reprints

A pack of lessons from the North Woods of Minnesota

ELY, Minn.— On an unusually hot summer morning in northern Minnesota, Shadow, Malik, Maya and Grizzer are lazily roaming around their outdoor quarters. The foursome with the distinctive names are wolves—two grayish/brown Great Plains wolves and two white arctic wolves—and they are the star inhabitants of the International Wolf Center.

This attractive town, hard by the Canadian border, is best known as the jumping off place for trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe area, but in recent years it also has become known as the home of this handsome center, which proclaims itself as the world’s premier wolf interpretive facility. It was founded on the belief that co-existence with the controversial predators is possible when people are presented facts about the wolves. Its mission is to support the survival of the wolf around the world by teaching about wolves, their relationship to where they live and the role of humans in their future.

The center attracts about 50,000 visitors annually, and on this particular day, license plates in the parking lot include those from Texas, Florida and Illinois. International Wolf Center membership totals over 8,500 persons in 50 states and 38 countries. The current pack on exhibit—all born in captivity ….

A great R&R; break after building homes in the Mekong Delta

Early in January, just before the start of the Year of the Ox, five Americans and 10 New Zealanders finished the first of two weeks with Habitat for Humanity International, helping build houses for eight families in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

After long, hot days of digging muddy foundations, mixing mortar and concrete by hand, tamping dirt floors and schlepping rocks, our Habitat leaders offered a needed break: 2 ½ days on the lovely island of Phu Quoc in the Gulf of Thailand. The island is about 50 minutes from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) via Vietnam Airlines or a 2 ½-hour trip from the city of Rach Gia on the Superdong Fast Ferry.

The Vietnamese government is intent on making Phu Quoc (variously, and roughly, pronounced “Foo-kwa” or “Foo-kwok”), an up-and-coming spiffy Asian island resort comparable to, say, Phuket in Thailand. It isn’t there yet, but the people are trying. And it’s still quite inexpensive, witness the predominately German, British and Scandinavian tourists who have discovered it ….

Norwegians, Finns, Danes and Swedes settled the area

“The Scandinavian Riviera,” as some locals affectionately call it, runs some 150 miles along Lake Superior from Duluth to Grand Portage, Minn., hard by the Canadian border. More prosaically, it’s the area along State Route 61.

Tipped off by friends to the region’s Scandinavian heritage, my wife and I headed to Lake Superior’s North Shore, seeking signs of early Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian settlers.

The evidence wasn’t hard to find. There was the Vild Von pizza at Sven & Ole’s in the lively town of Grand Marais. The ingredients included wild rice and Canadian bacon.

In the same town, at the Cook County Historical Society, photographs of past winners in the Miss North Shore Queen pageant had such names as Anderson, Hedstrom, Lindskog and Sjobers. At The Market, a Grand Marais store, merchandise included a Lonely Plant travel guide to Norway and Sweden. Nearby, the Viking Hus store sold Scandinavian gifts.