Dawn’s Disappointment Delights

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By Jody Rust
May 25, 2021

My first summer in Minnesota led me to a Disappointment Lake. 

She waited patiently at the end of hours that stretched from sun-up to sundown. A 40 pound pack, weighed down with the light kiss of a trillion steadily falling raindrops clung to my back while I took a million steps down trodden trails.

Her muddy banks were a soggy safe haven from the bull moose, whose lazy turn up the wash showed how clearly  unimpressed he was with my bright red IU rain gear, and my friend Jen’s orange tent of a tarp. At least the hunters would know who not to shoot.

My back ached, Jen cussed, and not even the damp air, soaking socks and drooping tent could keep me from crawling into my sleeping bag and shutting out the world at the end of my first hike through the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota. That night, darkness engulfed me. The outdoors faded away more quickly than it faded in. 

First were the birds, chirping. Then a splash of water, as if a fish had decided to take a peek at the world beyond its borders — see if the earth was really muddier on the other side.  Voices ambled to my tent, soft and far away, too distant to decipher, yet free enough to travel on the breeze. I thought we wouldn’t see other people. Seven days hiking through the Boundary waters should have kept us away from the herds of canoers, I naively thought.

The cool and damp air, its earthy smell of decaying brush mixed with pine and birch, lured me from my tent as much as the sun’s increasing intensity. I crawled from the tent, which drooped between two poles, and slipped into dry socks and my hiking boots. 

The mist drifted across the water, ambling without going anywhere. According to the map, and our sense of direction, we were on Parent Lake. I was disappointed to be so disoriented, but Lake Disappointment could not live up to its name.

The water was both glass and mirror, revealing the smooth rocks and pebbles on its bed while reflecting the mist and higher clouds that rose with the sun. The lake took the trees to its depth as they reached into the scattered blue sky. The water was cool to the touch — welcoming, enticing. 

A canoe with two fishermen worked its way down the center of the lake, narrow compared to other Minnesota Lakes we had seen. They waved, said hello, and their voices easily carried across the water. 

“What lake are we on?” I asked.

“Disappointment Lake,” said one, paddling slowly toward a promising cove. 

I laughed at the irony. I thought, if this is disappointment, I want to be disappointed time and again.  I went back to my bag, and pulled out my pen and journal, because, yes, it went everywhere with me, and I wrote this poem in honor of the best disappointment I had experienced to that point in my life. 

On morning’s edge,
the sun attempts to disperse mist
over Lake Disappointment
Bird’s call,
and a few crickets cling to the night song.
tall pines and white birch trees reach above low-lying clouds.

Descending the deep end
depends on more than
how many night crawlers you catch.
A certain finesse in the
twist and jerk of the wrist
is required.

You need a quiet patience
that outlasts cautious instincts.
The kind of patience that comes from
years of anxious struggling, and tugging the line
and repeated losses swimming deeper –
becoming evermore cunning.

The catch requires keen eyesight,
and someone who knows the difference between
the wind’s command over water,
and the push and wake that moves beneath.
(1990)