Growing Up on Agate Lake
By Howard Mooers
My earliest memory is not of a birthday, or a toy, or even of the lake. It’s of loss—a fragment of a moment so vivid it stayed with me all my life. I was no more than two, maybe three years old, standing in the yard when I saw our dog, Pepe, struck by a car on the highway that ran between our house and Serpent Lake. Years later, when I mentioned the memory to my mother, Elsie, she gently shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly remember that,” she said. “You were far too young.” But when I described what I saw—how Grandpa Gust walked down into the ditch and climbed up the slope with her in his arms—she turned pale and whispered, “That’s exactly what happened.” She said no more after that. Some things just settle into the bones.
We lived on a small summer fishing resort in north-central Minnesota—Mooers Agate Lake Resort, on a ten-acre parcel between Deerwood and Crosby. It was the kind of place where tourists came to fish for bass and bluegill, to breathe in pine-scented air, and to forget about the rest of the world for a week or two. The resort had nine rustic housekeeping cabins that my father built with his own hands, beginning in 1945, just after the war.
I was born in 1954, the third of four kids—Jack, Connie, me, and Don. By the time I came along, the resort was already well-established, a humble but steady operation run by our parents. My father, DuWayne Mooers, had been single when he started building it. After returning from wartime shipyard work in San Diego, he bought the land and began constructing the first cabins. It was a leap of faith, but he was nothing if not confident in his ability to get things done.
A few years later, he met my mother, Elsie. She was recently divorced—a quiet scandal in those days—and raising a son from her previous marriage. My parents didn’t speak much about the early years, and I didn’t understand the weight of that history until I was much older. Divorce in the late 1940s was rare, and the stigma followed people. But Elsie was resilient. She married DuWayne, moved out to the resort, and helped build a life that would anchor our family for the next six decades.
My childhood unfolded entirely on the lake. The landscape itself became my playroom. My friends and I built forts in the woods, played soldier among the trees, tracked frogs and dragonflies along the shoreline, and shot BB guns at rusted cans we lined up on logs. We explored without boundaries. When Dad started the Resort, there were maybe 4 or 5 permanent residents on the lake, but by the time i was exploring that number had swelled to maybe a dozen year-round homes. The lakeshore was mostly forested and wild. Everyone knew everyone. And every property line was more suggestion than law.
The resort, of course, didn’t run itself. And while it provided a livelihood, it was not a lavish one. A small fishing resort, even in the booming post-war years, brought in modest income, so my father worked elsewhere for much of the year. He was one of those men who could fix or build anything—plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, you name it. With help from my Grandpa Gust Larson, a skilled stonemason, Dad built not just the cabins, but our family’s home across the highway on a hill overlooking Serpent Lake.
But his real gift, I think, was with heavy equipment. He had an instinctive feel for machines—bulldozers, backhoes, loaders. He could make them do what he wanted with a kind of grace, like an artist with a brush. In the early 1950s, when the U.S. military began building the Thule Air Base in Greenland, Dad heard they were hiring civilian construction workers. He packed up and left for the Arctic in 1952, returning for short periods before heading back again in ’53, ’54, and one final time in ’57.
He would be gone for nine or ten months at a stretch, working long hours in the far north. But it paid well. Over just a few years, the money he earned in Greenland allowed him to pay off the resort and our home entirely. It was a sacrifice, and I imagine it wasn’t easy for Mom to manage things alone with four kids, a resort to run, and aging parents to care for—but she did it, as she always did, with grace and grit.
That became our rhythm. When spring came, Dad would get the cabins and grounds ready for the season. Then, once everything was humming, he’d leave again—first for local road construction jobs, and later for pipeline work. By 1965, he was pipelining in Michigan, and that became his preferred work from then on. Pipeline projects had a narrow seasonal window, which meant long days—six, sometimes seven days a week, often twelve hours a day. But the pay, with overtime, was good, and it helped secure our future.
Mom worked just as hard, though you’d rarely hear her complain. The resort ran from May to September, but her responsibilities never really stopped. She raised four kids, managed the business, cared for both sets of aging grandparents, and seemed to make time for everyone else in the community as well. She had a big heart and a wide circle of friends. She was deeply involved in our church, her book club, and every bake sale, funeral luncheon, and Sunday potluck that came through the doors. She loved to chat and laugh, and once in a while, she’d put on a nice dress, do her hair, and go out dancing—usually at the Deerwood Legion or a church social.
For all their hard work, my parents still found ways to create a life filled with small joys. We decorated the house for Christmas with nothing but handmade ornaments. Some were delicate crafts Mom made with her friends over coffee at the kitchen table; others were lumpy, glittered paper cutouts that us kids brought home from school. But every single one of them was saved, year after year, and proudly displayed. Our Christmas tree came from a small tree farm owned by friends. We’d head out together, bundled in wool coats and scarves, to pick the perfect one, then haul it home on the roof of the car.
The holidays were Mom’s favorite time of year. She’d make a big batch of her Swedish fruit soup, or fruktsoppa, just after Thanksgiving and portion it out for all the elderly Swedes in the community. She’d hand-deliver it in mason jars, along with a smile and often a short visit, catching up with people she’d known all her life. The house would smell of cinnamon, cloves, and simmered dried fruit. As kids, we didn’t always appreciate it—prunes and apricots weren’t exactly dessert in our minds—but we knew it meant Christmas was near.
It was a good childhood, full of fresh air, long summer days, and the sound of loons calling across the water at night. We learned to be independent, to work hard, and to appreciate the simpler pleasures of life—quiet mornings on the lake, the feel of the sun on your back, the pride in a job done right. We were part of something real and lasting, even if we didn’t always realize it at the time.
Now, with the years behind us and the resort gone, I find myself holding tighter to those memories. I walk through the woods in autumn and remember walking that same trail to the school bus, the leaves ablaze above me. I run my hand over a piece of old knotty pine paneling and recall the cabins my father built with care. I taste something sweet and spiced and feel my mother’s presence in the kitchen.
The place we grew up wasn’t just a patch of land between two lakes. It was a world—our world—and it shaped us all. It taught us to work, to care, to remember. And maybe most of all, it gave us stories—stories worth telling, and retelling, again and again.