This article was published in the Vilas County News Review on Wednesday, September 17, 2025 and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
“…I realized very early the power of food to evoke memory … to transport you to other places …” – Spanish-American chef, restauranteur, and philanthropist Jose Andres (1969-)
Referencing the title of this column, maybe not a gourmet taste of Up North, but a taste of the North Woods nonetheless.
Jose Andres was right, food – taste – can indeed evoke memories and transport you to other places.
A sale at the grocery store the other day offered a deal too good to pass up, and, enticed by a taste of nostalgia for old times’ sake, I purchased a six-pack of bottled Squirt soda.
Today owned and bottled by Keurig Dr. Pepper, for the uninitiated, Squirt is a caffeine-free, grapefruit-flavored soft drink created by Edward Mehren and Herb Bishop in 1938 in Phoenix, Arizona. Necessity, being the mother of invention, inspired the creation of the carbonated citrus soda to creatively deal with a bumper crop of grapefruit in Arizona, one of four U.S. states that grow the subtropical fruit alongside Florida, Texas, and California.
As a child – and still today more than five decades later – the distinctive scent and flavor of grapefruit-infused Squirt remains curiously intertwined in my memories with, of all things, the North Woods – and in particular, Boulder Junction. When on thinks of the Musky Capital of the World and Wisconsin’s “Up North” region, grapefruit doesn’t typically spring to mind.
For whatever reason, for my family and I in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, Squirt was an exclusively “Up North” soda, the effervescent liquid nectar inside the icy-cold green glass Squirt bottles being a staple of fishing in the North Woods. Squirt vending machines were seemingly everywhere in the North Woods in those days – outside stores, gas stations, and motel offices – unlike anywhere else I ever experienced.
Once I was home from the supermarket the other day, I popped open a Squirt, took a swig, and was instantly transported back 56 years and 291 miles north to Boulder Junction in the summer of 1969 for my first visit to the North Woods, my folks and I went tent camping at the Wisconsin DNR’s South Trout Lake campground in a semi-remote walk-in site on the banks of gurgling Allequash Creek as it meandered westerly from Allequash Lake down to Trout.
My mind was instantaneously awash in a mélange of happy, formative early memories of Boulder Junction – curious raccoons, blinking fireflies, the sound of the wind in the forest, the scent of pines, drawing pictures in the sand, gathering twigs and branches for kindling, and roasting Campfire marshmallows and Ironwood-made Walter Meyer hot dogs on whittled sticks over crackling campfires in our campsite’s boulder-edged fire ring.
We spent many of our days that summer angling out on 279-acre seepage lake Lost Canoe off Rustic Road Hwy. K East in an azure blue rowboat rented from ol’ Reuben Schauss in Boulder Junction, my mom and I reeling in panfish and the occasional walleye, bass, or northern pike for dinner while my dad, doing his best Captain Ahab wannabe, maniacally sought to land his elusive Moby Dick prey – a leviathan musky he dubbed “Old Granddad” that hovered tauntingly within eyeshot in the shade of a wooden fish crib off the lake’s southern shore. Bait in those days meant a visit to “Old Man Monahan” in downtown Boulder Junction to buy paperboard cups of wriggling ‘nite crawlers’ and nets of darting minnows scooped into our galvanized steel bait bucket.
Daily lunch in the boat out on the lake included bologna sandwiches, Geiser’s potato chips and fresh summer stone fruits, washed down with iced bottles of Squirt, the provisions gathered at Long’s Hillbilly Supermarket and George’s Super Valu in downtown Boulder Junction, a long-ago era when tiny downtown Boulder also supported five filling stations bearing the Standard, Mobil, Citgo, Phillips 66, and Texaco banners.
Back in camp at the end of the day, we’d fry up our fishing bounty for supper on a skillet over the hissing propane camp stove, followed by a leisurely evening of songs, stories, and conversation around the snap, crackle, and pops of the dancing campfire.
And so summers Up North in Boulder Junction continued throughout my childhood.
While tent camping later pivoted to the Crystal, Muskie, and Firefly campgrounds, and angling went decidedly upscale on Allequash, Muskellunge, Trout, and Plum lakes thanks to the use of my Uncle Ronnie’s succession of Mercury-powered SeaNymph fishing boats, that one constant out on the lakes remained Squirt, the official soft drink of North Woods fishing – at least for the Johnson family.
Cracking open that grapefruit-infused Squirt the other day vividly brought back my childhood Up North memories in all their Kodachrome glory, without ever cracking open a photo album. It was, as the Carpenters would sing in the same era, yesterday once more.