THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

I’m sure someone must have mentioned that I’d be on a boat.

But I somehow missed that information entirely until I was given directions to a boat landing. A book club was reading my novel, “Loon Point.” Someone in the book club knew my mother, and she wrote, asking if I would attend the meeting. “Loon Point” is described as book club fiction by my publisher, but I usually don’t hear about book club meetings unless someone mentions it after the fact. This time, however, I ended up at a boat landing—in the middle of nowhere.

I got there a little early, before anyone who looked like a member of the book club had arrived. I parked my car and walked to the dock, where a man was parking a pontoon boat.

“Is this the Mantrap Lake boat landing?” I asked.

“You here for the book club?” he replied.

“How did you know?”

“I’ll be on the pontoon.”

“Are you in the book club?”

“Oh, no! I just help out with the boat.”

Before long, a couple of cars pulled up, filled with women who looked like they might be members of a book club.

“Are you Carrie?” they asked. They had an advantage as my picture is on the book.

I told them I was, and they all introduced themselves one after the other. I hoped there wouldn’t be a quiz.

“You’re blonder than you are on your book,” one of them noted.

“The picture is in black and white!” another one replied.

“I get blonder three times a year,” I confessed.

Then we all put on life jackets and piled into the pontoon boat. I still wasn’t sure why I was getting on a boat. I couldn’t quite understand why a boat was necessary for a book club. I realized that I was feeling a little grumpy.

But I soon learned that we weren’t getting on the boat to talk about “Loon Point.” We were there for something much more important. We were there to look at loons.

It turns out this book club likes to do things related to the book. They read a book about an octopus and visited an aquarium where a large octopus lived. They read a book about Swedish immigrants and visited a restored immigrant cabin. And today they were on Mantrap Lake, a lake that was filled with loons.

The name was apt. I can imagine early explorers getting completely lost in this large, sprawling lake filled with tiny bays. And in every bay, there were loons. The fellow who gave us the tour on the pontoon boat told us they put out 24 man-made nests, and every one of them was used by loons. We heard loons calling to one another across the lake and saw loons diving into the deep water.

“How many loons are on this lake?” I asked the man driving the boat. He didn’t know. There were a lot. There were also a lot of bald eagles and bear and miles of state-forest land surrounding the lake.

It was a wonderful boat trip, all the more so because it was so unexpected.

I had this idea of what a book club looked like, and it didn’t look like getting on a boat in the middle of nowhere. I never imagined an adventurous group of readers would bring me to a remote lake in northern Minnesota to see loons. It was so much more fun—so much more memorable—than anything I had expected. I returned home, my head filled with loons.

Till next time,

Carrie

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