Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.
I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.
I grew up in Lake Orion, Mich. What was best about Lake Orion where, where we grew up was it was a suburb of Detroit but had a lot of open space around.
The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.
My grandparents told endless stories about the town they were from. It became an almost mythic place.
No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.
One of my oldest friends has a cottage on Smoke Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, and it's one of my favorite places in the world.
Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.