Rake Appeal { Sweet Spot

There’s enough history in Minnehaha Park’s 193 acres that it feels worthy of a Ken Burns documentary film. There’s the home of the first permanent settler west of the Mississippi—the transplanted John H. Stevens house. Originally built around 1850, it was in this house that the word “Minneapolis” was first tossed around. The Pergola Garden drips with flora native to the area, and there’s even a replica of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Those wanting to skip the history lesson can slip into the Sea Salt restaurant, a slick place that’s open seasonally, to load up on shrimp tacos or Sebastian Joe’s ice cream—and then head over to the band shell for an evening bluegrass concert.

But the real magic remains at the falls.

A stairway winds down into a tangle of greenery. You lose the sounds of the city even before losing sight of the banking planes and the brick towers of the Ford Plant to the east. More important, as you descend among the silver maples, you begin to see the waters “laugh and leap into the valley,” as Longfellow put it in his 1855 Song of Hiawatha. It was that poem that first lured pilgrims, including the likes of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, to this place, and actually gave the falls its name. By 1894, a zoo was built on the park grounds. By 1922, tourist cabins were erected and the park’s Princess Station welcomed dozens of streetcars a day.

Watching the water foam up, tasting the mist in the breeze, you’ve moved back in time—to a Minnesota devoid of mills, dams, or the Mall of America. Daily life in the Twin Cities offers few such opportunities to mingle with the ancient. Standing in the rush of water, hidden from the world above, it seems entirely plausible, as the creation story goes, that this is the spot where the mother of the earth gave birth to the Dakota people and that all the trees and surrounding grounds are indeed sacred.

The park has many moods. There are sunny afternoons with crowds of picnickers; Hmong girls splashing in the creek; bevies of high-end bicycles locked to the wrought iron fences along the gorge; and cool, cloudy mornings when walking along the creek is a solitary pursuit, met only by the occasional heron, clutch of bachelor ducks, or jogger.

Several years ago, the parks department put up fences to discourage intrepid trailblazers from clambering up to and even behind the waterfall. This spring, the stairway, which dates back to the New Deal WPA era, got a fresh coat of concrete. But even if you can no longer stick your hand in the froth, there’s still something a little illicit about disappearing in the woods, about the rush of all that water around you. The falls remain an icon, a vision of what the world was before us—and a sense that, should it come to pass, the world would do just fine without us.