September 27, 2026

According to family lore, when a tornado ripped through his land in June, 1973, my grandfather was so depressed that he considered selling the 162 acres in Minnesota’s Crow Wing County that he had purchased out of tax forfeiture just nine years earlier.
He’d bought the land in large part because of the majestic white and red pines that had somehow avoided the logging boom of the previous century. After the tornado, all but a few of those pines lay like Pick-Up Sticks, strewn across the landscape.