[Issue# 006] Go Pack Your Bags

Hey, it’s Mark.

There is a picnic table in northern Minnesota, on a rock above the Vermilion River, and my family has been eating lunch at it for seventy-three years.

Same table. Same rock. Same fire ring. There is a tree just below the falls that shows up in every photograph anyone in my family has ever taken up there, going back to the ones in black and white, and as far as I can tell that tree has not changed at all.

We just got back. And I need to tell you what almost happened this year.

How it started

Seventy-three years ago my great-grandparents, Charlie and Nellie, started driving up to a stretch of river outside Orr, Minnesota … a town of about two hundred people. They stayed in a trailer deep in the woods with no electricity and no plumbing. There was a well, and to keep food cold they would lower a tray of it down into the well on a rope and haul it back up when it was time to eat.

That is the era we are talking about.

They went two or three years and something got hold of them. They decided this was not a place to go. It was a place to bring people.

So they went to my grandfather, Bob.

And Bob said what everybody says. He said: I would love to. It sounds amazing. I am just too busy, and I really do not have the money.

And Charlie looked at him and said this.

Bob did not say anything for a moment. Then he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Charlie said: go inside, tell Marcella you are packing your bags, and you are coming with us.

They packed. They went.

Everything downstream of that is because of that one afternoon.

What it became

My Aunt Linda is how we date it. The family story is that Grandma brought her up when she was two months old, swaddled under the seat of the boat. Linda is sixty-eight now.

I started going when I was seven. That was forty-seven years ago. My own kids have been going since they were babies … My daughter Grace used to stay back at camp with her great-grandmother Marcella while the rest of us fished, and I would motor back and pick the two of them up for shore lunch. Mary, by about age two, was not going to be left anywhere by anybody.

We are on the fifth generation now.

But here is the part I want you to notice.

Charlie and Nellie had a houseful of children. Only one of them kept this going … my grandfather Bob. Bob and Marcella had a houseful of children. Only one of them kept it going … my mother. My parents brought all three of us kids up there, many times, for years.

Only one of us kept it going.

Every single generation, this thing came down to one person deciding.

I've watched this same pattern end companies, not just family trips. HP's founders had one rule for keeping their culture alive as they grew: leaders walk the floor and talk to people directly, no closed doors, no layers in between. Decades later, people still point to that habit as the reason it worked … because somebody kept choosing to stay close, on purpose, every single day.

I have watched the other ones go. We had a Christmas tradition at my grandparents’ house; when they got too old to host it, it ended. We had a Thanksgiving built around my great-grandparents; it still happens, but it is not the same thing. Those traditions did not die because anybody stopped loving each other. They died because nobody picked them up

Why this one is worth the trouble

There is no cell service up there. No internet in the cabins, none on the water, none at shore lunch. There is exactly one thread of Wi-Fi in the whole place, outside the camp owner's porch, and you have to pay the mosquitoes for it. The fishing is not easy, the weather does whatever it wants, and getting in is a project.

That is the entire point.

Everything up there is hard on purpose. You catch the fish, then you clean the fish, then you build the fire, then you cook the fish over it. Nobody hands you anything. And it turns out that doing hard things beside somebody is the fastest way I know to end up in a real conversation with them.

This year I had one of the best conversations of my life with my son Markus while the two of us stood in the fish house cleaning the day’s catch. I am not going to tell you what it was about. I will tell you it could not have happened at a restaurant, and it could not have happened over the phone, and if either of us had had a signal, I do not think it would have happened at all.

That is not just a feeling. Researchers at the University of Essex ran an experiment: pairs of strangers talked with a phone resting nearby. Nobody touched it. When the conversation was small talk, the phone changed nothing. But when the conversation was about something that mattered, the ones with a phone on the table came away trusting each other less and feeling less understood than the ones without.

Up there it is not a discipline. It is physics. There is no signal. So you talk.

How close we came this year

Here is the thing about a fragile tradition. It does not announce that it is ending. It just gets harder and harder to pull off, until one year it does not happen … and then it never does again.

This year, Mary had to fly in from another state, and we picked her up at the airport in Chicago on the drive north. Grace is in med school; she had to finish her classes, drive to a family friend’s house, and get dropped at the airport at five-thirty in the morning. Her husband Harrison was on a work trip in Michigan pulling eighteen-hour days … he was not planning to sleep at all, just work until one in the morning and go straight to the airport. And my dad’s knees are shot. He is having them replaced this year, and none of us knew whether he could get down the rocks to shore lunch.

Then, standing on that one thread of Wi-Fi outside the owner's porch, swatting mosquitoes, I got a notification that Harrison’s flight had been canceled.

I got in my truck, parked it as close to that porch as I could, and called the airline.

A woman named Denise

The agent’s name was Denise, and I could tell inside of ten seconds that she was different.

She asked why the trip mattered. So I told her. Told her about this river. Told her this was year seventy-three. Told her about the picnic table, and that my daughter and her husband were about to miss the whole thing.

It turns out Denise is from northeastern Minnesota. She knew exactly the country I was describing.

She said:

We were on that phone for about an hour and a half.

She found Harrison another flight. Then she went and looked up Grace’s reservation … I had not asked her to … and moved Grace onto the same connection, so that a newly married couple who had not seen each other in a week would get a five-hour layover in Minneapolis together instead of five hours apart. Then she put them next to each other in better seats for the last leg.

Then she gave me a way to reach her directly, in case something went wrong.

Something went wrong. The system put Harrison on the following day’s flight. I reached out to Denise. She fixed it again.

The bird they never left alone for five weeks. The bird they fed four times a day for three months.That is Elon on my lake right now, being told by the only two birds he has ever known that he does not live here anymore.

Here is why I cannot stop thinking about her

Denise has no stake in my family. She will never eat at that picnic table. She will never meet any of us.

And she decided that our being there was worth an hour and a half of her evening.

Charlie said, “Go pack your bags.” Denise said, “If you’ll trust me, we’ll figure this out.”

What it actually takes

I want to be specific here, because “keep your traditions alive” is useless advice.

My parents start working on this trip weeks ahead. They buy the supplies, they load a trailer, they pull it up there early … all so that it is as easy as possible for the next generation to show up. Then I try to do the same for mine.

And there is a body of knowledge that has to physically transfer. Somebody has to learn to fillet a fish. Somebody has to learn to cook it over an open fire without ruining it. My mother keeps a packing list, and on that list are things like butter-flavored Crisco and a seasoning called Fry Magic, and if that list dies with her, part of this dies with it.

And then you blink

When I was twenty-eight, I sat on the river and talked to everyone on the trip about what it would be like someday … not when my future kids came with me, but when my kids were my same age, bringing their own.

I am not sure I have the words for what that does to a person.

One question.

Charlie has been gone a long time. My children will tell their children about him … not because of a company he built or money he left behind, but because one afternoon he refused to let a man he loved say he was too busy.

So here is what I want to ask you, and I mean it.

What is your proximity tradition? The one thing that reliably pulls the people who matter most into the same place, at least once a year.

And if you do not have one … when are you starting it?

Do not just think about it. Write it down and send it to me. What would it be, where would it happen, who would be there, and how would you make it last fifty years? It stops being a wish the moment you put it on paper.

I read every single one. And if you tell me to keep it between us, I will.

The best time to start one of these was fifty years ago. The second best time is now.

It’s good to be back.

Mark