Listening Point

Listening Point, located on the south arm of Burntside Lake, was Sigurd and Elizabeth Olson's getaway place. They initially purchased 26 acres, and eventually enlarged their property to about 36 acres. The property, less than ten miles from their home, included a small beach, a cove bordered with alder and willow, upland stands of second-growth birch and pine, and large boulders dropped into place during the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age ten thousand years ago.

Most important, however, was the westward-facing point itself: glaciated greenstone rock fringed with weathered pines and partly covered with a patch of bearberry and juniper. Sitting on the end of Listening Point, Sigurd could look out over the wide-open spaces of Burntside Lake, listen to the birds, watch the sunset, and regain some balance in a life that had become more and more hectic at a time when most people begin to think about retirement.

Sigurd spent some of his spare time in 1956 driving around the back roads of the north woods looking for a cabin that was just right. He didn't want anything fancy; he wrote in the book Listening Point that he just wanted "a simple shelter where we could just move in, spend a few hours, a night or two, or if in the mood even a week, an outpost away from the phone and interruptions:It must be as natural as a shelter back in the bush, like an overhanging ledge or a lean-to, or a cabin on some trapper's route. We would carry water from the lake, cut our firewood, do all the things we would have done in the wilds, and when we went to sleep at night we wanted the feeling we were still close to the out-of-doors and that the cabin was not merely an extension of our house in town."

In October 1956 Sigurd found just the right structure about seven miles south of Ely, where a farm had been condemned to make way for Ely's airport. He bought it, situated it at Listening Point on a new stone and masonry foundation, added some windows, and hired a local craftsman to build a fireplace with rocks from the property.

Listening Point acquired its name in the spring of 1958, when Sigurd's daughter-in-law Yvonne arrived for a visit from the Middle East, where Robert Olson served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Hiking around the property with Sigurd, and hearing him tell what the point meant to him, Yvonne was struck by a similarity with the diplomatic community in Libya. Benghazi was referred to as a listening post, from which U.S. diplomats could stay in touch with the ebb and flow of life along the northern coast of Africa. She told her father-in-law that the point, as he described it, seemed like a listening post for the wilderness. Yvonne's comment led to the name of Sigurd's second book, and from then on the Olson property on Burntside Lake was known as Listening Point.

"Though the point was only a small part of the vastness reaching far to the arctic," Sigurd wrote, "from it I could survey the whole. While it would be mine for only a short time, this glaciated shore with its twisted trees and caribou moss would grow into my life and into the lives of all who shared it with me. I named this place Listening Point because only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard. Everyone has a listening-point somewhere. It does not have to be in the north or close to the wilderness, but some place of quiet where the universe can be contemplated with awe....The adventures that have been mine can be known by anyone."