Submitted Photo Charles and Luca Crane pose with their catfish caught Memorial Day weekend at Lake Tschida in Grant County.

Six years ago, I brought my future wife Angie and my stepdaughter November to my family’s cabin at Lake Tschida for the first time. Four years, a wedding and a baby brother Luca later, we visited again as a family of four, when we stayed for a whole week in June 2024.

This year, things are quite different, with just Luca and I making the trip south to Grant County for Memorial Day. Angie stayed home to focus on restoring order in our home without a two year old underfoot. She almost changed her mind Saturday morning while I was loading up the car, but in the end decided the opportunity to deep clean the floors of our apartment was too good to pass up.

That was fine by me, but I still felt a swell of anxiety and stress thinking about the drive itself. I haven’t done much traveling outside Minot in the months after November passed away. Coming here without her was right at the top of the list of the many aspects of life that feel wrong due to her absence.

For example, while Luca has been enjoying our family pass at the Discovery Center and our impromptu visits to Oak Park after daycare, I can’t help but feel regret for every time I told his big sister we didn’t have time to go. We treasured every time we did, just as November treasured the lake even before she was a year old.

I elected to take the scenic route over Garrison Dam while Luca napped, and made a beeline for old Otto Maerklein’s place on the southwest corner of the lake. Luca, cranky after the long car ride, headed straight for the meager shoreline. The lad and I spent the first hours walking along the beach, climbing sand cliffs, and throwing rocks in the water.

My folks showed up around suppertime, and it didn’t take long for Bumpa to get multiple poles in their holders and teach the two year old the rudiments of casting. Luca got his first taste of the “Outdoor Boys” lifestyle watching Bumpa reel in a catfish, and didn’t look away during the cleaning and filleting process. His sister would have loved it too, and it inflicts literal pain upon me that we never got the chance for her to try out fishing herself.

Ultimately, that pain clouded and diminished every brief moment of joy and serenity I experienced most of the weekend. Everything Luca had to experience on his own, and not in tandem with his partner in crime, his mentor and protector. She would’ve been shimmying and sliding around that sandy cliff right along with him, and probably begging me to let her take out our kayak on the water.

She didn’t get a chance to experience the ritual of digging out a life jacket, dragging some implements of recreation down to the water, and not coming out until the dinner bell rings or the cold becomes too much to bear. It became difficult not to catalogue every little thing marked by her absence during this trip, which made it difficult at times to be present and involved in what Luca was experiencing.

I pulled myself out of it Sunday morning, which as usual came with a great stillness in the air and on the water. Bumpa went back down to the water shortly after the rest of us rose. Luca grew bored with fishing and started playing a game only he could understand while I supervised; until Bumpa’s cries for help sent me back down to the beach.

He’d hooked two fish at the same time, and quickly handed me one of the rods, nevermind I hadn’t been fishing in nearly 20 years let alone had a license. Despite my fumblings, somehow I was able to reel in and secure a third catfish that was just about as long as Luca was tall, and nearly weighed as much as him too.

When the rush was gone, I couldn’t help but add it to the list of things I’d give my life for November to have had the chance to experience herself.

While the time spent with my family at Tschida was rejuvenating, as is typical, there’s usually a hollow feeling in the final hours as everything is packed up and everyone trickles off down the dirt roads of Grant County to our respective homes.

November used to ask me all the time if we could live at the lake. Her brother asked me the same thing shortly before falling asleep within minutes of us crossing over the Heart Butte Dam. If only we could.

If only.

Charles Crane is a staff writer at The Minot Daily News.