Mark Odegard - Island Years: My Peace Corps Tale From Gunflint to Fiji

Magnetic Island

THE YEAR 1968 was pivotal for everybody. In September, after completing my tour in the Army, I used the G.I. Bill to begin classes in Los Angeles at the Art Center School of Design. My year in school turned out to be rewarding and fun, but in those days before cars had catalytic converters, the L.A. smog gave the sky a permanent yellow cast. I was still readjusting after my time in Vietnam, and the sulfurous haze brought back unpleasant memories. I returned to Minneapolis and started looking for work in advertising or design.

One day a listing in the paper jumped out at me. Hennepin County was looking for a probation officers case aide to help Vietnam vets on drugs and alcohol. The position was a far cry from my design training, but I applied and got hired. Within a month, Id been assigned twentyfive vets in various states of crisis. My tour had been easy compared to what they went through, and many had a stone-cold look in their eyes I remembered from the war. I was an artist, not a social worker, and the challenges were overwhelming.

Despite that, six months later I got promoted to a fulltime adult probation officer a total fluke. Getting fellow veterans into treatment felt good, but my caseload grew, and I soon had forty men to watch. Some nights Id hunt down a guy on the street, sober him up at my apartment, then get him before the judge the next morning. It was intense.

With these tough-luck cases burning me out, I fled the courthouse every day at lunch, trying to calm myself in the fresh air. On one such walk, I bumped into Stephanie, an old flame from high school. Id actually had a crush on her since ninth grade when we happened to meet at church camp. We wrote each other when I was in Vietnam, but we lost touch when I moved to L.A. When last I heard, she was engaged to a friend of mine. She told me about her breakup when we met for coffee a week later. We started dating.

Having known each other for fifteen years made it easy for us to feel close. After a year together, we got serious and started talking about marriage, and everything fell into place. Stephanie was captivating; I was drawn to her confidence and beautiful smile. She was a hard-working professional who knew what it took to succeed. A dress buyer for Daytons, the department store chain, she took monthly business trips to New Yorks garment district and stayed up late poring over spreadsheets. Meanwhile, Id be on the phone urging my clients to get help. I was spending weekdays in criminal and traffic court and weekends at the workhouse and treatment centers. Tired of our stressful jobs, we began to think of quitting and where wed live once we did. After considering options that ranged from Hawaii to Paris, we decided to move up North.

For us, up North meant Grand Marais, Minnesota, a small town we loved on Lake Superior, near the camp where wed met. One weekend we made the five-hour drive to the area, looking for work and a quiet place to live. We found both by getting hired as caretakers on an island estate fifty miles inland, on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

After taking the job sight unseen, we drove an hour north up the Gunflint Trail to see what wed signed up for. There were no roads to the island. Leaving the car at Gunflint Lodge, we proceeded by motorboat across Gunflint Lake and passed through a narrows into Magnetic Lake, bound for a distant speck of granite. We were enthralled as we neared the island and its beautiful, Swiss-style lodge. Apart from a few small structures, including a shed and some outhouses, the only other building was a small caretakers cabin beside the water, our future home. The island was less than seventy yards wide, and one hundred feet from Canada. We took a quick walk around it but didnt look inside the lodge or the cabin, anxious to begin our long return trip to the car. Wed seen enough to agree that living at such a remote and beautiful place would be incredible. As we pulled away, we could see where the lake drained into the north-flowing Granite River, an entry point into the Boundary Waters.

Back in Minneapolis, we gave notice at our jobs and prepared ourselves for our adventure. Being young and in love, nothing seemed impossible. We had no fear.

Our small, outdoor wedding took place two months later, at eight one June morning beside Caribou Lake, near Lutsen, south of Grand Marais. On our second day of marriage, we drove to Gunflint Lake with my cedarstrip canoe tied atop the car and embarked on our new life. When we boated up to the islands dock with the canoe in tow behind us, we felt we were in a dream. But what until then had been the happiest day of my life soon became the worst day after we stepped ashore.