go for it. Two smaller guys started at the back of the bed and pushed as Dahlke and I pulled. Once we got to cruising speed, he and I had just enough left in our legs to get a few strides ahead of the bed. As soon as we crossed the turnaround line, we stopped, pivoted, and braced.

The bed’s plywood “headboard” crashed into our shoulders. Our running teammates let go and sprinted past us, ready to begin the task. The rider jumped out of the bed.

Somehow, Dahlke and I weren’t injured. Isn’t it great to be 19 years old? Looking back, I don’t remember signing a waiver.

The maneuver bought us a few extra seconds. Next, our task. Our runner had to put on a sumo wrestler suit, then get through several hula hoops. Our job was to help.

We won the first heat. I was feeling good about our prospects.

After watching a couple more teams, it was our turn again. If we won this race, we’d advance to the championship.

We raced down, survived the crash at the turnaround, and completed our task. Our four new runners took off with the bed. We were neck and neck with the other team when disaster struck.

A reporter for the local newspaper was taking pictures. I didn’t see what happened, but she somehow stepped in front of our bed and got clipped by the speeding frame. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. Unfortunately, our bed got thrown off course and we lost the race.

I tried to appeal. The race coordinator was sympathetic but couldn’t figure out how to remedy the situation. I offered several reasonable suggestions to no avail.

The week after, I sent an email with a few recommendations. Apparently bed races were very important to me at the time, though I’ve never done it since.

It was 2008, the great recession, around the time my mom sold the flower shop and my dad left his longtime company and picked up work delivering anhydrous ammonia tanks to farmers while he looked for another design job. It seemed like we weathered it okay, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. Ah, the ignorance and arrogance of youth.

Anyway, that email turned out to be a bad idea. Dahlke and I got volunteered to organize the bed races the next year. Another perk of living in a small town: plenty of opportunities to serve your community. Sometimes whether you want to or not.

This summer, I was able to get back to my old hometown to check out Top the Tater Days with my parents. I was glad to see that Farmington’s bed-racing tradition continues. The championship team took home $300. The best dressed team and the best team spirit awards earned an even better prize—a one-year supply of Top the Tater.

In Nova Scotia, I’ll have the Pictou Lobster Carnival to fill my annual celebration needs. The activities are a little different—boat races and lobster banding contests—but the idea is the same:

Community and competition. Two of my favorite things.

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I’m not sure exactly when Hayley and I got engaged. It might’ve been somewhere between Chippewa Falls and Wausau, Wisconsin. And I can’t really remember if it happened coming or going.

It was early July, 2018. We’d been dating for six months and it had been serious from pretty much day one. It was time to talk about marriage.

I wasn’t nervous, exactly. But I knew it was something I wanted to get right.

I’d been informed early in the relationship that Hayley was not interested in being proposed to. Okay, I thought, I don’t like surprises either. I could handle that.

I was warned off from asking her father’s blessing. And her mother’s, for that matter.

“Bad idea,” she said. “They’ll wonder why you’re asking them. Plus, I get to decide.”

Can’t argue with that logic.

To be honest, I probably would’ve asked them if she hadn’t talked me out of it. I thought it was the polite thing to do. I’m from the Midwest, after all.

Hayley and I were driving from Saint Peter, Minnesota to Suamico, Wisconsin, just north of Green Bay. We were on the way out for my friend Dahlke’s wedding. I had a shiny new credential of ministry from the Universal Life Church and was set to officiate the ceremony.

“Okay,” I said. We’d just crossed the border into Wisconsin. “Where do you want to start?”

We’d compiled a list of topics. I wasn’t expecting any surprises, but it’s good to check the fine print before entering into a binding legal contract.

“Pets,” she said. “I want 12 cats and several dogs.”

That’s how I remember it, anyway.

She’d thrown me into the deep end of the pool. Forget politics and religion. If I could weather this topic I had a good chance of marrying her someday.

At the time, we had Duke and two cats.

“I think our pets are perfect right now,” I ventured.

I waited a few seconds. She didn’t say anything.

My family always had dogs. I understood dogs.

“Maybe another dog someday, but we’ll need a bigger yard.”

She smiled. We were off and running.

As for me, I would never choose to have a cat.

Love does funny things to a person.

Halfway though the drive, Hayley took over at the wheel so I could review my notes for the ceremony. What an honor it is to be asked to preside over one of your best friends’ weddings.1 Also, what the hell was he thinking?

I studied my remarks for the dozenth time. Dahlke and I had been through a lot. I was nervous but couldn’t show it and wouldn’t let him down. People expect a certain presence and sense of calm from their wedding officiant. I charted my course for the weekend accordingly.

A bunch of my high school friends and acquaintances were hanging out in the garage when we arrived at the house on the western shore of Lake Michigan. It was mid-afternoon and it appeared that we were a few hours late to the party.

I introduced Hayley to the group, then excused myself to go find Dahke and his fiance.

Things were less rowdy inside. I greeted Dahlke with a hug, then introduced myself to his future in-laws. I talked everyone through what to expect from the ceremony, and clarified a few details and preferences. Everyone was feeling good about the plan when I returned to the garage.

“Hayley’s great,” a skinny guy from high school slurred at me. We weren’t close friends but I’d known him since Little League.

“She gives really good advice.”

I looked at Hayley.

“He has a new girlfriend,” she shrugged.

Speaking of girlfriends, one of mine from high school was also there. I learned later that she’d spent quite a bit of time telling Hayley about all of my favorite things.

Of course, my old girlfriend did it in the present tense even though more than a dozen years had passed. She, too, had consumed a few adult beverages.

“I knew about the Mountain Dew,” Hayley teased me later. “But I didn’t realize how much you loved Top Gun.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or concerned, but I was glad she was enjoying herself.

The next day, I sidled up to Dahlke before pictures.

“I look like a goddamn leprechaun,” I said.

The wedding colors were emerald and gray. As the officiant, I was wearing a green bowtie over my vest and corsage. My round face bulged red above the too-tight rental collar.

Dahlke chuckled.

“I wanted you to look like a leprechaun,” he said.

You never really know if Dahlke is kidding or not. When I thought about it later, I still couldn’t decide if he’d picked the outfit for me on purpose or just delighted in the lucky coincidence when it happened.

After the wedding, we signed the marriage license on the top of a car outside the reception hall then danced the night away.

On the drive back to Minnesota, Hayley and I continued our discussion. Finances, kids, careers. It all seemed to line up.

I’d never had any doubts, but seeing her gracefully navigate a wild weekend of high school friends and family and strangers and do it all with a smile had only made me more certain. To be honest, she handled the whole thing better than I did.

Thirteen months later, we were married. In the six years since, we’ve asked each other a bunch more questions about how we should go about navigating life together.

Sometimes, as we go through this journey together, I think back to when she advised me not to ask her parents for their blessing. In a funny way, it reminds us we’re on the same team and has helped guide us through some tough decisions.

“We get to decide,” I say. “Let’s talk about it.”

The flags outside the campus center hung at half staff on first-year move-in day.

It was Friday of Labor Day weekend, a still morning on the hilltop campus above the Minnesota River Valley. I couldn’t decide if the lifeless flags looked tired or ashamed.

There’d been another mass shooting earlier in the week, this one at a Catholic elementary school in Minneapolis. An eight-year-old and 10-year-old are dead, 18 people wounded, and a community where faith and learning walk hand in hand now devastated, never to be the same. On the morning of their service to mark the beginning of the school year, Annunciation’s church and school was transformed not by the weight of ideas shared or debated or voted on but by the actions of one person with tools that allow for the sudden, exponential expansion of suffering. The same predictable arguments and talking points would follow.

When news of the shooting broke, I was on campus in Saint Peter at the first faculty meeting of the year. The mood in the air was one of cautious optimism for the days ahead. Higher education is going through a tough stretch, no doubt. Some of it’s sector-wide and self-inflicted, a lot of it’s being pushed by straw man arguments. But my little institution has a lot of things going right, and we were preparing to welcome our biggest incoming class since the pandemic.

A few hours later, a senior administrator started crying in my office. He had close connections to the Annunciation community and was especially shaken by the fact that the shooting had taken place during a worship service for kids. I’m better at managing people’s problems than their emotions, but I tried my best.

On move-in day, I got to my office around 6:45 a.m. and dumped a packet of Emergen-C into a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I was checking email for the third time that morning when the Provost stuck her head in the door.

“All good?”

I nodded.

“I think we’re ready,” she said. “Here we go.”

The best of us, she disappeared down the hall.

Move-in day on a college campus is always bittersweet. Opportunity, excitement, anxiety, sadness, and hope all play a role depending on the person, or sometimes, depending on the minute. Our student orientation leaders and staff brought energy and tissues, trying to turn the tide of feelings to positive or at least to guide new students and parents to the gentler edges of the emotional current.

After spending the morning assembling futons and hauling miniature refrigerators into residence halls, new students and their loved ones were invited to a convocation service in the college’s chapel.

Earlier, I’d conferred with the chaplains about the optimal placement of the base for the college’s ceremonial mace, then double-checked the service binders at the pulpit and lectern. When no one else was around, I made a quiet wish, or prayer I guess, hoping for a good year. I don’t know who or what I was praying to, maybe just the universe. Like a former smoker chewing on a pen, sometimes the ritual is enough.

New college students started to trickle in with their parents. One of the Campus Safety guys stood in the back. Another made his way through the growing crowd. I helped straighten a few doctoral hoods as the President and senior team lined up to process up the aisle in their academic regalia. Families continued to stream in. A Saint Peter police squad pulled up outside the chapel and parked with two wheels on the sidewalk. When the officer came in, I shook his hand and thanked him for being there.

We started five minutes late because it took so long to get everyone packed into the chapel. It was a good problem to have, but I made a note to see if we could get the carillon bells rung early next year. At the back of the chapel, I checked in with one of the chaplains, then gave a thumbs up to the vice president seated in the front row. He signaled the organist in the balcony, who wrapped up the verse and switched from gathering music to the processional.

So far, so good.

I find it hard to sit still for a service, so I usually stand in the back and keep an eye on things. The speakers sounded good in the balcony and main seating area but weren’t as loud in the wings. I wondered if we could make some adjustments before next week.

As an English major I’d read a bunch of American literature, but I never got into The Catcher in the Rye the way some people do. Holden Caulfield is kind of insufferable, a whiny guy who doesn’t play by the rules and is surprised when people don’t know what to do with him. And besides, everybody knows a bunch of people are phonies, I remember thinking, he should just deal with it like the rest of us and move on. I much preferred To Kill a Mockingbird and its weightier lessons. Clearly, I missed the point.

Of course, missing the point or not taking action when it comes to problematic but often unsympathetic characters plays some role in our nationwide shooting problem. It’s easier to say another prayer or twist the speculative intentions of a misfiring brain into a conspiracy than it is to confront what’s clearly an issue with the most obvious solutions—common-sense gun laws and more funding for community mental health resources.

It’s complicated, they say, it’s about freedom. Plus, we have more important things to spend our money on.

It’d probably help a lot if we’d turn down the “world is on fire and someone’s to blame” rhetoric. That solution wouldn’t cost a dime.

Today, I can understand Holden’s dream for which the book is named, where he pictures himself in a field of rye at the edge of a cliff, racing back and forth to catch careless children before they fall over the edge.

Substitute work shit and moving for Holden’s kids, and you’ve got my version.

Then again, I think a lot of people feel that way about something or other these days.

I bet you do.

At the end of the convocation service, the teary-eyed new students and their families traded farewells. Of their many hopes, I imagine the parents wish most of all that their children will be safe.

Did I expect a problem in the quiet college’s hilltop chapel on move-in day?

No.

But I didn’t want people to worry. I know what it feels like to worry.

I wish that we lived a world where I—we—didn’t have to.

By Labor Day, the flowers outside Annunciation will have already wilted and left stains on the Minneapolis sidewalk. Soon, someone will sweep them away. There’s no school on the holiday, so hopefully we go one more day without another shooting. We’ll all keep an eye on the headlines.

Monday is also Hayley’s birthday. She’ll celebrate in Nova Scotia with one of her best friends from Saint Peter who flew in to surprise her.

I plan to be in my office on campus shortly after 6 a.m.

How did I get here?

For Christ’s sake, how did all of us get here?

I don’t know if I’m ashamed or just tired of it all.

I emptied my savings account to buy a used Harley Sportster from my friend’s mom’s second ex-husband. (To be fair, they were still married at the time of the transaction.)

I’d spent the year after college splitting time between living at home and in my aunt and uncle’s spare room because it was closer to work. Despite my student loan payments, I’d managed to scrape together a couple thousand bucks. I’d just moved to a rental house in Mankato with Jake and one of my other college roommates. My job as an admission counselor at Gustavus was fun and new. I lived a 20-minute drive away. And I’d just turned 24.

Why wouldn’t I buy myself a Harley? I didn’t care if it was the smallest, cheapest, most uncomfortable bike they made.

Not to be outdone, Jake bought a used Suzuki Boulevard a few months later.

We were young guys on our own, making a little money for the first time. We had no real problems or commitments or major life stressors, though you never really recognize that at the time.

We called ourselves the Thunder Volcanoes.

I regret that we never had patches made.

On quiet weekends, we’d ride out west of Mankato on the Judson Bottom Road that rolls along the Minnesota River, head north to Nicollet and stop at Schmidt’s Meat Market, then glide east to Saint Peter. We picked up Rabbit Road along the river bottom, then followed the Kasota prairie past the stone quarries and back south into Mankato.

We strapped duffel bags to our seats, crammed clothes in a backpack, and rode up north to the Loon’s Roost. Neither of us had windshields, so the trip to the cabin was a four-hour endurance test with highway-speed winds to the chest and the backpack pulling you to the rear. Our traps and lats would be sore for days. A couple times we met up with Dahlke on the way to the cabin, buzzing in from intersecting interstates and merging in St. Paul like worker bees queueing up to return to the hive.

I roamed Minnesota’s driftless area in a ragtag group of big guys on little bikes, me on my Sportster, Dahlke on his old rebuilt Honda, and another buddy from high school on a cafe racer he’d cobbled together on his own.

We never ran into any Hell’s Angels, but I don’t think they would’ve given us much trouble.

Twice, Jake and I got stuck in bad, sudden downpours and were glad to ride away. Another time I went to the shoulder to thread the needle between the Jersey barrier and a no-look merger on Highway 100 west of Minneapolis. That was a fun one. It wasn’t till the highway opened up in Shakopee that I was able to unclench my jaw.

We were in a parking lot in Mankato once when a driver cut me off and I somehow avoided the accident but went over the handlebars into a grass median. Jake was surprised when I somersaulted right through it and popped to my feet. It was adrenaline, I guess, or muscle memory from those “falling lessons” as a kid at the local Taekwondo studio. I was fine, just shaken up. The bike survived with a scratch.

Still, I never got over the feeling that my boots, jacket, and vest were just a costume.

I don’t know why that is, but it probably made it easier to hang them up for good.

After those few golden summers, I found myself taking the bike out less and less. I’m not sure what did it, really. Maybe it was getting older. Could’ve been when I started dating Hayley. Our house is close to campus—it hardly seemed worth it to fire up the motorcycle for such a short trip to work. And let’s be honest, most likely my job had something to do with it.

The next thing I realized, my motorcycle hadn’t left the garage in five years.

I sold the old girl last year for less than it was worth, glad to see it go to a friend of a friend who knew how to fix it up.

I wonder if the other Jakes ever get their old steel horses running.

Probably not, both of them with young kids now and other things going on in life. It’s funny how your focus shifts.

I don’t miss it, really.

Maybe once in awhile.

You see, I used to snake a headphone wire up my jacket. I’d tuck in a single earbud and carefully put on my helmet. I had an old iPod shuffle so there was no picking the tune. But boy was there something to being out on the road on a summer day when just the right song came on, bugs splattering your helmet, feeling the grit of dust between your teeth.

It’s one of the greatest things in the world until a June bug hits you in the throat at 70 miles per hour.

The wakeup call came early on the first full day that I ever spent in Nova Scotia.

When Hayley and I rolled out of bed at 3 a.m., my future father-in-law, Nipsy, was already scrounging around in the kitchen upstairs. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or the dogs. Maybe a little of both.

Then again, I could have been hearing voices. Hayley and I got in around supper time the day before after a three-day, 2,000-mile (3,220 km) drive from Saint Peter. We went to bed early but it took awhile for me to fall asleep after all the excitement of arriving in Pictou for the first time. Throw in the two-hour time difference from Minnesota and the dark basement bedroom, and I hardly even knew where I was.

I put on pair of gym shorts and an old football t-shirt and headed upstairs.

“Coffee, TJ?” Nipsy asked.

I squinted at the kitchen lights, rubbed an eye, and grunted something that must’ve sounded affirmative.

“Fill your boots.” He nodded to the pot on the stove, then disappeared out the door.

I poured a cup and dropped in two ice cubes. I blew across the top and took a sip.

Holy shit.

That woke me up, alright. I wondered if it was some kind of marine-grade industrial stuff he’d ordered along with oil filters and fuel-line cleaner. I didn’t know if it had been created in a lab or brewed through copper tubing somewhere deep in the woods.

I tried another sip. Now that I knew what to expect, I kind of liked it.

Hayley came upstairs a few minutes later. I was pacing back and forth in the living room, eyes double-bloodshot from the lack of sleep and concentrated caffeine.

I hoisted a pair of rubber boots in the air with one hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

I shook a thermos at her with the other.

“Your dad tried to poison me but I’m too strong.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Let’s go fishing,” I said.

We pulled into Caribou Wharf after the 10-minute drive from Pictou. Navigational lights and floods snapped on as diesel engines coughed to life. Captains and helpers hauled fish trays filled with frozen bait down from the wharf and stacked them on the decks of the boats.

Nipsy and his helper, Eddie Lyons, were already aboard the Hayley and Noah. The boat was tied up outside Sea Mist Again, which is captained by one of Nipsy’s best friends, Clinton. Hayley climbed down the ladder and walked across the transom to the boat that bore her name.

I hesitated for a second, then followed.

There I was, clambering over a concrete wall and balance-beaming across a gunwale, all of this taking place literally at the end of the road where a spur of the Trans-Canada Highway runs into the ocean. No warning signs except on the fuel tanks and garbage bins. Diesel exhaust, cigarette smoke, and salt spray mixed in the humid pre-dawn air. This is pretty damn cool, I thought.

I jumped onto the deck of the Hayley and Noah.

Hayley was wearing pink rubber oilskins. She introduced me to Eddie for the first time.

“Should be a good day,” Eddie said, “Weather looks A-1.”

“Put those on, DJ,” Nipsy said, pointing to a pair of blaze orange rubber overalls that matched Eddie’s and his own.

They fit just fine, I thought.

We joined the swarm of lobster boats sailing out of the wharf at 4 a.m.

Out on the bottom of the ocean sat Nipsy’s 280 lobster traps. They were grouped in 56 trawls. Each trawl consists of five traps strung along a length of rope that has a colored buoy on each end. We motored up to one of the buoys. Nipsy locked onto it with a spotlight and Eddie reached out to snag the rope with a gaff. He hauled up the first few feet by hand, then passed the line to Nipsy, who strung it over a pulley then secured it in the hauler that would drag the traps up to the boat. When a trap reached the surface, Nipsy bent down, grabbed it from the water, and pulled it up onto the port gunwale.

From there, Eddie went to work, quickly opening the trap, pulling out lobster, removing the old bait, rebaiting the trap, then sliding it down the rail. He was a one-man assembly line.

If a lobster was too small, it went back over the edge. Female lobsters carry their eggs curled under their tail. If you saw even one egg hidden under there, the lobster went back in the sea. Once all five traps were cleaned and filled with new bait, Nipsy hit a button to release the trawl back into the water.

Eddie didn’t wait. As soon as the last trap was ready, he spun around to the sorting table where he’d been putting the lobsters that warranted a closer look. He reached into a bucket of rubber bands, emerging with one clamped around the end of the pliers-like tool. He snapped the rubber band around a lobster’s claw, then repeated the process. Eddie measured the back of the lobster with a metal measuring tool that hung from the table by a string. If it was big enough, it was a “market” lobster—the kind you see in restaurants and that draw a higher price at the wharf. If they were smaller but still legal size, they went in the “canner” tank. These lobsters would most likely be used for processed seafood products.

We watched carefully as Eddie handled the first trawl, then Hayley stepped in to help band the lobster claws. That left me on bait duty.

Once Eddie had plucked the lobster, he slid the metal trap down the gunwale. I reached in with a pair of thick rubber gloves, pulled the old, chewed-up bait out of the trap and tossed it overboard. I replaced it with a mackerel that I’d cut into three pieces, then closed the trap and slid it down the rail. It wasn’t so bad in the morning, when the hardest part was cutting the frozen fish. But as the day wore on and the bait fish thawed, it became a dirtier, stinkier job.

The sun came up over the Northumberland Strait as we worked. After awhile, it was time for a break. Nipsy heated up breakfast sandwiches and coffee on the stove down in the berth.

I switched to lobster banding.

“Be careful of the claws,” Eddie warned. “They’ll pinch you if they can.”

We had a full boat by the time we finished our last trawl and started making our way back to Caribou.

It had been a great day on the water. Sure, it was hard work, but the sun, calm seas, and crowded traps made the time pass quickly.

A couple days later, I decided to go out again. Hayley stayed home. Nipsy had said it would be a little windy.

It turns out I should’ve asked a few more questions about the forecast.

I spent most of the trip hanging over the side of the boat feeding the fish. Between bouts of sea-sickness, I helped band lobster and stack traps. It was “hauling day,” so we were pulling the traps out for the season, filling the back of the boat, and bringing them back to the wharf.

“You’re doing great, buddy,” Eddie said. It didn’t feel like it. “Nipsy’s had a bunch of guys who get sick and just curl up in the cabin and quit. Good on ya for keeping at’er.”

The truth is, I felt the best I did all day in the 30 minutes after each time I puked. I figured I might as well make the most of the time by working.

We got back to the wharf to drop off the first load of traps. A teenage kid Nipsy had hired was standing on the wharf. He’d overslept and missed the boat earlier.

“JJ, trade with him and get some sleep,” Nipsy said. He pressed his car keys into my hand. I half-heartedly protested, then gratefully climbed the ladder to solid ground.

When I got back to the house, I collapsed into bed. I’d been sick seven or eight times and was exhausted.

“How’d it go?” Hayley asked when she got home from her run.

“It was a tough day,” I answered. “But I think I did alright.”

Jake and I were sawing away at a fallen tree with a two-man buck when a Chevy Tahoe turned off the gravel road into the driveway.

My dad was in the driver’s seat and his friend Joel was riding shotgun. We watched them pull in.

I took a long pull from a can of Hamm’s and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Jake leaned back, mopped his brow.

“About time you guys showed up,” he said.

We bent back down and made a show of continuing our manly work.

“You guys are full of it,” Joel hollered.

He was hanging halfway out the window. No sense waiting five seconds for my dad to park when he could start talking right away.

Jake and I broke into laughter. I greeted Joel with a hug.

Dahlke piled out of the back seat. He’d caught a ride from Farmington with my dad and Joel.

My dad took in the scenery.

“Looks like fishing will have to wait,” he said.

A bad storm had rolled in the night before. There were a few trees down in the yard. A mature pine had snapped off and was lying on the roof of the fishing shed.

Fortunately for me and my dad, it was the annual guys’ weekend fishing trip at the Akin family cabin. There would be plenty of hands to help. And the witty banter, insufferable in any other setting, would help make for light work.

Joel was already providing a steady stream of commentary on everything from professional golf to how to approach the yard clean-up.

“You need a beer?” Dahlke asked.

“Only if you’ve got a cold Douly,” Joel replied. He was the only guy I knew who drank O’Douls on the regular. I didn’t understand it at the time.

The other guys arrived somewhere in the scrum of unpacking and getting ready to take on the downed trees.

I returned the antique saw to its spot on the garage wall. Uncle Haltey wandered around picking up sticks and singing the Lumberjack Song from Monty Python. Dahlke fired up a chainsaw and started clearing limbs from the first downed tree.

It’s always good to have an Eagle Scout around.

The origins of the annual men’s weekend retreat to the Loon’s Roost are unclear to me. Maybe it started in the early 80s, soon after my grandpa bought the property. Apparently in those days you could afford a cabin on the water on one public servant’s salary. Back then, my dad’s softball team stayed at the cabin while playing in a nearby tournament. A more recent iteration was his yearly golf and fishing trip in the late 90s and early 00s. The traveling trophy from that era consisted of a bottle of Advil with a golf ball hot-glued to the lid and two jigheads serving as handles. It sits in a place of honor on a shelf in the corner of the kitchen.

Today, my dad simply refers to the annual gathering as “Fish Camp.” For all of us, I think, there’s a lot more to it than that.

When the storm had rolled through in 2012, there were nine of us that made the trip. If the group was a recipe it would be a hotdish, extra salt.

• Joel - Several years younger than my dad, they first met when Joel was a hotshot junior high pitcher throwing illegal curveballs on a baseball team coached by Uncle Haltey. He worked at the hardware store in Farmington, then for the local electric co-op.

• Uncle Haltey - No relation to me. One of my dad’s lifelong best friends. Recovering liberal arts major and general philosopher-grump.

• Fumblitis - Uncle Haltey’s teenaged son. Tagged with the moniker by Joel after repeatedly dropping fishing equipment in the boat.

• The Provider - One of my dad’s best friends. The self-proclaimed “Provider” because he cleaned all the fish—and says he caught them all, too. Good listener, bad jokes, sound advice.

• Mr. W. - An independent older man from Farmington with a developmental disability. He supported and was supported by many in the community over the years, including my grandparents. Before my time, he used to have an old black cat that he walked around town on a leash. Mr. W. loved to fish.

• Dahlke - Jake Dahlke, my high school buddy, karaoke partner, and best friend. Up for anything, jack of all trades, foxhole-caliber guy.

• Jake - My college and 20-something roommate, best man, and best friend. Typically a positive, moderating influence for everyone. Generally quiet, occasional top-10 zingers.

• My dad - The patriarch of the trip. Second-generation Loon’s Rooster. Central connection point. Likes fishing almost as much as Mr. W. Competitive.

• And yours truly - Jacob—”Jake” to family, “JJ” to everyone else—Akin. Lots of Jacobs born in the 80s. Two of them happened to be my best friends.

After clearing up the worst of the timber, it was time to hit the water. My dad took Mr. W., Uncle Haltey, and Fumblitis out in the pontoon. The Provider invited Joel to hop in his boat. That left the Jakes.

We piled into my late grandpa’s seasoned Alumacraft with our fishing gear and a cooler of beer. The 9.9-horse motor labored under the weight of an all-conference wrestler and two college football players, still big but already starting to soften up.

We told some tall tales and caught a few fish. The Jakes talked a good game, but we didn’t know anything about life. How could we? We were 23.

By supper time on Saturday, we’d caught enough keepers to have a fish fry. Fumblitis hauled up the bucket of fish from the dock as The Provider honed his filet knife. Jake set up the outdoor kitchen. Joel and Dahlke teamed up to batter and cook the fish as my dad looked on and offered some pointers. Were they helpful suggestions? I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder.

There were a few minor flare-ups but a well-timed joke or two ensured that nothing boiled over. The end result was a perfect meal of walleye, perch, and crappie accompanied by baked beans and fried potato slices, all of it washed down with Hamm’s and Captain Morgan, brandy on the rocks, O’Douls, Mountain Dew, milk, Monster Energy, and root beer, depending who you asked.

After dinner, I sat on the deck with Jake and smoked a cigar. I kept an occasional eye on the life-jacketed Mr. W., who was bobber fishing for bluegills from a lawn chair on the dock.

Earlier, he’d tried to pull a fast one. Apparently the rest of us had taken too long to get moving again after lunch. When the fish called, Mr. W. could be counted on to answer.

“What’re you doing down there without a life jacket?” Joel shouted through the window screen while washing dishes.

Mr. W. gave a dismissive hand flap over his shoulder. “I’m fishing!”

“You can’t fish without a life jacket!” Joel fired back down the hill.

Mr. W. waved him off again and plunked his worm in the water.

“Why I oughta come down there and kick your ass!” Joel yelled.

Intervention seemed like the prudent path. I went down the steps to the dock and gave Mr. W. his life jacket. He put it on without debate.

“Thank you, Jacob,” Mr. W. said. He’d known me since I was a small child. “Jacob, you tell that Joel to watch out. I’ve got an Irish temper.”

“I’ll let him know,” I replied.

Joel helped Mr. W. dish up for supper and sat next to him at the kitchen table for the evening meal. They went on like old friends. Having spent most of their lives in Farmington despite being born a quarter century apart, I guess they kind of were.

Later that night, after Mr. W. had gone to bed, the rest of us were sitting around in the living room. The play-by-play of a Twins game provided background noise from the television at the edge of the room. I was paging through an old book of poetry I’d pulled from a shelf, two and a half sheets to the wind, when someone suggested I read a poem aloud.

I don’t know if they forgot that I was an English major.

I read a poem.

“Your turn, lips,” I said to Joel.

He somehow managed to yap constantly without ever being truly annoying. He shrugged and gestured for me to toss him the book. Joel thumbed through the thin volume for a minute, then loudly cleared his throat and read a poem.

Everyone snapped politely.

Dahlke asked for the book. He read a poem.

My dad read a poem.

Fumblitis declined.

The Provider read a poem.

Uncle Haltey wouldn’t read one, at least that first year.

Jake read a poem.

I read another.

Joel died of pancreatic cancer in 2016 at the age of 52. The year before, he’d won the Minnesota state powerlifting championship in his division.

A few months before the end, my dad called and said that he and Joel were making a last-minute trip to the cabin. It was mid-September and the forecast called for a beautiful early fall weekend. Dad wanted to know if I could make it. I'd just started in a new position at Gustavus and I didn't know if I could get away, but when things looked clear at five o’clock on Friday, I hustled home, grabbed a bag, and hit the road.

After catching up with mostly-true stories that night, we loaded up the pontoon after breakfast on Saturday. None of us really expected to catch any fish that time of year, but the sun was shining enough to take the chill out of the air. We trolled back and forth for awhile, maybe pulling in a fish or two, before Joel tied into a big one.

Of course, because it was Joel and he liked to talk, we didn't believe him at first.

But it was even more remarkable because we all knew—even though nobody said it—that this was Joel's last trip to the Loon's Roost. And on that bright, chilly fall day, when the fishing wasn't any good at all, somehow this big northern found Joel's hook. And somehow the six-pound line, brittle and worn from a summer of wind and water and sun, cut and re-tied a dozen times over, didn't break. When we got the big fish in the net and brought it over the railing into the boat, the lure, which had been hanging loosely from the side of the fish's mouth, immediately fell to the floor of the boat. But there was Joel smiling, holding his northern for one last Loon’s Roost photo before releasing the fish to fight another day.

"It was the biggest one I've ever caught," he said later that night. There was no bravado in his voice, honest this time despite all the fish stories he’d told over the years.

I remember that trip all the time.

The Sunday morning goodbyes at Fish Camp are quick. Nobody wants to linger too long or say too much. Sometimes, a guy packs up and sneaks off before everyone is awake. You can’t catch the magic every year, and even when you do it always wears off quickly.

I get it. The morning sun’s not the same when you need to head back to the real world.

But we’ve done the poetry reading every June since that first time back in 2012. Guys have even penned a few of their own.

I’ll leave you with one today.1

Fish Camp
by JJ Akin
May 2024

Two generations and the spectre of another,
and a few other ghosts besides,
        depending how you define the term—
they haunt a cabin called the Loon’s Roost each June.

The scene is not of eldritch horror,
or supernatural auroras 
winding through Norway pines
and tickling the back of their necks.

A charge in the air all the same,
a certain energy, positive mostly,
excitement even, 
        or what passes for it in a man today,
expectations all year of stories to be told.
A worship service, a revival meeting of
water, sun, fishing, fire, laughter, food.

And on Saturday,
after the last fingers of daylight reach for the sky,
and finally lose their grip on the horizon,
the men pause the Euchre game, 
and read poetry aloud. 

Two old drinkers, three decades sober off the brown stuff,
        red-eyed tonight but that doesn’t count, anyway,
at least two more who aren’t done yet,
and it’s they who raise a toast,
and recite their poems the loudest,
walking into middle age
with the confidence of relative youth
        and maybe a little faith remaining, 
        or the belief, at least, 
        that there’s still time to repent.

A few other characters around the room,
young, old, layered, undiagnosed,
each unexplainable to the uninitiated.

With advanced degrees and with applied experience
in the hard lessons and ways of the world,
setting aside the politics of the moment,
the men take up well-thumbed chapbooks, 
swap garage-sale anthologies,
unfold their own scribbled, earnest words, written haltingly 
        with an unexamined mix of embarrassment and pride
over the course of the last year.

There is no conductor as the gravelly choir sings vespers.
Each soloist hits his own discordant notes
of tempo, meter, intensity, and rhyme. 
But a relentless crescendo swells through the room
as the sections come together—

Is this what God is?
A summer watchnight symphony of men together, 
        for a short time, unafraid?

And it’s standing room only for the visiting spirits who gather,
those who have wandered in across the years—
some longer than others,
some pulled by life in other directions,
some no longer welcome,
some gone for good. 

“But why should I lie here longer?
I am not dead yet, though in years,
And the world’s way is yet long to go,
And I love the world even in my anger,
And love is a hard thing to outgrow.” 

“American Portrait,” is the benediction,
whispered almost, as the songbook closes for another year.
Tomorrow is Sunday, but these men took communion early, 
        the only kind that seems to work.

Afterward, the glare of reality returning, 
both clock hands nearly vertical, fading,
I look at these people I love
        each picking up again the things they carry, 
        whether they know it or not. 

It’s a wistful recognition when,
quietly drinking in the scene, 
a question comes to mind—

I smile to myself, 
        leave it unspoken.

When I met Hayley for the first time, I was wearing short denim cut-offs and a leather tool belt.

We didn’t start dating until over a year later, but with an introduction like that it’s really no wonder she found me so charming and all-around irresistible.

A week or so earlier, I’d run into a friend and colleague at work. We caught up about her son, who’d been a few years behind me on the college football team, then she told me about a new professor in the health and exercise science department.

“Her name is Hayley. I think she’s around your age,” my friend said. “You should invite her to your Halloween party.”

Made sense to me. The more the merrier. At the time, I lived in a four-bedroom rental in Saint Peter with an assistant swim coach, a graduate assistant in sports information, and my best friend and former college roommate, Jake, who worked closing deals at the car lot in town. We had a great Gustavus social group with admission counselors and athletic coaches in their late 20s and early 30s, plus a broader cut of faculty and staff from various departments and ages. Most of us were connected in some way to a twice-weekly game of pickup soccer we fondly called “Noontime Boomtime.”

I was the college’s communications guy, so I was used to quick conversations with folks from across campus to check a number or get a quote for a story. I looked Hayley up in the directory and punched her extension into my phone.

“Hello?” she said.

Nice, I thought, it’s always good to catch someone at their desk on that first call.

“I’m JJ Akin from the marketing office,” I said. “I’m having a Halloween party on Saturday. You should come. Bring a friend.”

“Okay…” she replied. Looking back, it may have been a question rather than a commitment.

“Great,” I said. I gave her the details and hung up. One more item off the party-planning checklist.

I learned later that she thought the conversation was awkward and that it was weird that I’d called her office phone. So yeah, I guess the government is right. It is hard to be a straight white guy.

The party started around sundown. I mixed myself a Captain Morgan and Diet Coke in a yellow plastic takeout cup from Dickey’s Barbecue Pit.

The men’s basketball coach and his date were dressed as hippies. A fly fisherman in his mid-fifties, he approached life as sort of a wry amateur philosopher. If I squinted at his personality and considered replacing his usual bourbon with a different, um, reflective substance, I could picture him in Haight-Ashbury. Good costume.

A communication and gender studies professor showed up wearing a curly-haired wig and a high school letter jacket. “Marty” was embroidered on the chest. I knew him as a brilliant, moody scholar and documentary filmmaker. Now it made sense why he was so good during those lunchtime soccer games.

The woman who’d told me to invite Hayley was dressed, I believe, as Velma from Scooby Doo. Her husband was a Duke basketball player.

Hayley and a friend from grad school showed up dressed as 80s pop stars.

I was the construction worker from the Village People. I don’t recall if I was still wearing a hardhat when Hayley arrived. A couple of my buddies were sporting cowboy gear and motorcycle leathers to complete the look.

We met that first night but didn’t talk much. I was busy playing host to 30 or so guests and Hayley was happy to be meeting new friends and colleagues.

A few months later, I invited her over for dinner with a smaller group.

“It’s cool that your dad is a lobster fisherman,” one of my roommates at the time said to her. “Have you ever tried salmon?”

“Yes, I’ve eaten salmon,” Hayley said.

The guy was known for a trying a little too hard to make conversation. Still, he got a lot of first dates. I, for the record, went on very few first dates, but I almost always got a second one. Everybody has a different style, I guess.

Throughout that first year, Hayley settled into the broader friend group. She became good friends with a few women who worked in student life. We all played bar trivia together on Tuesdays and had a party every couple months to celebrate something or another.

By the next fall, things were starting to click between us.

I’d been sort-of dating a physical therapist from Mankato who came from very Catholic farming family in southern Minnesota. It was fine, but everyone could see it wasn’t going to work out. Hayley was doing some online dating. I remember her telling me about an accountant she met for dinner at a little restaurant that’s halfway between Saint Peter and the Twin Cities.

“Nice guy, but kind of boring,” she said.

Obviously, she needed to be with someone in a higher octane profession. Good thing I was a higher education administrator who did copy editing and sent out email newsletters. Talk about sex appeal.

In early December 2017, one of our other friends hosted a Christmas party. We ate and laughed and talked and somebody broke out a guitar and we all sang together. Hayley and I sat next to each other on the couch.

We had an easy connection. It didn’t feel like work the way dating in your late 20s and early 30s often does.

We talked about it a few weeks later.

“What do you think?” I asked

“We can give it a try,” she replied.

And they say romance is dead.

We’ve been together ever since.

I have the dimensions of a fire hydrant.

Five-nine but I like to round up. About 225 pounds if I’ve been watching my diet and exercise. The old football muscles in the chest and shoulders migrated south several years ago. I wear wide sunglasses and all of my shirt sleeves are too long because I need to size-up to get a neck measurement that fits.

Since we’re talking about my body, now seems as good a time as any to tell you that my pancreas doesn’t work. Don’t worry about that for now, it didn’t happen until well after my days of athletic glory as a Farmington Tiger.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, fireplugs.

A lot of people look at me and think I used to be a wrestler. I get it. And I was a fullback on the football team, so that makes sense. But back in those schoolboy days, once autumn wore on and the weather turned cold, I didn’t wrestle or play hockey or shoot hoops. I was on the swimming team.

Our co-coaches were both middle school physical education teachers. The older guy was a relentless recruiter and more than a little eccentric. The bad cop of the coaching duo was a woman in her mid-20s who’d played high-level college softball.

I like to think they asked me to join because my athletic talents in gym class were so obvious that they had to have me on the team. The reality is that they tried to talk everyone with a pulse into joining. Swimming was a relatively new high school sport in Farmington. The program was still trying to break into the mainstream. And you can fit a lot of guys in eight lanes.

My friend finally talked me into it in eighth grade. We played on the same baseball team. He said I was an excellent swimmer. Like a fool, I believed him. Really, he wanted me to help absorb some harassment from his older brother and friends, who were also on the team.

I was confident in the water. I passed all my lessons and spent quite a bit of time at the local municipal pool and in the lake up north, but swimming laps was new. And, to be honest, I never grew to like that part of it.

Practices were grueling. Minnesota has long, dark, subzero winters. We practiced every day after school except for meet days. We were on the deck by 5:30 a.m. for early practice a few times a week. To paraphrase one of my old teammates, who said it best:

You get out of your warm bed and freeze in your cold room.
You get dressed, go outside, and shiver in the early-morning air.
You warm up in the car, then you freeze on the way into the building.
You walk through the warm pool, then shiver while pulling on your suit in the locker room.
You stand on the deck looking at that still, chemical-blue water, and you know exactly how cold and unpleasant it will be.

Then you dive in anyway.

Some days, I never went outside when it was light. You’d get to the pool before sunrise, go to school, then to practice, then leave when it was dark and cold.

We’d pull, kick, and swim miles and miles to prepare for races that were only 50 or 100 yards. (Yes, there are many race distances longer than that. But not for me. Fireplug, remember?)

As younger guys on the team, my classmates and I endured the frequent lash of wet shammies cracked with pinpoint accuracy by the older divers. One of the senior swimmers liked to sneak out of the pool when the coaches weren’t looking, climb the diving board, and cannonball on top of you in the middle of a set. One second you’d be swimming along, the next you’d be six feet underwater, gasping for air and hoping your back wasn’t broken. I thought it was just part of being on the team.

And there were more chronic discomforts.

Your muscles are always sore. Your skin is constantly itchy from the combination of chlorine, frequent showers, and winter air. If you don’t take your time with your suit after practice or have a bunch of extras on hand, you’ll always be pulling on a pair of jammers or a Speedo that isn’t quite dry.

After a while, you develop a complicated love-hate relationship with your teammates and the pool. You evolve a strange sense for analyzing the water without ever thinking about it—some pools feel fast, some feel slow, and some even feel “dry.” I can’t explain it, but swimmers will understand.

Frankly, a lot of it just wasn’t much fun.

But racing?

The anticipation of the starting buzzer. Launching yourself from the block and cutting perfectly into that blue mirror. Pulling like crazy for the wall. Breaking the water at the turn and seeing just a flash of your teammates as they lean over and scream at you from the deck. Clutching at those muffled cheers to find a new gear, then peeking over to the next lane and accelerating even more.

The racing was pretty fun.

And the camaraderie. A bunch of kids from all kinds of different backgrounds and abilities and social groups, brown-nosers and burn-outs, recruited by a wild-eyed middle-aged diving coach and a tough-but-loving 25-year old who felt ancient to us. God, were we young.

Before every meet, the team would gather on the deck. Guys wore tiger-striped racing jammers and long, fleece-lined coats. We’d throw our arms around each other, form a circle, and lean in. One of the captains or coaches would count us down.

“Lutefisk, lefse, Copenhagen snuff!” we screamed. “Farmington Tigers, ruff, ruff, ruff!”

It was an old swim cheer that one of our coaches had learned back in high school. God knows why we used it. It all seemed normal to us at the time. Totally normal to scream a nonsensical chant that has nothing to do with your school mascot to get hyped up before a meet. Totally normal to engage in horseplay that bordered on assault. Totally normal to have a woman coach who you obeyed without question. Mostly good lessons, a few that could’ve perhaps been learned in a less experiential manner. Oh well.

My sophomore year, I was doing pretty well in the 100-yard butterfly. The fly is a beautiful stroke when you watch it on television every four years, but as high school swimmers we were not its most efficient technicians. Still, even the best in the world can’t mask how exhausting it is. From the second you enter the water, you’re holding a tight streamline and propelling yourself forward with full-body dolphin kicks. As you come to the surface, you rear up and throw both arms out wide and fling them forward in front of you as you try to steal a gasp of air. Two kicks per stroke, and if you don’t time them right you won’t get your shoulders high enough to take the next one. As your arms enter the water you’re already pulling, preparing to lurch forth again. You can be two feet ahead of the next fastest swimmer and lose because you misjudged your final stroke into the touchpad. The butterfly is unforgiving.

In one race towards the end of the season, I ended up in the lane next to a conference rival. We’d been back and forth all year. On the final stroke, I thought I had him. We touched the wall, broke the water, and snapped our heads toward the scoreboard. He beat me by a split second.

I looked at my dad up in the stands and put my thumb and forefinger an inch a part.

“I was this close.” He couldn’t hear me across the pool and the screams of the crowd, but he knew exactly what I said.

When I got home that night, there was a piece of paper lying on my pillow. It was a printed picture of a University of Minnesota swimmer talking with his coach after a race. He was using same hand gesture I’d flashed across the pool that afternoon.

Below the picture, in black marker, my dad’s distinctive block print.

A few weeks later, I broke the school record in the 100-yard butterfly.1

When I think back to those days on the swim team, the lessons are clear. I learned the value of:

…showing up every day.

…working with a wide array of people, some you love and some you can’t stand, and finding a way to do it because that’s what the team needs.

…managing the aches and emotions of a long season.

…paying attention to the little things.

I retired from swimming after that sophomore year and spent the next two winters lifting weights for football and baseball. I still lifeguarded and taught swimming lessons. My coaches and teammates didn’t understand. My parents, thank God, didn’t push me too hard to keep going.

I was proud of what I’d accomplished in the pool, I just wasn’t sure if I had the energy to do it all again. Of course, I couldn’t articulate that at the time.

Looking back now, would I do it differently? I don’t know.

I liked winning more than I liked the activity itself.

It’s a recipe for success, but not the sustainable kind.

A week ago, I got caught in the closest thing Pictou Island has to a traffic jam when I stopped for two minutes so the mail plane could take off from the stretch of gravel road that doubles as a runway.

When I was back on the ground in Saint Peter on Wednesday, I waited for longer than that at the first stoplight coming into town.

At dinner the night before I flew to Minnesota, Hayley and I talked about the next couple months. We’d both be busy—me with a few big projects to finish at work and a house to empty and sell, Hayley starting her first full year teaching at a new university and singlehandedly rehabbing our post-surgery dog.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

Sounds like an easy question, doesn’t it? Four words.

The answer, though, was complicated. And I’m a guy who’s pretty good at talking about his feelings. (Most of the time, anyway.)

Despite all the twists and turns, despite the things on our to-do list that didn’t get to-done, it had been nearly a perfect month. I tried not to think too much about what was on the other side of the ledger in Minnesota if all of July’s craziness seemed almost idyllic.

To be clear, I know that I’m idealizing Nova Scotia right now, painting that fresh scenery with a warm aura and kind brush.1 It’s all true, but it’s also an intentional choice in how to frame things, one that I feel compelled to acknowledge.

Part of that approach, I think, is me trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of a happy and balanced life in Pictou County. The positive spin is that maybe I want it so much that I’ll somehow will it into existence, believe it into being. The cynical read, or perhaps just the realistic one, is that I may be creating expectations that can’t be met and am setting myself up to be disappointed. Or worse, I could be building a sandcastle in my mind and only playing in that platonic ideal of the place, blind to the warts and realities of my soon-to-be Canadian home.

In a job interview once, I described myself as a “pragmatic optimist”—a person who sees the problems and people involved as contours on a map by which we can navigate to a successful outcome. You can almost always get where you need to go, I said. Sometimes you avoid the hill altogether, sometimes you incorporate its slopes into your path, and sometimes you blast right through it.

And sometimes I think I’m full of shit. But then again, a lot of people are. You can be full of shit and still be pretty good at what you do.

I got that job.

A couple hours before we sat down for that last supper together, Hayley had been out running errands while I was at home in Bayview catching up on work emails and preparing for my return to the office. The phone rang. Hayley had a flat tire. Could I come help?

Six weeks ago I would’ve looked up who to call for a tow.

But it pays to be a quick learner. After a month in Pictou County, I knew exactly where to find the air compressor. I checked the hose and swapped out the quick-connect coupler for a threaded insert that would take the air chuck for the tire. A few minutes later, I pulled up to the East End Grocery in Pictou.

The tire was blown so the compressor was for naught. We jacked up the Subaru and were putting the spare on the car when Joe Underwood pulled up. He’s taken care of all of the tire needs for Hayley’s family for as long as she can remember.

“I was just driving by and saw you here,” he said, tightening the lug nuts on the donut. “Drop it off at the shop and I’ll have it ready on Thursday.”

It’s nice to be able to fix your own problems, but it’s also good to have people looking out for you.

Hayley and I were pretty quiet on the drive to the restaurant. We had to leave at 5 a.m. to go to the airport. It would be a late night finishing up some things around the house and getting ready to go.

In some ways, it felt like I’d been in Nova Scotia for months. At the same time, I couldn’t believe I was already leaving. So much had happened, and so much of it was unplanned.

So, how did I feel?

“I’m exhausted,” I answered Hayley. “But in a much different way than I was back and June.”

I love my job, maybe too much. It’s a good job and I’m lucky to have it. But it had been a crazy few years at work leading up to this trip. The best and worst thing about working in higher education, especially where you went to school, is how much you care. Part of my time in Nova Scotia was meant to be a re-charge or a reset, I’m still not sure which.

And trading one kind of tired for another, I thought, wasn’t the worst outcome. I used different muscles in Nova Scotia, literally and figuratively. It felt good to get them moving, some for the first time. Meanwhile, the others were resting—or at least not working as hard as they have been for as long as I can remember.

People sometimes think higher education is a sleepy proposition, especially at a residential liberal arts college like Gustavus. Au contraire.

Besides the usual juggling of projects, I only have one real job for the next couple months: doing everything I can to help our new president get off to a good start. In an industry that’s feeling pressure from many different angles and is increasingly under bad-faith scrutiny, it’s a delicate time to undergo a change at the top.

I love Gustavus. It’s taken a lot but given me everything, including Hayley.

And I’ve always been up for a challenge.