Paddlers approach a waterfall along one stretch of the Boundary Waters’ 1,200 miles of canoe routes. Photo © Kevin Proescholdt.
Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area
|
|
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area—the nation’s largest wilderness preserve east of the Mississippi River—is at its best in late August and early September, when the nights are tinged with frost and the days are still warm enough for a midday swim. The summer crowds have thinned by then; the mosquitoes and black flies have given up for another year. And on these autumn days, the Boundary Waters is at its best early in the morning. Awakened from your sleep at dawn on such a day by a chattering dispute between red squirrels, you stir from your sleeping bag, put on a warm jacket and go down to the edge of the rocky point where you have made camp for the night. The ancient bedrock has been worn smooth, first by glaciers and then by the wear of centuries of water and ice. The lake—one of more than a thousand within the million acres of the wilderness—is utterly placid. It might be a pool of molten glass. Above its surface, an ethereal mist rises, faintly tinged with the purples and mauves of sunrise. It obscures the far end of the lake and even the island you know is only a few hundred yards offshore. The air is as quiet as the lake is calm. No breeze stirs the yellowing leaves of the poplars. The songs of the white-throated sparrow, the red-eyed vireo and the ovenbird—ubiquitous a month earlier—have vanished. There is a moment at every dawn when the whole world seems to take a big breath. This is that moment. You close your eyes and breathe in the silence. You hadn’t known, you realize, quite how deeply you have hungered for just such a silence. You take a seat at the very edge of the lake and stare into its depths. Could you ever, you wonder, exhaust your capacity for peering into fires at night or lakes in the morning? How could you; how could a person ever cease to be fascinated by fire and water? In the end, after all, fire and water are the fundamental connectors between civilization and wildness. While you have been staring into the waters, silvery in the morning light and showing the khaki brown mosses of the rocky lakebed, a loon has silently slid into view. It swims close enough so that you can see the startling scarlet of its eye and its handsome black and white dress, as formal as a butler’s. The laughing cry of the loon by day and its mournful cry by night are the signature sounds of this landscape. They have been echoing across such watery places for a hundred million years. The sun is just beginning to pierce the mist. A dragonfly flits through the rays, its clear wings sparkling like jewels. Its lineage far outdates that of the loon. You think about the pedigree of age that everything in this landscape seems to carry: the bedrock formed 3 billion years ago; the pines, descendants of the earth’s first tall plants; the ferns, the mosses, the lichens, the fungi, old, old colonizers of this land; the dragonflies, winged creatures of the Paleozoic; the loons, elders among the birds; the wolves howling in the night in primeval chorus. The temptation is to think of this as an unchanged and unchanging landscape. But you know that the last glaciers arrived in this country only 16,000 years ago, and that fire has long shaped its forests, and that humans have been present here, and a force in the landscape, for perhaps the last 10,000 years. And you saw firsthand in this summer of 1999 how quickly and radically this wilderness can be transformed by natural forces when, on Independence Day, hurricane-force winds flattened 350,000 acres of these forests, leaving not a single mature tree standing in some vast stretches. The sun has burned away the mist. You break camp and launch out across the lake in your canoe, eager to see what lurks around the next bend. What makes you at home in this place is the long history you share with it. What keeps you coming back is the discovery that arrives with every stroke of your paddle. |