How We Met: Birch Lake

My memories of summer vacations on Duck Lake in the Upper Peninsula stayed with me and ran deep. And so I wanted to create a similar tradition with my own family, wife Noelle and kids Sonya and Todd. We tried week-long vacations at cabin resorts on Moon Lake (Duck’s neighbor in the UP) and Presque Isle Lake in far northern Vilas County, Wis. But I was looking for a place we could return to year after year, and for various reasons neither of those two quite fit.

The next year, in 1987, when Sonya was five and Todd two, we wrote to the Oneida County Chamber of Commerce for information on housekeeping cabins. Dozens of brochures came by mail; the one that appealed most was for Jung’s Birch Lake Cottages, near a place called Harshaw that we had never heard of, about a dozen miles southeast of Minocqua. We bought a week in a cabin called Bayside, sight unseen, for $400 (enough money back then to ensure, pretty well, a quality experience).

It was love at first sight. Noelle fell for the cozy two-bedroom cabin, with new furnishings, knotty pine walls and, as bonuses, a fireplace, microwave oven, and deck – in her words, “all the comforts we don’t have at home.” For me it was about the lake, 180 acres with expansive beds of cabbage weeds on the edges of which I could catch walleyes, bluegills, perch, and the occasional largemouth bass. The romance was sealed when, on our first night, I caught a 38-inch muskie right off our pier. There was a nice swimming area for the kids, and all the Northwoods icons were there -- loons, ospreys, eagles, deer, raccoons.

We visited Birch Lake for a week almost every summer thereafter, usually staying in the Lakeside cabin, right next to Bayview. Then in 2009, a wooded lot came on the market, straight across the lake from the cottages. We closed on the lot in December of that year, parked an RV trailer there, and by fall 2011 had our own cottage. The way we came to buy the land is a story in itself, for another time. Suffice it to say our relationship with Birch Lake has bloomed into something deeper and longer-lasting.

How about you? How did the romance with your favorite lake begin? How did you two meet?