Yuen: What a Minnesota Vikings legend taught me about becoming a cabin owner

When I first moved here, I didn’t understand why so many people were unavailable on the weekends in the summer. “We’re going up north,” to me, sounded like a gentle way to let people down, a modern Minnesota version of “I have to wash my hair.”

Owning a lake cabin was never a dream of mine. But it’s been a lifelong obsession of my husband. He hails from a hardscrabble town about 3½ hours north of the Cities, home to one of the clearest lakes in the state, infused with minerals that can turn the waters into a hypnotic turquoise that mimics the Caribbean. His grandparents sold their cabin decades ago for a steal and over a handshake, and he’d been itching to get back on the lake ever since.

And now, after years of scouring the North Woods for a private patch of our own, we’ve achieved his dream. We bought a cabin on his favorite lake.

Over the years I resisted this plan. A transplant to Minnesota, I didn’t fully understand why one would choose to have two mortgages, two places to clean and maintain, and an anchor that would make us less likely to travel to someplace new. I couldn’t crunch the numbers in a way that would financially justify such an indulgence.

Alan Page was also less than enamored of the idea of cabin life.

After he married his wife, Diane Sims Page, the Minnesota Vikings legend would sometimes visit her family cabin near Outing, Minn., but reluctantly. The lake life wasn’t something Page, a native of Canton, Ohio, was born into. Even after the Pages took ownership over the property and kids entered the picture, Page often chose to stay home while Diane took the children up north. And when he did show up, “I was the family grump,” recalled the retired Minnesota Supreme Court justice.

Why all the moping? When Page set out to run along gravel roads through the woods, the mosquitoes turned him into a happy meal.

Then Diane got herself a kayak, and her husband tried it, too. Everything changed.

“All of a sudden, I thought, ‘Hmm, I could go up and get my exercise on the lake without the bugs,’” Page, who’s 79, recalled. “All of a sudden, it was fun to be up there. It gave me something to do beyond simply being out there for the horseflies.”

Then came an outdoor pizza oven, making maple syrup and holiday dinners at the cabin, family traditions that became sacred rituals. The couple experienced the wonder of being up north through their grandkids’ eyes, from breakfast cruises on the pontoon to the time Diane tricked the children into thinking dinosaurs were tromping along the shoreline. (She laid down large dino-size footprints into the sand.)

“I laugh at my reluctance early on to be there,” said Page, saying he would have missed out on core moments like those. “That was a memory for my grandkids, but it was a memory for me.”

His Sunday morning kayaking trips under a “blue sky and puffy clouds” are akin to a spiritual experience, he said. “The quiet. The occasional eagle, the occasional loon. There’s no way to get it in the city. As beautiful as our lakes are, the sound of silence is something you can only get in the North Woods.

“There’s something there that you’re going to love,” Page told me. “I don’t know what it will be for you. Find it, and enjoy it there.”

Many Minnesotans who have the means wouldn’t need to be convinced. Today’s economic uncertainties and higher mortgage rates haven’t stopped lakeside property from selling fast and for a premium. As a broker told my colleague Jim Buchta, lakeshore is the steadiest segment of the market in many parts of the state.

Still, it’s a huge investment. I’ve told my friends that buying a cabin was either the best or stupidest decision we’ve ever made.

Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s the best.

When we drove up to the cabin last month on the first weekend it was ours, our sons bounced out of the car and beelined right to the water’s edge. My husband paced the grassy perch that overlooked the lake he’d spent decades fantasizing about. Even our dog got the zoomies, sprinting laps along the shore. The water entrances all.

I thought about all of the summers we’ve already spent on this lake while renting out somebody else’s cabin. The crawfish the boys chased and the bass they reeled in. The conversations and cocktails on the screen porch we’ve had with family and friends.

The cabin represents an intention to slow down childhood, a separation from the insanity of everyday life, and a chance to savor summer with the people you love.

You can’t put a price tag on connection and peace. Page says the cabin is still one of his favorite places to be. Diane died in 2018 of breast cancer, but “she left this legacy, a place that was special to her and special to us as a family,” he said.

“Don’t fight it,” he told me. “Join it.”

A cabin on the lake is about the memories you make there. And that’s really what Minnesotans mean when they say they’re going up north.