BEMIDJI HOME TO BUNYAN, BABE.

Byline: Beth Gauper Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The tourists pulled up in front of the 18-foot Paul Bunyan, his red shirt glistening against Babe and the blue backdrop of Lake Bemidji, and stuck a video camera out the window.

Whirrr! It's a record of a piece of Americana that has proven irresistible to generations of tourists.

Paul and Babe have been a sensation ever since they were built for Bemidji's first Winter Carnival in 1937. Coverage in newspapers and national magazines brought crowds of tourists to Bemidji, which still makes a living logging, and other towns began to build their own symbols. Brainerd, the busy resort area an hour and a half to the south, got its Paul in 1949 and began a rivalry by laying claim to the legend.

``My brother thinks this is Hicksville and won't set a foot beyond Brainerd,'' says Carol Ann Petersen, executive assistant at Bemidji's lakefront Community Art Center. ``But we're a little less crowded. There are more red and white pines, and the air is different.''

I've always wondered about that crisp, woodsy tang found only in the northernmost part of the state. John Fylpaa, year-round naturalist at Lake Bemidji State Park on the northern shore, attributes it to the mix of trees, especially the balsam fir and other pines.

``As a kid, one of my strongest memories is of the smell of the moist forest ground that's very distinctive of the north woods,'' he says.

This bracing quality is not lost on windswept North Dakotans, for generations Bemidji's most stalwart tourists, or heat-fleeing Southerners.

When I visited in June, the weather was indeed divine. So was the chicken mostaccioli I had with a glass of wine on the shady brick patio of Tutto Bene.

Three doors away, the marquee lights were blinking at the renovated Chief Theatre, home of the 45-year-old Paul Bunyan Playhouse, Minnesota's oldest professional summer theater, where a musical play was about to begin.

After the show, I walked to the lakefront, where children were still squealing atop the Ferris wheel, then drove to my art-filled room at the Meadowgrove B&B, set in a grove of white pines outside town.

It was the first time I had really discovered the charms of Bemidji.

The next day, I picked up my daughter just north of town at Concordia Language Villages, whose immersion camps draw students from across the nation. Then we drove downtown to explore some more: Cosmic Java, a hangout for the 5,000 students of nearby Bemidji State University. Anntiques, with an unusually good collection of cool stuff. Morell's Chippewa Trading Post, which has a split personality: It carries exquisite quillwork, sweetgrass baskets and drums made by local Chippewa, but sells loads of junky souvenirs and displays a big wooden ``Injun Joe'' outside that has provoked demonstrations by local Ojibwe, who lived on the lake's south shore long before white settlers arrived.

Anglers dangled lines off the fishing pier just south of town, where the Mississippi enters Lake Bemidji and, on the other side, finally heads southward. And under the gazebo outside the fancy new Visitors Center, the Community Band played and ice cream was scooped to celebrate the town's centennial.

Bemidji was one of the last places in Minnesota to be settled, says Susanna Frenkel, president of the board of the Beltrami County Historical Society: ``In some old photos, there'll be a log cabin built for a homestead, and a Model T sitting next to it.''

Even today, she says, despite the civilizing effects of the university and many government agencies, Bemidji still has a vaguely frontier feel.

``One of the producers of `Northern Exposure' grew up in Bemidji,'' she says. ``I always felt while watching it that it was more Bemidji than Alaska.''

ON LOCATION

Bemidji is a 4-1/2-hour drive northwest from Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Lake Bemidji State Park has a beautiful beach, bog walk, trails and naturalist programs Wednesday through Sunday in summer, weekends in winter, including candlelight skiing. Information: [phone]. The university rents canoes, kayaks, sailboats and bikes on the lake side of its football field, just south of Diamond Point Park at the end of 15th Street. Information: [phone]. For general travel information, call [phone], Ext. 100.

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Photo, Box

PHOTO The figures of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the woodsma n's big blue ox, have stood in Bemidji, Minn., for 60 years, becoming instant north-woods icons when introduced at a 1937 winter carnival.

Beth Gauper/Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service

Box: ON LOCATION (see text)