“I’d like to visit the swamp.”

My parents thought this an odd request when I visited my home state of Minnesota last week, but I’d recently learned that I’d grown up literally next door to one of the most unique plant communities in the world, and I had never appreciated it.

So I set out to rediscover the peat bogs of my youth.

I grew up 100 miles north of the Twin Cities in the town of Isle, population 751, which sits on the shores of Mille Lacs Lake. Mille Lacs is the second largest lake (after Red Lake) in this land of 10,000. It’s about 70 miles in circumference.

Mille Lacs Lake was formed by glaciers that scraped the earth during the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago. Creationists here maintain that the lake was made by Paul Bunyan.