Journal Entry #2 - A Walk Along the Mississippi

     This weekend I was in St. Paul, Minnesota visiting my girlfriend and we decided to go on a long walk along the river. It was an uncharacteristically warm day for February in Minnesota. The sun was beaming down on the snow and ice creating puddles of melt and heating the air to over fifty degrees. As we walked along the sidewalk, thin trails descended the fifty foot bank down to the frozen over Mississippi. In the summer these would be manageable foot trails but in the melting ice they were more like ice scutes. Continuing along the river, I was reminded of a painting I had seen during our excursion to the Amon G. Carter museum. The painting was a depiction of a tribe of the Dakota playing a lacrosse-like sport on the Minnesota river near Fort Snelling as women and children sat in trees surrounding the play area, and others stood among the teepees overlooking the river. It was by far my favorite painting I had seen during our visit, and now I was just a few miles upstream from where it had supposedly happened over 150 years ago. Throughout the course of the walk I continued to think back to this painting and the scene it depicted, and imagine what else I might see on this walk before there was a Minneapolis skyline dominating the horizon. Still, even with the bridges, houses, and roads, that interrupted the view of the Mississippi, a few miles of wandering under the bare oaks that lined the river was the highlight of my day.