Spent some time recharging my creative juices in one of Minnesota's many state parks last weekend. Big Woods State Park is a fragment of the original Eastern Broadleaf Forest that once covered over 3,000 square miles in the southern third of the state. The arrival of white settlers brought maps and grids which parceled out this forest to all comers, and with the help of lumberjacks, beasts of burden and the revolutionary John Deere plow, the forest was chopped down, stumps removed and the ground broken into the gentle farmland that is much of MInnesota today.
This Big Woods fragment was just too inconvenient to destroy, and survived. In the middle of it is a rectangular waterfall that evokes Frank Lloyd Wright . While I was there, two small boys stood by the side of the creek and attempted to bring the waterfall into submission by throwing rocks at it. Their father stood nearby, disinterested, checking his cell phone. The waterfall persisted. The boys grew bored. After a time they moved on and I was able to snap some pictures.














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