Trapping Demons Inside Tupperware
and other stories from Minnesota summers
I love Los Angeles. I’ve lived here for nearly 14 years, and it’s very much my home. But Los Angeles is not a summer place. Cue the “What are you talking about? LA is the epitome of summer!” Sure, on its surface, with its palm trees, pools, and laid-back lifestyle, it seems like a summer place. But if you’ve lived in LA for a long time, and especially if you come from somewhere else, I think you understand that it’s simply not.
Here, summer comes late and stays well past its expiration date. Because it rarely dips below 50 degrees during the day, we live in a land of eternal warmth, and we’re always sort of sleepwalking. Summer doesn’t hold the same excitement as it does in other places because not much changes between now and winter.
If I could spend the better part of the summer outside of this city, I would. Maybe I’m just envious of the endless barage of “Euro-summers” inundating my IG feed. But then I remember how sticky Europe is in the summer, and I’m like, no, I would rather be in the Midwest — also sticky, but no one appreciates summer quite like a Midwesterner.
I haven’t lived in Minnesota for a long time, but I yearn for it during summer. People take advantage of how late the sun stays up in the North Country by sitting in their backyard with the grill smoking, or on the front porch, greeting neighbors as they garden. Night falls, and it’s still somehow over 80 degrees, so you head to the lake for a moonlit swim where fireflies dance with the stars and sing their summer songs.
In reality, the beaches are just patches of sand on lakes you can see across (unless you’re at a Great Lake), and the perfect meal consists of a hot dog, potato salad, Coors Light, and Dairy Queen for dessert. But there is nothing quite as pure as a Midwest summer.
At my core, I’m just a Minnesota girl who needs to swim in a lake to feel something. I think that’s why I’ve been reminiscing about my old friend Michelle’s family cabin, which I used to visit nearly every summer.
A couple of hours outside of the city, the property sat on a quiet lake and consisted of a main house, a few small, white cabins, and a modest dock with some boats and jet skis. I started going to the cabin with Michelle in middle school, so our adventures there began innocently enough.
One year, we went for Memorial Day weekend, and the place was covered in mayflies as thick as a rabbit pelt. Not an inch of any surface was sans mayfly. These fuckers buzzed up and down lampposts, took over the dock — you couldn’t open the door to the house without getting a handful of them. So what did we do? Committed mass murder, of course.
We came up with a variety of maniacal ways to kill the beastly bugs. We tried to trap them inside bubbles. We filled buckets with soapy water and attempted to drown them. We lit them on fire with a lighter or grabbed them by the handful and threw them into the fire pit. I don’t think our murderous rampage got us too far, but they all died the next week anyhow, because that’s the menial lifespan of a mayfly.
Once we were teenagers, our activities became a bit more nefarious. We started hanging out with the townies who would throw parties in the woods and sit in boat houses smoking weed, drinking Four Loko, and taking pharmaceuticals. During one of these “woods parties,” someone had the bright idea to pack all the cars in like a stack of dominoes with no room to fall. You couldn’t leave the party until the car behind you did.
This was obviously a pre-Uber era, and we were also in the country, where nothing was walkable and kids were driving four-wheelers drunk by age 14. In my memory, this party was huge, loud, and the line of cars stretched straight to the street. So naturally, the cops came to break it up.
The second we saw flashing lights, we partygoers scattered as deep into the woods as possible to avoid getting caught. Flashlights scanned the forest from dirt to treetops as I crouched in child’s pose, feeling my back get eaten alive by mosquitoes.
Every Minnesotan has experienced the true hell of Midwest mosquitoes, especially at night, in the woods, or near a body of water, and we checked all boxes. Unless I wanted to acquire an underage drinking ticket and be looked down upon in the eyes of Michelle’s entire family for the rest of my life, my only option was to keep crouching and getting eaten.
Eventually, the cops gathered whatever kids they could and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves. With my back devoured and most of the party dispersed, it was definitely time to go, but may I remind you that our ride (some local boy) was trapped behind a Tetris of other cars.
We spent the next few hours until dawn drinking whatever was left of the abysmal alcohol collection and lying down in random people’s cars trying to get some shut-eye. That night, I learned how much I HATE not being in control of when I can leave an event, especially if it means being trapped at a party until the sun comes up; something I unfortunately would not learn how to avoid until much later in life.
Luckily, her parents hadn’t seemed to notice our absence, but I did get a lot of suspicious questions about my back, which was covered in welted mosquito bites from shoulders to butt, resembling an extra spicy pepperoni pizza.
Another fond memory of Michelle’s cabin is from the last time I was there — summer 2011 (no regrets). *Side note: “summer 2011, no regrets” was the official summer slogan of all Minneapolis kids that year. I think we could all feel that it was something special, and if you ask anyone who lived it, they’ll probably tell you it was one of the best summers of their life.
It was nearing the end of this incomparable summer when Michelle, our friend Sage, and I returned to the cabin before we all went to college for the year. We’d gotten really into going on mushroom “journeys.” In fact, the first time I did shrooms was in Michelle’s basement in the dead of winter when we were 15. But that’s a story for another day.
This was the first time we tried shroom chocolate and decided we wanted to have two unique experiences — a day trip and a night trip.
We woke up early, ate a hefty breakfast complemented by our magic chocolate, then pulled out the canoe and hit the lake.
At this time in my life, I only knew how to do shrooms one way — by taking a lot of them. Micro-dosing wasn’t a concept. Why would you only want to feel a little silly when you could transform your entire being into a freshwater dolphin or an explorer discovering untouched waters? Many of my trips resulted in tears and panic because I would do way more than I could handle, but this was one of the best I’ve had.
We spent the entire morning and afternoon canoeing around the lake, pretending we were Louis and Clark, laughing our asses off, falling into the water, and desperately seeking land when we inevitably needed something solid to touch. It was a perfect summer day, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
After our adventure, we started coming down, took an afternoon nap, and then it was time for our night trip.
When dusk fell, we made a bonfire by the lake. The fire was raging when the shrooms hit, and I felt my mind begin to melt as I stared into the flames licking the fire pit barrier. I remember being grateful that my body felt too heavy to stand, because I was sure that if I could rise from my lawn chair, I would run straight into the fire and dance in the flames.
While the daytime shrooms brought out the airy, childlike side of my personality, the dichotomy of self was apparent with my night trip, which took me into the darkest depths of my mind.
Although that summer was one of the best I’ve had, I was coming out of a period of deep depression. I’d had a mental health crisis only a few months prior, and spent the following months on a debaucherous (and incredibly fun) party bender, which was only masking my depression while probably making it worse in the long run.
Once I was able to tear my eyes from the flames, I looked toward one of the little white cabins and saw a young girl wearing a tattered nightgown standing beside a lamppost. I screeched and jumped up from my chair, alarming my friends. The ghostly apparition disappeared, and then I became convinced I was possessed.
The trip began with fear of my own mind’s capabilities and moved onto fear of demonic entities. So, as one does, I begged my friends to perform an exorcism. They ushered me into one of the cabins, where they strapped me to the bed as I writhed around like Regan in The Exorcist. I was pulling out all the stops with this performance.
After a sequence of guttural screams and preternatural laughter, my friends trapped the “demon” in a Tupperware container. We rushed it out of the cabin, tossing it into the lake, where we hoped it would float away forever or sink to the bottom and drown. Because that’s what good friends do when you’re undergoing a “demonic attack” (or you’re just a deeply dramatic theater kid who had a hard year and needed attention).
We’re somehow real adults in our 30s now, but I hope I can go back to Michelle’s cabin someday and relive the uninhibited freedom we felt in our teens on that lake. If you can’t tell, I’m deeply homesick right now and probably should book a trip to Minnesota, stat. But one thing about being an adult is that we’re always so damn busy. So TBD on getting this girl to a lake, but I will be in NYC when this is published, which is not the nature escape I’m craving, but it’s an escape nonetheless.
Hope you’re spending your summer exactly where you want to be and how you want to spend it!
xx, Sarah
Love this. And yes, nothing like a Minnesota summer.
I’m sitting in my kitchen, it’s 92 degrees and I just spent an hour outside cutting a shape out of a piece of plywood. I’m covered in sawdust and sweat. But no worries. I’m in Minnesota! Going to put on my suit, run over to a lake, take a quick swim and be back to work within the hour. Ahhh.
Perfection
I only wish I could join you at that lake!!