Tara’s Wharf

“I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.”
—William Cowper

Tara is one of the many people I emailed and telephoned in search of winter accommodations. She lives in Ranier, three miles east of International Falls, a village on the shore or Rainy Lake. Initially, her price was too high, and I told her that I only want Internet, non-smoking, heat, and quiet. Tara’s Wharf, as she calls her four-unit B&B, has suites with bedroom, kitchen and sitting room, all with views of the lake. Breakfast is not served in the winter, but still, Tara’s Wharf is a very nice place. Nobody rents the units in the winter except for a businessman who stays there all year. She offered me a unit for nearly the same price as my simple room in International Falls. I refused only because Ranier has no stores and only one restaurant—Grandma’s Pantry with her famous wild rice pancakes. I would have to walk, ski or snowshoe three miles for staples.

Tara drove to my room in a minivan, pulling a trailer. As we rode to Ranier, she said, “It has 260,000 miles, about time to turn it in.” Her trailer carries three large plastic tanks. “I bought them to set on the boat dock. When full of water, they’ll hold the dock in place against ice pressure and keep it from breaking.”

I had walked to Ranier a few days before and ran into Tara at Grandma’s Pantry. I didn’t want to call her unless the place in I-Falls didn’t work out. But there she was and we talked briefly before she had to go show somebody a house.

She called me a day later and offered to come and take me to Tara’s Wharf, no obligation. “My businesses, ” she said on the way, “fill up the summers and part of the winters. I buy and sell houses, rent apartments and houses. I look at every place as a place to own, at least for a while.”

Tara’s Wharf was an industrial building that she bought and changed into the B&B. We sat inside what could be my winter home, looking at the lake. “You can sit here with your morning coffee and watch the otters climbing onto the dock,” she says.

I ask about going out on the ice. She explains that the lake begins to narrow here and the current increases as it becomes Rainy River. The ice is unreliable here, thin and unpredictable. Thick ice forms to the east in the broad part of the lake. Visitors don’t always know this and get into trouble. Last winter, she says, three snowmobiles came over the ice right here. The one in front went down. The other two were able to stop. It took a helicopter to get the poor man out of the water, and amazingly he survived. There is still a snowmobile somewhere on the bottom.

She says that every property she sees is an investment in her eyes. Not so much a money-maker as a raw material from which she creates art. “The money is nice,” she says, “But it’s the art that I’m after.” I understand immediately, and tell the story of John and our six-month jaunt about the United States, looking for a site for the best little farm in America. It didn’t have to be a good farm, but it needed to instill an image in our minds. We settled on forty-seven acres in Tennessee with a house that needed a lot of work.

Taught by those months in searching, considering properties for their future rows of corn and secluded home sites, I can’t escape what I have come in later life to call, The Poet’s Farm. Now, while resting after cycling or while skiing through the woods, I scan the countryside, and there I might live, and did live once. I’ve become accustomed to consider almost every country property as place to build a home or farm. In imagination, I have bought them all in succession. Whenever I sit for a spell on a piece of land, there I might live. And there I did live for an hour, a week, a month or seven years. I see in these imaginary farms how I could let the years run off there. And see the spring come in. Thus I became rich without any damage to my poverty. Each property yields for me the most abundant crop of the kind I want, if I can only leave it alone. For it makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. Imaginary farms are better, each one now a poem, uninterrupted by hoeing. They are mine as much as the owner’s.

Tara’s Wharf is really nice, but I fear that getting to groceries or any place but nearby Grandma's Pantry might be difficult. She responds, saying people will take me to town. I wonder. She lives nearby, but is gone a lot. It’s just so nice right there on the lake.