As I padded along ahead in the distance I noticed a good sized wooden dock on the north side of the channel. As I approached, I noticed what I thought at first was the wooden framework of an old barn, long abandoned after the amusement park went out of business on the island almost 100 years ago. The trees were bare of leaves, with only small green buds. Had this been the middle of summer I never would have see it. The closer I got, the more I questioned what I was looking at. Finally, pulling right up next to the shore, I was amazed at what I saw. A three story house, with glass walls and roof! It was fully furnished with fireplaces on each floor situated on a piece of land that was 50 feet from the channel I was in and more amazingly 50 feet from the north shore of Big Island, a place where literally thousands of boats pass by, may just a few yards from the shore.
Well when I got home I told Chris and the kids about it and they all thought it was pretty cool. I did some online research and could not find a single reference to a house made of glass on the lake. At work on Monday I talk to several lifetime locals that boat on Minnetonka regularly but know one seemed to know what I was talking about. Did I imagine the whole thing? Was is a bad case of kayak fever...a figment of my imagination brought on by the euphoria of my first paddling outing of the year?
Yesterday I had a chance to knock off work an hour early so I decided I'd paddle back out to Big Island, camera in hand to see if I was dreaming or not, and if not record some photographic evidence. The weather was heavily overcast, with a Spring rain storm working it's way into the region. Halfway out on my 45 minute journey to the island, the wind picked up from the south east as the lead edge of the storm approached. the calm lake almost immediately sprang to life, the water turning first dark gray and then black with wind swept waves 1-2 feet high driving spray into my face. As George Costanza from Seinfeld would say "The lake was angry my friends!".
I made my way back to the channel, confident that I was not loosing my mind. As I rounded the bend to approach the dock I noticed a boat. Aha! the owners must be home. Joy and sadness all in one. I'd be able to confirm the existence of the house but I'd feel weird taking pictures with them there. Well, false alarm it just happened to be a fisherman. So I was able to paddle up to the shore and snap a few pictures for visual evidence. As I was paddling backward away from the shore, the fisherman motored slowly past me. I make a comment that my friends didn't believe there was a glass house on Big Island, and no lie he looks at me and say "What glass house?" I'm like, the one Right There! To which he exclaimed, "Wow look at that, a glass house. I never noticed that".
So, I guess that explains it. Sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it in plain sight. We are all so wrapped up in doing what we are doing that we sometimes fail to see something that is right in front of us. If this isn't a metaphor for life I don't know what is. I challenge each of us to look up and look out. There is an amazing world all around us. If we don't pay attention to it, we could very easily destroy it. There are future generations coming behind us hoping we will start looking up. Let's not let them down.
