In the early 1970s, I was a teenager living in Luck, Wisconsin. Our neighbor was a kind old lady named Agnes Nielsen. She would pay me to mow her lawn and occasionally run the sump pump to drain water out of her basement when there was a lot of rain.
During some weekends and during the summer, Agnes’ daughter, Bonnie Dufresne, and her family would drive from the suburbs of the Twin Cities to visit her. Bonnie’s kids were: Joel, Shannon, and John. John was close to my age so we hung out together. We spent a lot of time walking in the woods and playing near Little Butternut Lake.
For some reason, we decided to create a ‘Nature Club’. The only two members were John and me. We each paid a couple of dollars in dues and used the money to buy a magnet through mail order catalog. We took my dad’s aluminum boat out onto Little Butternut Lake. We tied a rope to the magnet and dragged the bottom of the lake to see if we would pick up any metal. We only used the magnet a couple of times. We pulled up a few rusty soda or beer cans.
Little Butternut Lake was only about 20 feet deep at most. There were lilly pads and cattails along the shore. There were weeds in the water and some times during the year the algae bloom caused the color to turn green. When it was green you didn’t want to swim in it because you might develop ‘lake itch’. Even when wading in its sandy north shore, blood suckers were plentiful and on you within a minute.
Decades after those days of youth, my wife, sister, and I met up with the Dufresne family at John’s house in St. Paul, Minnesota. We shared what we had been up to these may years. John said he still has the Nature Club magnet!
