Boundary Waters

Morning on Jasper Lake, Minnesota. One in a string of mountain lakes in BWCA, Boundary Waters Canoe Area. It’s way off the grid wilderness, bordering on Canada, and we’ve come far back into it, canoeing ten miles over and through five different lakes to get here yesterday. 

My brother and I are traveling with our friends Tom and Marilyn, a retired doctor and his therapist wife, who have made multiple journeys out into this wild and beautiful country of over a thousand lakes and a million acres. Power boats or motored transport of any kind are not allowed here. Canoes and hikers only. Aircraft are required to adjust their flight plans to avoid flying over BWCA. 

We are camped on a large granite outcropping, jutting out into the lake. A basic feature of the country, these large boulders were left behind when glaciers carved out these lakes over hundreds of thousands of years. Scrape marks on the rock attest to the power of the advancing and retreating ice. There are no man made dams here, only mother nature at work. Digging. 

We’ve pitched the tents in the shade of the pines and cedars that have taken root in the thin soil. The views over the water from our high perch are expansive and well…breathtaking. A large beaver swims lazily next to the shore, curious about us. Loons dive and surface, their haunting calls reverberating off the granite cliffs.  Bald eagles watch from the treetops, swooping down on unsuspecting fish.

My brother and Tom have taken a canoe out this morning and come back with three glistening lake trout. Marilyn and I fry them up with scrambled eggs and bagels for breakfast. 

Today is not a traveling day, which is a relief after the paddle in yesterday. In addition to canoeing across the five lakes, there was a portage between each pair. Where everything is carried across rocky connecting trails, sometimes fifty yards, sometimes a half mile. Occasionally more.

Tom has demonstrated the technique of hoisting a canoe onto one’s shoulders with Marilyn’s hand made wooden canoe, a canoe that has made the journey up from Tennessee on top of their Subaru, into Canada and across the north of Lake Superior, to arrive here. Getting it up on the shoulders involves a certain skill set, along with a modicum of strength. But once there it’s almost perfectly balanced, ready to be carried over the rough trails. By the end of our five days out here, over maybe twenty portages, I will have almost mastered it.

Over the course of the day, we swim in the cool water and lounge around in the bright northern sun. It is the end of summer, as August bleeds over into September, and clear sunny weather lingers. Fall is in the air, but only barely, mainly in the light breeze moving over our rocky point. Other paddlers are almost nonexistent. After a morning in the sun, I retreat to a shady spot to read and make some notes. 

There is mystery, and deep quiet here, and I’m finding that these trips feed the soul, often in ways normal life neglects. A life that the 14th century Sufi mystic and poet Hafez described as like, “being dragged along behind a farting camel.” 

Also letting go of the self, expectations, and ego. “Become a lover, and curious.” Hafez continued, “As long as you see yourself as learned and intellectual, as whole, you’ll lodge with the idiots.”

That night we grill steaks over a crackling fire, and share those along with a vegetable pasta and Tennessee whisky. We study the constellations in the night sky, getting our bearings by the north star, always the same. Tom offers to take me out in the boat for a better view. 

We paddle out into the middle of the lake, the sky spreading out over the broad still water, which mirrors it back. As I lean back in the bow seat, Tom deftly and silently paddles the wooden boat counterclockwise, in a slow circle. I’ve seen beautiful night skies in the clear-aired mountains of north Georgia and Tennessee, but nothing quite like this. For the sheer star packed vastness of it all. Shooting stars flare and burn out, and it feels as if the canoe is still, while the whole sky slowly turns, like a giant primordial clock. Steadily ticking, as it always has.