Hok-Si-La Municipal Park, Minnesota--Kathryn and Mathew McGrady

This story was collected as part of a collaborative effort to record the state of American lakes, rivers, and waterways as well an attempt to uncover what water means to Americans. Listen to other stories recorded by the Minnesota Humanities Center for the Stories from Main Street project, an initiative created by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service for its traveling exhibition "Water/Ways."

Kathryn McGrady (KG): We like to go Hok-Si-La. We do a lot of camping in the summer and we do a lot of swimming, so fishing as well. Well you know we did go there on one of my son’s schools field trips and they had, the fisherman came in and poured in buckets of fish, it’s just amazing because there was probably 20 different types of fish from them just going out there and pouring them randomly into these buckets. Which I thought was pretty neat and another neat thing about Hok-Si-La is that when it rains or when it starts flooding, the way it changes the beach it’s just fabulous. We went down there and there is no beach but we just went swimming anyways. It’s just neat because it completely changes the landscape – the water does. You never know what you are going to get when you go back.

Mathew Murillo (MM): When I go to Hok-Si-La I like to just sit and float on the logs.

KG: We love the rain too, don’t we? MM: We love to just go and jump in the puddles.

KG: Yea, we like to go jump in the puddles. We like to dance in the rain.

MM: And of course hail is not good, of course.

KG: Right, nope.

MM: Once it popped one of our tires and with rain and with the rain and sun together you can form a rainbow.

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