Letter from the Boundary Waters.
The great wilderness areas are still there to teach us humility.
When I catch myself feeling morally superior to a man who’s job description includes Leader of the Free World, maybe it’s time I get knocked down a peg. And what better medicine for that than the prospect of carrying a 17-foot canoe over something named The Height of Land Portage?
So off the grid I went, accompanied by a group of old friends. We spent a final night under the solid roof of a log cabin near the Canadian border, fortified ourselves with a hot breakfast of bacon and eggs, paddled across pretty Moss Lake, carried our canoes over the short portage into Duncan Lake, and we were in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
There are a lot of ways to describe the Boundary Waters. Over a million acres of designated wilderness area. More than one thousand lakes scooped out by the mighty ice-age glaciers. The most-visited wilderness in the U.S. It all adds up to the same thing. The B.W.C.A. is wild and it’s huge. And other than what you can carry on your back, the civilized niceties we’ve all come to depend on are disinvited. Awe is too small a word for what you feel.
I first visited the Boundary Waters with a church youth group when I was sixteen. The minister must have read about Moses leading his people into the wilderness and decided it would be a good thing to try with his youth. For me it was formative. I often find myself bringing up the values I learned in the Boundary Waters when I’m trying to make a point at work. One of my favorites: always leave a stack of cut wood by the fire ring in case the next visitors to the campsite arrive late and exhausted. I know somewhere in this simple wisdom lies a lesson for, say, organizing a corporate project team or crafting national tax policy.
Huge hunks of the nation’s character have been formed in wilderness areas like the Boundary Waters and we need this now more than ever. Former Vice President Walter Mondale wrote about the area recently and noted that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spent time here as a Boy Scout. I take this as a hopeful sign.
I’ve been to the B.W.C.A. with my dad. I’ve been here with my son. It’d been over a decade since my last trip but it might as well have been yesterday. Nothing was changed, and that’s the point. Sure I used to drink the lake water straight off the blade of my paddle and now I carry a water bottle with a twenty-dollar filter. This is mostly because the B.W.C.A. would be a lousy place to spend the day hugging a Forest Service issue latrine (picture a less inviting version of a prison commode).
But the granite cliffs. The towering white pines. The cool, clear lakes. The loons and eagles. These exist in some immutable time dimension you don’t find anywhere else on earth.
If you’ve never been, here is the method of travel. Your gear goes in a Duluth Pack, which is basically a giant sack carried Santa Claus style on your back. The new ones are improved over the original canvas packs with their brutal leather shoulder straps. Now the packs are lighter and waterproof, with a hip belt to transfer some of the weight to your legs.
The big sack-like packs ride in the bottom of the canoe, keeping the center of gravity low while you paddle across the lake. When you spot a break in the dense forest you’ve found your portage. Everything comes out of the canoe, you carry it all across to the next lake, and repeat.
Ideally one half of the paddling team loads up the packs. The other shoulders the canoe. In the days of the rugged old aluminum models this was a spine-crushing exercise. Now the canoes are made of lightweight Kevlar, and leave your vertebrae for the most part intact. But what’s lost in weight is gained in fragility, and it’s a good idea to load the new-style canoes out in the water away from the rocky shore. You will want a good pair of water shoes.
It was at the first night’s campsite that the wilderness revealed its full power and majesty to me. We’d raced to get there. During the busy August season finding a good campsite later in the afternoon is like trying to grab a cab at rush hour in Manhattan, and there’s no StubHub aftermarket if everything on the lake is occupied. So we pulled in tired. When I climbed up the short path from the landing the sight took what remained of my breath away.
One of the big blows that come through the B.W.C.A. had leveled all the big trees. It looked like the place had been clear-cut. The fire ring sat in a clearing half the size of a football field, lined by 3-foot diameter logs. The fallen timber served nicely as furniture for a group of tired campers, but I couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like to huddle in a tent while the wind howled and the massive trees crashed all around. A trip through the wilderness is filled with humbling reminders of one’s miniscule presence in the universe.
You are miles from Siri with her helpful directions. Or any other sort of help for that matter. The iPhone is stuck on “no service” from the time you drive north out of Grand Maris. There is no warning sign on the Forest Service fire grate that says HOT. When the seal on the water filter breaks, you boil the drinking water.
When I got back to civilization I saw an item in the paper about a dozen employees from Burger King’s marketing department burning their feet trying to walk over hot coals at a team-building retreat. I’d suggest a trip to the Boundary Waters instead. If nature decides to take a swing at you at least you go out with some dignity.
On our final full day of paddling we came out of a narrow channel and into the teeth of a big wind blowing down the entire length of Gunflint Lake. The water was the color of cold steel. The waves were taller than the sides of the canoes. We made for an early campsite on a small island. We nicknamed it Gilligan’s Island. We were hoping to luck into better conditions the next morning for the long paddle to the other end of Gunflint Lake. As we settled in and got a fire going the wind went from some malign spirit trying to blow us back to the beginning of our trip to a miraculous friend blowing all the mosquitoes out of the campsite.
I went to sleep hearing the sound of waves breaking on the rocky shore. I woke in the middle of the night to a silent stillness. Looking up through the open fly of the tent, the sky was so full with stars I thought I was getting a view of Heaven.
The next morning the water was mirror smooth for our final seven miles of paddling. Where the previous day’s wind had roared so loud we couldn’t shout from one end of the canoe to the other, now there was only the soft dip of our paddles. We pulled out at the famous Gunflint Lodge, which has anchored the western end of the lake since the 1920s. The bar is well stocked with beers from the Bent Paddle, Castle Danger and Alaskan Breweries, and this is a good thing to encounter after a stretch in the wilderness.
It was the day of the big eclipse, the first total solar eclipse to cross the entire U.S. in 99 years. We had headed exactly the wrong direction if we wanted to see it, north instead of into the nation’s midsection where the serious viewing was available. Still, we sat on the patio of the Gunflint Lodge eating walleye sandwiches, drinking beer, watching the moon nibble bites out of the sun, until the sky clouded over and we left our eclipse glasses with the kids playing on the dock (we’d been sharing them with everyone on the patio anyway).
To my mind, the unpolluted view of all the stars glittering like diamonds through the open fly of my tent was the more spectacular sight. The universe provides this show nightly, available to anyone willing to pack up a canoe and make the trip.
